Articles tagged 'personal'
It makes phone calls, too Apr 12 2006
Yesterday I took delivery of my new handset upgrade - the Sony Ericsson K750i. I had originally wanted a Nokia N70, but decided to go for the K750i because I realised I probably didn’t need the extra features the N70 had, and I certainly didn’t need the extra cost that goes with it. So after playing around with the handset last night, I’m pretty pleased. I was upgrading from a Samsung D500, which I enjoyed using, and my biggest gripe was that I couldn’t set the alarm to use mp3s that were stored on the phone - with the K750i, I can ;-)
On top of this, there are plenty of neat features. PC integration is a lot smarter, and while the usage of the Memory Stick Duo will annoy some people I’m sure - being as I own a PSP, and had a spare 1GB card lying around, I was most pleased. This is the first phone I’ve ever owned with over a gig of memory in it, and because it’s got a fairly nice media player in it, a decent set of headphones (that double as a hands-free kit) I’m tempted to use it as my portable music player. I don’t find time to listen to a lot of music out and about (well I do, but that’s why I bought a decent car stereo), but whenever I think “I could do with an iPod right now” I usually don’t have mine with me. However almost always I’ll have my phone on me - if I can remember to stick the headphones in my pocket, I’ll be sorted.
I’ve also tried a few apps on the phone, more on this later - but let it be said though that Opera Mini is pretty awesome, and I’ve got an SSH client on there too - I’m always pleased by the nice range of apps available for Java based phones, and whenever I get a new phone I tend to re-investigate - so I’m still playing with this side of things.
The thing I use my phone most for is probably txting (just shades actually making calls) and it’s intuitive to use and feels nice and easy. Unlike before, where seemingly every time I changed my phone I had to re-learn where all the symbols and special txting keys were, the layout on the K750i is almost identical to the D500 (space key, caps key all in the same place). As such it feels right at home, and the actual interface for writing a text is much much nicer.
Overall, it’s a sweet sweet phone, even if I do have to get used to locking the keypad again! It even allows me to make and receive calls which is a bonus ;-)
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, “sony ericsson”, k750i, samsung, d500, “mobile phone”, “cellular phone”
It's got a name Apr 12 2006
Give It A Name is back on again this year, and seeing as I mentioned it in my last post, I thought I’d give a quick shout out to say I’m going to be at both days, Earl’s Court London, this year. It’s just over two weeks away, and thanks to the brilliant “Kill Your Own”, I think I’m looking forward to seeing Hundred Reasons the most. Billy Talent come a close second, and LostProphets, Taking Back Sunday, and MCR all feature too - it’s going to be an awesome two days.
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, “give it a name”, “hundred reasons”, “billy talent”, “lostprophets”, “taking back sunday”, “my chemical romance”
Kill Your Own, but buy this album first Apr 12 2006
Hundred Reasons - Kill Your Own
This album is a masterpiece. Right from the get-go, it grabs you by the scrotum in a way most bands can’t do, and it doesn’t let go until “Breathe Again” has finished, itself putting the finishing touches on an epic album. Previous Hundred Reasons albums were great, and I’ve been a fan since the first. The second album was good, if a little weaker, but I felt that after the debut effort they might always struggle to eclipse that. Since then, an extended break, and lead singer Colin’s efforts with his side project The Lucky Nine proved incredibly entertaining - I had the pleasure of seeing The Lucky Nine last year at Give It A Name, and they didn’t disappoint. If anything, I saw a heavier, slightly darker side to Colin’s vocals, that I wish could be brought to the table with Hundred Reasons. Well here’s my wishes come true - Colin has definitely benefited from being able to rock out that extra inch or two over the last couple of years, and this album is like a mixture between the delicate melodies of classic Hundred Reasons tracks, and the immediacy and downright rock that made up most of The Lucky Nine’s debut album.
Enough waffle - “Broken Hands” drags you in and sets the tone, with the first single, “Kill Your Own” following, and providing a slightly more melodic, yet still heavy track with which to advertise the new album on. The third track, “Destroy”, seems to tip it’s hat slightly to songs more reminiscent of “Ideas Above Our Station”, but that’s not a bad thing. The album does dip into a lull in a couple of occasions, but I’d say in no way were “Chance”, “Perfect Gift”, “This Mess”, and “Better Way” weak, they simply act almost as rest between the far better crafted songs - “Live Fast Die Ugly” is raw and sounds like a producer was nowhere near - and sounds awesome because of it. The superb “Feed The Fire” I just can’t get enough of, and “No Pretending” really is another perfect example of how to combine heavy, with harmonies and melody to provide a song that even your parents could listen to. By the time the last track comes around, you’ll need a break, but “Breathe Again” continues for six minutes, building up and down, until finally this crushing, awesome album comes to an end.
