Monday, February 26, 2007

Birds, Ajax, Meebo,ThySpace

Went for a walk at the weekend, up the River Loddon with my Dad and my two children.

(Now I know that in reality I live close to two motorways, a train line and under the flight path to Heathrow, but I can ignore that just because of the sheer amount of wildlife).

We saw the usual suspects, of course, (mallards, swans, geese, blackbirds, robins, great tits, etc.) but also gadwalls, long-tailed tits and, amazingly a kingfisher. Add to that, that there were four(!) red kites above my house yesterday, and all-in-all, I am a happy chappy.

Now, it's time for an admission: I hate GUI programming. Mono, Swing, Xt, GTK all hold painful memories for me. (I once wrote an entire application in XLib, so I know the pain of trying to write without a toolkit, too). Ajax toolkits are just as bad, except the documentation sucks arse, debugging is painful, and the technology really wasn't designed to do this.

JWZ famously once said of X11 programming "Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes". I'd say Ajax programming is the same, but without any limbs.

I've become a huge fan of meebo at work, since installing more and more software on a Windows box is a recipie for disaster. ;-) It does show that other people are a lot better than I am with Ajax, though. :-(

MySpace is a load of old toss. There, I said it. I set up an account, just because other members of my family have them, but I don't use it. So why do random strangers feel the need to ask to be my friend? Fuck you, and fuck off. Losers.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Vote now! : Dell IdeaStorm

Popular Stories - Dell IdeaStorm

Tell them you want Linux on your laptop! My Dell laptop works well (if not flawlessly) and I had to pay for Windows (which I don't use/have installed).

If you're in the same boat: vote!

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Printer, Grails, Groovy

Well, this week, I've been getting very well acquainted with Grails - it rocks. Thanks to the original ideas of the RoR/Maypole crowd, and the Java-iness of Groovy - beautiful. It builds on the solid foundations of Hibernate, Spring and SiteMesh too - all of which I've done some work with before.

Of course, Perl and BusinessObjects have both been floating around tool.

I just bought a new printer - an HP C3180 which rocks my socks. So much better than my old OfficeJet K80 and only £40! Excellent.

Sunday, February 04, 2007

New blogger and a quick catch up.

Oooh, I've been switched to the new blogger. At last!

There's so much I've been meaning to post about. JAXB, factories, groovy. MyEclipse SNAPs (coming in 5.5) look good. (It's the only piece of closed source software I pay for).

I bought a beautiful Sony MP3 player, which means
  • I've had to switch from the freeness of OGG to the evilness of MP3
  • I have to use some weird software to get my files on it. (But it works)
Went to Oxford yesterday. It's such a nice place, but so busy! It's like Bath on a Saturday in December! Fantastic though.

Peace - out.