Putting your past behind you
Why is it, that as a 28 year old ‘grown up’ guy, I can still get choked up when I reminisce about the past?
I recently added an old boss of mine as a friend on Facebook. Now, I am not a big facebooker but I like seeing what people are up to these days. I haven’t seen this guy in 5 years or so, probably more actually. He meant a lot to me in my old work and was hugely supporting of me when I was going through some rough times. He means a lot to me and we just lost touch. When he accepted my friendship request and I looked over his profile, I got a bit funny. I realise now how much he meant to me and I never really recognised that. The worst part is that I work now about 200M from his old place. I didnt know it was his 'old place until I looked at his profile today. He is actually now in another state (Melbourne) and this upsets me a bit because I thought that I could see him at some stage and go and have a drink. We are extremely different people, for the most part, completely opposite, but I always felt a common understanding and connection with him.
This phenomena has got me thinking about how it doesnt take much for me to reminisce to the point of being depressed. When I think of how things ‘used to be’. Whether they are good, bad, ugly, regrets, whatever. I just constantly feel like I have wasted a lot and I have done and seen things that I either want to do or see again, or change somehow. I cant move on because there are so many things that I focus on that are in the past.
A few years ago, I drove past the house I grew up in. The house was sold under bad circumstances (ripped away from myself and my mum, basically and there are a LOT of good and bad – very bad, memories in that house) and I have been unable to even look at it for a long time. The sheer thought of going there fills me with panic and I get all sweaty. Its so odd as I cannot put my finger on what it is about that place that freaks me out. I just know that everything in my being is telling me to ‘STAY THE FUCK AWAY!’.
Odd.
So, how does one, seemingly grown up, guy move on and let these things go? Why, when something from my past draws my attention to it, do I just drop to a low, want to listen to 80’s music and drink myself to sleep? Ergh, they didnt teach you any of this crap in school… Not that I was there long enough to learn it anyway.
Thats my emotional rant of the day…. Actually, I’ll try to keep these to a minimum, maybe thats my rant of the month. 
Web services that dont work. My #1 frustration
I can understand when things are in a public beta stage and are still going through testing, that things may not work. But, when a web application has been launched and there is no trace of ‘Beta’ or ‘testing’ anywhere on the site or service then you’d expect things to work ok and in this age of extremely competitive sites and services, it is simply unacceptable when they dont work as required.
Today, I decided that I needed some ‘Bookmark this’ buttons at the bottom of my posts as I have implemented on Skylines Australia.
So, as my blog is with Blogger, I thought there must be a widget or a pre-written piece of code out there to do it for me. I came across Sharethis and Addthis.
Sharethis
I registered at Sharethis and I filled out the form for my blogger button and I followed the prompts to put the widget on my blog and impatiently hit ‘save’, excited about this new addition, I refreshed the blog to be presented with this;
1. A new side widget with nothing in it. 
2. A link underneath my posts that does nothing (because of javascript errors) 
So, that was it for Sharethis. It had already wasted too much of my time.
Addthis
So the next thing to try was Addthis. Their site looked nice and to be honest, the button looked nicer and more functional than the Sharethis equivalent. So, I thought I would give it a go and register. 
This was what I was presented with after registering. No disabling of the form before putting your details in, or even a nice notification page (this is all that was on the page, just some centred text). My registration still went through as gmail was quick to notify me of the successful Addthis registration.
Maybe I just need to stop being lazy. Its not a hard thing to add to the posts and it’d only take me 30mins or so to whip something up. But after these two dismal attempts at attracting me as a user on their sites, I started to think of other sites that constantly irritate me.
Shelfari
This is actually a fairly good site. I do use it and I generally like it. But their search engine is attrocious. What respectful web site in the 21st century has a crap search? None. Searching and indexing has advanced so much in the past 10 years that there is simply no excuse for bad search engines. This site constantly makes me use the advanced search to put everything in to find a book. eg. Searching for ‘A year in tibet’ gives me a crap load of books, mainly about the lord of the rings. But if I go to the advanced search and put in the title and author, I get the book I was searching for which has the exact name I was searching for. Not to mention on this site how you can mark a book as ‘Plan to read’ and then next time you come back, its set to ‘Already read’ and ‘I own this book’… Not sure what happens between visits but I dont read that quickly.
Blackout Rugby
This site is a great online Rugby game. FYI, I love rugby. I bought a team-signed Waratahs jersey on Saturday night. Thats beside the point. This game is great, but lacks the finesse of something with more time under its belt. For example, up until a few months ago, the site used a flash-only navigation. This meant that if I logged in on my 64Bit Fedora machine (with no flash support), I had to try to guess the URL of the pages I wanted, which also lead me to a big fat SQL error (and likely, an injection opportunity which I promptly notified them about). They have now implemented a fall back navigation menu for no flash support. The other area this site falls over is in stability. The site has been down so much over the past month (maybe 5 days at least) due to them moving hosts twice. When you are charging money for a ‘premium’ membership, this is simply not good enough. You cannot expect to grow your user base when you take usability so lightly.