Overall? Superb. Hundred Reasons best work yet. Buy it now, and kill your own.
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, reviews, music, “hundred reasons”, “kill your own”
Review time Apr 12 2006
Ok listen up boys and girls, review time. I planned over the last few weeks to write reviews on a few things, however I haven’t yet gotten round to it - so here’s a start. They aren’t huge reviews, they are more like bitesize reviews to get straight to the point ;-)
The Vines - Vision Valley
The latest effort from Australia’s “The Vines” falls short. In a big way. When I say short, I could be referring to the track length. I got to about track six, when I suddenly realised maybe I’d been sent some kind of pre-order promotional CD by mistake - the longest track so far was 2m42s in length, with a number of the songs the wrong side of two minutes. Don’t get me wrong - if the music is awesome, it could be 30 seconds long, and I’d be happy to just stick it on repeat (The Hives are an excellent example of this) - but in this case, once I hit the end of the album, I was still disappointed. With the exception of perhaps the opening track, “Anysound” and the excellent “Gross Out”, the album was a big anti-climax for someone like me, a big fan of their previous work. Even with the “epic” last track, “Spaceship” at just over 6 minutes, the album only just tips 31 minutes, and all told, it’s 31 minutes that could have been better spent elsewhere.
Overall? “Get Free”? If you can get this album for free, then it’s worth a cursory glance for the short but sweet “Gross Out”, but otherwise allow yourself three extra minutes and listen to The Hives’ last album, Tyrannosaurus Hives - more energetic, more interesting, more fun.
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, reviews, music, “the vines”, “vision valley”, “the hives”
May the farce be with you Apr 11 2006
Maybe I’m behind the times with this one, but this is fucking cool.
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, “star wars”, lightsaber, “the force”, awesome
Ooh, embarassing Apr 10 2006
Hows that for cross-browser compliance? Just realised (thanks to my bro) that when viewing this very blog using Internet Explorer it appears it was asking users to download the page as a file. This will be down to the work I was doing on accept types and content types a while back, and it must have snuck by my rigourous multi-browser regression testing system ;-)
Anyway, one quick fix later and even IE users can see the content now :-)
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, “internet explorer”, firefox, “accept types”, “content types”
Visitations Apr 10 2006
Just a quick note to say that I’ve now had well over 100 unique visitors to the blog this month so far - not a massive amount, but much much better than previous months - and it’s only a third of the way through the month! I’m going to keep trying to blog regularly, as I’m enjoying it, and if anyone else gets something out of it too, then that’s a good thing :-)
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, personal, blogging
Building blocks Apr 10 2006
So before I get cracking with a few ideas I’ve got going on, I wanted to get my base framework and build environment sorted. After taking xFramework offline and turning all of the useful code I wrote into a more condensed, useful set of libraries, I then decided to work on a few build tools.
First up was to refine the unit-testing libs and console tool that was part of xFramework. Re-named, and re-built, I made it leaner and faster. Previously, there was one core library - this was the same one the console tool used to execute tests, and the client library containing the unit-tests referenced to tag unit-test classes. Now, it’s two separate libraries - a client framework lib referenced to mark up unit-test classes with attributes, and a console tool with core library (and a reference to the framework lib) to execute unit-tests themselves.
Secondly, I wanted a build server. I searched a while back, and came up short. There are plenty out there, but the criteria I’m after is:
- Automated build setup, with an easy-to-use configuration structure
- Plugin interface for a totally extensible build and reporting process
- Cross-platform, runs on both Linux and Windows, and preferably Mac OS X too
- Checkout a working copy from a Subversion repository, either using the “file” or the “svn+ssh” protocol. I’ll write further SCM support as and when I need it.
- Build the project, so far the only supported plugin is an MSBuild plugin, for building MSBuild project files such as Visual Studio 2005 solutions and projects (of course the API should be fairly similar to the XBuild tool for Mono, which was a port of MSBuild, and I’m thinking about a NAnt provider somewhere down the line)
- Run some code metrics, so far just a simple line counter for each file meeting the configured criteria, and a total line count
- Run unit-tests on the code, using my unit-testing framework, and a bridging plugin for the build system
- Generate some documentation, using my own documentation engine (see below)
- Cleanup after itself
Now that this is done, and tested, there are a few other plugins I want to write for it, but on the whole it’s good enough for me to develop with now. The build reports are also extendable - an interface is defined so that plugins can be written to deal with the build report, and so far I’ve written one provider that saves this report to file, and one that mails it to me, both of which I use. This means I now have my project building nightly, with everything automated, and me being notified of the results.
