Tag Archives: geek

Multipack’s March 2008 meeting

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multipack.gifThe Multipack describes itself as “a community of multi-talented Web professionals from across the West Midlands” and attending one of their meetings has been high on my list for over a year now. This Saturday I finally made the effort to get to Birmingham for the March meeting and it was definitely worth it.

I got there a bit late so didn’t manage to speak with all of the 15 or so people in attendance as the seating was initially an awkward L-Shape but they seemed a friendly, knowledgeable bunch and people started moving around soon enough. Discussions ranged from Mark James (of FamFamFam fame) describing the features of his pseudo-UML source code generator, the merits (or not) of twittering ones every mundane thought and super-mobile notebooks. I also got to put a face to the name of Owen Gregory, had a general business chat with Noel Welsh and Dave Gurnell of Untyped, bumped into Sukhi Dehal again and had a good chat with Tim Gaunt on the train home who also happens to be a fellow Underscore subscriber.

I’m particularly excited by The Multipack as it’s (as far as I know) the only general interest gathering of web types round these parts, I like its relaxed beer and geekage attitude and although it’s a bit of a mission for me to get to – 1.5 hr journey each way including a £20 cab fair for the last stretch home from the train station (although that’s my fault for wanting to drink and living in the middle of nowhere) – I do think Birmingham is a sensible location for the meetings. I did also raise the subject of there being a mailing list aspect to the group which, as I’ve mentioned previously elsewhere, would mean that people don’t have to remember to visit a website to have a conversation; everyone’s got email, right?

If you’re into web and available for the next meeting on the 12th of April then you should definitely come along. It’s already in my diary.

Update: There *is* a mailing list, hooray. http://groups.google.com/group/multipack

Vim auto indenting

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I used to get annoyed when pasting text into a Vim window as each line would indent one more tab than the last line.

To fix it I used to add set noautoindent in /etc/vimrc, however this unsurprisingly turns off auto indenting, which is a useful feature for normal typing.

Today I came up with a definitive solution to this by setting a key binding for ‘pastetoggle’. Now in vimrc is the line:

set pastetoggle=<F11>

..meaning that should I need to paste in some formated text I simply press F11 when in insert mode to enter paste mode, paste my text in and then F11 again to exit paste mode (but still be in insert).

One could also do :set paste and :set nopaste, but this was far too much typing for my liking.

Note: This is working for me in Vim 7.0

Google Developer Day 2007 (London)

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On Thursday I attended the Google Developer day 2007 event in London and overall I’d say it was worth the day out of the office.My headline excuse for going was that I’m working on a project that requires some Google Maps integration and as there was a 1.5 hours hands on workshop on it I figured it’d save me some investigation time in the office – and it turns out that I was right, so thumbs up there. Continue reading →

Where’s my spy camera?

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My quad core Mac Pro finally arrived yesterday much to the relief of the people at work as I am no longer able to parrot out every 5 minutes “Where’s my spy camera”.

I’ve never used a Mac for day to day tasks before so I’m more than a little daunted. I took it home to get it all set-up and to get used to it before I deploy it at work (as I can’t afford to lose any productivity).

On first impressions the build quality is superb and adding the extra 2GB RAM that I bought from Crucial was a doddle as was adding two additional ‘spare’ SATA disks that I had and then creating a striped RAID array out of them.

I also installed VMWare Fusion as it seems to do all of the things that Parallels does but is free (currently anyway); it seemed very happy with a Win XP x64 install but then it should as I gave it 1GB of my 4 GB’s of RAM).

Anyway, back to being productive.

P.S.

What is your personal spam index?

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It’s easy to work out, take the formula (that I just made up):

S / ( P x A ) = M

Where:
S = Total number of spam emails that you have
P = Period that they were collected over
A = Num of accounts collected from
M = My spam index

I use gmail so this calculation is easy:

S = 11,242 in my spam filter right now
P = 30 days (as it auto deletes after 30 days)
A = 2 (the main gmail account plus my 8+ yr old bealers.com email account)

M = 11242 / ( 30 x 2) = 187.37

So there you have it, my spam index is 187.37.

What’s yours?

iTunes 7 and a slight screw up

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Apple launched loads of new stuff today:

Whilst I was waiting for iTunes 7 to “Determine Gapless Palyback Information” over my 75Gb of music I had a very brief click around their propoganda. For some reason I went to the car integration page and as I recently bought a very old Nissan 4×4 I then clicked on the nissan logo (which is ironic seeing as the radio in it only picks up 5 Live):

nissan.jpg

Imagine my shock when instead of seeing a website about cars I see a rather unfortunate website by some bloke whose surname is Nissan and as it turns out is getting bent over and, well, you know, by Nissan’s lawyers:

nissan-but-not-nissan.jpg

*chuckle*

Goodbye London

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The men came today and took all of our stuff away in a truck; this came after a week of packing, saying goodbye to people and generally not having enough time to get everything done. I drove to Upton in our little old Renult with all of the computers in the back and Cathie went to her Mum’s house in Bristol with Eden and Mo; she’ll turn up tomorrow when the men are gone and I’ve put the kids beds up, etc.

