New Year, old habits

Just a quick update on what’s been happening so far in 2007. So far my aim of writing more on this blog has fallen by the wayside, and January isn’t even over with yet! An auspicious start if ever there was one.

In less than a week I am going to hit 30. A time for reflection I think, at least on the career front. I am beginning to feel the effects of getting older too. I went to a friends 30th birthday on Saturday evening, pulled my usual trick of drinking far too much, and it has basically taken me until this morning (Monday) to fully recover! That never used to happen. Bugger.

On the work front, I’ve been using Alfresco, a document management system, to build a records management system for one of my clients. It’s an interesting system both from a technical point of view – I never thought I would say that about something written in Java – and in terms of the market the company is going after; think an open source version of Documentum.

Anyway, I’m in Starbucks at the moment using up the last few days of the (monthly) Wifi pass that I paid for. I’ve ran out of coffee so time to sign off.

DNS updates

I am about to update the DNS settings for this domain. As a result this site and my email may be screwed up for a day or two. I normally reply pretty quickly to email so if you send me an email and don’t get a reply within a reasonable amount of time please try sending it again.

The Superhero test

Everybody else seems to be doing it so here are my results from the Superhero test:

Your results:

You are The Flash

The Flash
75%
Iron Man
65%
Supergirl
60%
Hulk
60%
Superman
55%
Robin
55%
Green Lantern
55%
Spider-Man
50%
Wonder Woman
40%
Catwoman
40%
Batman
30%
Fast, athletic and flirtatious.


Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

I am a little bit concerned that Supergirl appears at number 3 in the list. I definitely answered no to the “Do you wear thongs” and “Have you ever worn a push-up bra” questions!

Anyway, this is probably going to my last post of 2006 so Happy New Year to everybody!

Calls not registering

For a while now my phone (Sony Ericsson K800i) hasn’t been registering calls that I have missed, dialled etc. It was annoying because if I had missed a call I would have no idea who had called!

Anyway, after searching around I finally came across the solution: Menu -> Settings -> New Events -> Pop-up.

Do that and you will be able to see the calls you have made/received/missed in the call list. I have no idea what exactly this feature does but it seems to work so I’m happy again.

Friends Reunited

Met up with some friends from uni the other night. I hadn’t seen Rikard (far left) for about 7 years and I’ve only seen Max a few times since graduation way back in 2000! It was fun catching up. Just like the good old days. Plenty of nachos and beer too! The picture was taken at Bunker bar in Covent Garden.

Buzzwords “R” Us

Those of you who know me will know that I abhor the use of the term Web 2.0. It’s meaningless! Well it seems I’m not the only one. Mike Moritz, a venture capitalist whose successes include Google and Yahoo to name but a few, was recently asked what Web 2.0 means to him. He replied, ” Nothing – less than zero. Falling romantically in love with buzz phrases tends to be a fairly painful experience in our business.” If one of Silicon Valley’s pre-eminent VCs doesn’t give any credence to the term then neither should you! Enough already.

Source: I came across the quote in an article in the Sunday Times Business section

YouBoob

YouTube error

I managed to kill YouTube! I came across the New Numa video and saw that most of the comments on the first page were rather negative – the video is not worth watching. I also noticed that there were around 13,500 comments so I clicked to see all of them and boom, that’s when I got an internal server error.

Click on the image above to look at the full size image.

Emacs on Ubuntu

TRAMP is supposed to come installed with Emacs as default from version 21.4.x onwards – well, something like that. Having installed Emacs on Ubuntu using apt-get I couldn’t for the life of me figure why TRAMP wasn’t working! When I tried to open a remote file it kept trying to use FTP and always complained about something or other – I don’t remember exactly what it was complaining about.

Anyway, it turns out that TRAMP is not included with the version of Emacs that I had installed (sigh). To install it type “sudo apt-get install tramp” on the command line and restart Emacs. Viola!

To set the default connection mode to ssh, edit your .emacs file and add the following line:

(setq tramp-default-method “ssh”)

I Woz there

On Thursday evening at University College London I went to a talk given by Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple. He was the guy that single-handedly built the Apple I, one of the first, if not the first, personal computers. The rest is history.

The purpose of the event was to promote his new book iWoz – of course I had to buy a copy while I was there but I did get him to sign it so it was worth it. He talked mostly about his childhood and the early days of Apple and why he wanted to be an engineer. It was clear from his talk and from what I have read so far in his book that engineering still remains his passion.

I recorded a short clip of his talk on my mobile phone. I’ll put the clip up later when I have more time.

Wrist problems

For the last month or so I have been having real problems with pain in my wrists and forearms. I have had days where I have had to stop typing because it has just been too painful. I have had this problem before but usually it disappears after a few days. It’s strange because I use a Kinesis keyboard. They are supposed to prevent these kind of problems (although I am currently writing this on my laptop keyboard). I am even thinking about buying a vertical keyboard!

I guess it could be because I don’t take enough breaks away from the keyboard. However, yesterday I found an application for Mac OS X that reminds you every so often to take a break from typing. It’s called AntiRSI. It runs in the background and every so often up pops a window telling you to take a break. It gives you a great excuse to go and get a coffee!

David has more information on his site here. His article also includes a link to an application for Windows that works just like AntiRSI called Workrave.