The third and final tool I’ve written, is a documentation engine. This came about purely because I tried writing an NDoc documentation plugin for my build system, to no avail (it didn’t like my .Net 2.0 assemblies). I browsed around, and found two things: 1) there is little or no activity currently occurring on the NDoc project, and 2) a few users are starting to modify the source themselves to provide a source distribution of NDoc with support for .Net 2.0. I took one look at the Xml documentation files that the C# compiler outputs (the ones that NDoc uses) and decided instead of using unsupportable, possibly unreliable user hacks to get my documentation needs accomplished, I’d write my own little engine, and in this way I’d get exactly what I needed. And so my third development tool in my toolchain, a core library defining a plugin interface for document generation, was born. It allows project files to be configured (defining the Xml document input files to use), and it allows plugin documentation generators that handle the actual output - I wrote one simple plugin to provide Html output for now, more advanced output could be Linux style man files, a Windows style help system, MSDN docs, or a multi-page Html documentation web site solution (currently it chews out one Html file, using JavaScript to allow expanding/collapsing of elements). I have written a console tool to build documentation from the project file, and of course the build server plugin is used to generate documentation directly from within the automated build process.
I now have an end-to-end build process, which, while some tweaking and a bit more code writing is necessary, does the job more than adequately for me. I feel far more confident going on to build upon a lot of my ideas, knowing I have the building blocks in place to write and develop applications more reliably.
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, framework, “build tools”, “unit-testing”, “build server”, xframework, subversion, msbuild, xbuild, nant, ndoc Comments
Cool! Apr 9 2006
Now this is cool.
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, ipod, “video ipod”, doom, half-life
The job Apr 7 2006
I think Steve McClaren should be seriously considered now for the England manager’s job when Sven Goran Erikkson vacates it after the World Cup. He’s showing that he can manage a team to great, hard-worked victories over international opposition time and again. Here’s hoping that Arsenal win the Champions League, and Middlesbrough take home the UEFA Cup - imagine that just before the World Cup, both European competitions won by English teams!
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, england, “english football”, “steve mcclaren”, “world cup”, “uefa cup”, “champions league”
Do the dirty bird Apr 6 2006
Today the new NFL schedules are released, and looking at the Falcon’s schedule for the 2006 season, I notice a couple of things. Firstly, it looks like they don’t play a SINGLE late Sunday game - they play two Monday night games (away to New Orleans, home to Dallas), and the rest are early Sunday games (1pm). Secondly, the schedule is obviously a bit easier than last year, thanks largely to our poor finish to the season, and the final 8 and 8 record. However, if it goes down to the wire, I don’t fancy the New Years Eve trip to Philadelphia on December 31st as the final game of the season…
Now it’s just a short while to the draft, and then the countdown to the new season can really begin!
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, nfl, falcons, “atlanta falcons”, draft
Muby, or Ronad Apr 6 2006
Two interesting points of view on a debate between two technologies that I didn’t think could be so comparable - Monad (MSH), and Ruby. Ted Neward puts forward his case for using Monad, because of its scripting ability, and provides some interesting usage of the scripting syntax to back his views up. Glenn Vanderburg says he’s sticking with Ruby however, and goes on to explain why, cleverly writing the same script that Ted did using Monad, in Ruby - just 17 lines of code, instead of 37 using MSH. Both posts are worth a read, however my opinion? I think Ruby has my vote all the way - it’s cross-platform nature, and the fact that it is a dedicated scripting language (rather than a shell with a neat syntactical scripting language to back it up) are really winning points for me. After all, I’d be happy combining Ruby with Rails to write a fully-fledged web application - but besides utilities/maintenance scripts, I don’t give Bash a run out very often. In the same way, I think at first people may say “look at how cool Monad is, look at what it can do!” but in the long-run, it’s use will be relegated to command line oriented tasks, and the “real code” will be written with languages like Ruby. My $0.02 on an interesting topic of conversation.
UPDATE: it looks like the original script in Ted’s article actually originated from a post by Lee Holmes - and since the debate, he has re-written the script, matching the Ruby version almost line for line - I guess that blows the whole lines of code argument out of the water then. Really it just comes down to what you are trying to write - in this case there’s not a lot between the two, however in other projects there may be a clear advantage to using one or the other. I’m happy to have both at my disposal :-)
Technorati Tags: el, eldiablo, monad, msh, ruby, rails, scripting
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