Like any self respecting techie the first things I did were:

  1. Put on some music
  2. Get beer & chips
  3. Get ADSL working
  4. Drink beer and clean the chip grease from laptop keyboard
  5. Get wireless working
  6. Drink more beer
  7. Unpack primary computer and get external access
  8. Beer etc
  9. Get other machines working
  10. Get bored and distracted by something online

Cathie and Darren are pissed

Cathie and I had a party a week ago that was *fantastic*. We invited a lot of friends and past colleagues to an event that Kurt – who is the Creative Director at Fresh01 – DJ’d along with his mate Nick who between them put a night on every Wednesday called Club Hemishpere.

It was a gret party, like having a wedding but none of the stress and expense; a big mix of our friends and whisper, no kids.

Party pics here:
http://bealers.com/photos/mates/goodbye_london/

Sad PHP poem

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Disclaimer: You have to be a geek to find the following even mildly interesting or heaven forbid, amusing.

List: php-general
Subject: [PHP] Sad PHP Poem
From: “Martin Alterisio”
Date: 2006-06-26 4:25:20

A sad poem of an algorithm where solitude brought excessive use of cpu
cycles and memory allocation for redundant data (it copied over and over
again the same image till all memory was filled with it)

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=php-general&m=115129593132595&w=2

Performancing: The perfect Blogging Firefox extension?

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I’ve been playing with my Firefox extensions this morning as I recently re-installed windows at home and wanted to make sure that it had all of the essentials that I use at work. So this led me to ‘waste’ 15 mins browsing the Extensions repository and I came up with a real find, Performancing:

Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox

  • Works with all major blog software
  • Easy WYSIWYG Editing
  • Trackback, Technorati and Del.icio.us support

Once installed, just hit F8 or click the little
pencil icon at the bottom right of your browser window to bring up the
blog editor and easily post to your WordPress, MovableType or Blogger
blogs.

As the text says I have a blog editor in my browser that I can tap away at whilst surfing using the same window.

It also allows one to drag and drop formatted text or images from the browser window above or there is the fallback option to selct text, right-click and ‘Blog this page’ from the relevant context menu.

Set-up was a doddle I just selected ‘Custom blog’ then ‘WordPress’ and I then had to specify the URL to the XML-RPC script that comes with WordPress. As a nice touch it prefilled this with a default URL example for WordPress which saved me having to look-up what the page was called. Other than that I simply specified my username and password and here I am writing my first entry.

It’s hard to fault quality software like this but a few niggles were:

  • There is a, beta admitedly, spellchecker (Yay!) but I couldn’t get it to work, probably my fault;
  • The cursor keys didn’t always work in the editor window, up and down would scroll the browser pane above (and the editor window *definitely* had focus);
  • There is superbly thought out ‘upload image’ option for inserting images and unfortunately it doesn’t support scp

Here’s a screenshot:

That URL again: http://performancing.com/firefox

Disable the F Lock key on Microsoft Keyboards

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If you’ve got a MS keyboard then you probably have come across the annoyance where the functions keys have to be switched on using the F Lock key.

Well be annoyed no more:

The F Lock key is a hardware switch in the keyboard. Its state cannot be controlled programmatically. Its default condition is “off”. As a result, whenever the keyboard is reset, or loses power, the F Lock key will always be in an “off” state. Do note that with the Microsoft keyboards released after September 2004, the keyboard will retain F Lock status through a reboot.

For many, the way that the F Lock key operates is not desirable; some people want “normal” function key operation, some people don’t need the keys at all.

There are two ways to work around this issue. If you connect your keyboard to your computer via the PS2 port, you have two choices, you can either reprogram the scan codes using the Scan Code Mapper found in modern Windows NT-based OS (Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003) or you can reprogram the keys with the assistance of Microsoft’s Intellitype Pro software for their keyboards. If you connect your keyboard to your computer via USB port, then the only way to get around this is to reprogram the keys with the assistance of Microsoft Intellitype Pro.

While there is no way to control the F Lock key state programmatically, we can resort to some form of trickery to make the function keys act like function keys all the time, no matter what the F Lock state is.

Depending on your keyboard connection type, pick from one of the two methods to ‘fix’ this issue

http://jtsang.mvps.org/flock.html

(It’s only taken me two years to even bother googling for a fix)