In conclusion
Web site owners and operators need to realise that if their product does not work, they will lose their users. It is that simple. If something doesn’t work, the user will go elsewhere. If something isn’t accessible, the user will go elsewhere. If something is too complicated, the user will go elsewhere. With the level of competition and new-and-improved up-and-comers in all areas of the internet, its never been more important to ensure that your service works. Even if it means removing functionality to ensure that the core of the system is as bug-free as possible. Or just stamp a ‘Beta’ on it.
Debian etch apt-get issue
I am setting up a local development server at work as our main development server is in Melbourne and we have no root access (so permissions changes on directories can take days, literally, before they are actioned). I am using debian as it is the OS used on the main dev server (if it was up to me, I’d use CentOS, but thats a story for another day). I used the internet setup disc image to minimise what I downloaded and installed a bare-bones system on a machine here.
When I went to use aptitude (apt-get) to install required software and servers, I kept getting errors advising me of the dependants needed for the install, but the error says “but it is not installable”. For some reason, I was unable to install anything. Anyway, after some searching it appeared that the default sources.list file (/etc/apt/sources.list) contained repositories for security patches only. Adding the following line sorted it for me; (NOTE. Use a locally hosted mirror or updates will take you forever);
deb http://mirror.pacific.net.au/debian etch main
Also, as a side note, on etch, use vim, not vi as its much, MUCH easier and you wont pull your hair out as much.
Incoming call desktop notification in new PC Suite 7
I have been looking for something like this for a long time. I hate ring tones with a passion and my phone is almost always on silent. Enter my ipod and a productive morning and I miss a lot of calls. So, Nokia has built in a desktop call notification feature in their new PC Suite. “Be informed of incoming calls and new messages received on your computer!”
But, after a lot of searching (And I mean a LOT, there is no documentation for this feature anywhere. Not even in the PC Suite User Guide) it appears that not all phones are supported and the ones that are need to be connected via cable, not Bluetooth.
What an absolute bugger. I dont want to have to plug my phone in all the time. Whats the point of having a phone with Bluetooth if all the features of PC Suite cant be utilised with it?
Further Reading;
No incoming call notification - PC and Mac Software - Nokia Support Discussions
Re: Incoming SMS and Call notification - PC and Mac Software - Nokia Support Discussions
Re: No New Call Notification with the New 7.0 PC Suit - PC and Mac Software - Nokia Support Discussions
Web applications that I could not live without
I thought it was time I post about the web services that I could not live without. Basically, last week I bought a new Nokia E71 so that I could do as much work / organisation from my phone as possible. So, my ongoing drive is to have as much of my web accessible data available on my phone. This list is almost as much for me as it is for you, so I don’t forget things.
I seriously could not live without gmail. I have gmail check all my email accounts so that my mail is accessible from everywhere. It took a while to pry Outlook from my hands, but once I had done it, I never looked back. I am also able to check gmail from my phone with ease.
iGoogle, or google.com/ig is my start page. I have everything on it from all my news from Google News, all my latest RSS updates from Google Reader, all my latest statistics from Google Analytics, plus other things like the weather, a Remember The Milk widget and even a ‘This Day In History’ widget (I love my history). This is the absolute centre of my internet.
Remember the milk is an online task manager which can be as simple or as complex as you like. I am terrible at remembering ideas and todo’s. I originally tried todoist which was good, but I much preferred RTM. I have based my RTM lists on this awesome post on the RTM blog. I can share tasks or even entire lists with anybody else on RTM which makes working with the task manager so much easier as others can update my tasks for me. Also, RTM have a widget for iGoogle and a plugin for gmail (providing you use firefox, which you should) and can add tasks to your Google Calendar. I have definitely become more productive since using this and I continue to try and hone my RTM skills to get more from it. I am also trying to get RTM to sync with google via the iCalendar service and the Remote Calendars plugin for Outlook 2003 but have so far been unsuccessful. Doing this would allow me to put my tasks on my phone.
Google Calendar is a very good online calendar but because I use Outlook via an exchange server at work and we have Outlook on the home machines, I dont get much opportunity to use it for a primary calendar. But, what I do use it for is synchronising my home Outlook with my work Outlook using Google Calendar Sync which runs on my machines and updates my Google calendar with my Outlook appointments (which then gets sync’d to my other machines!).
Twitter is an odd one. People love it, hate it or just don’t get it. There are many sites offering ‘how to use twitter’ advice but its up to you. Basically, it is known as microblogging and you get 140 characters to update your audience with. I use it to post about new blog posts or news and I follow a few web developers, designers and other influential people to see when they have updated their blogs and sites. I use it with TweetDeck which is a desktop client for Twitter and makes Twittering much easier. Me on Twitter.
Flickr is an image hosting service. I started using the service this year as an alternative to Picasa web albums. As I have started dabbling in photography, being able to view images on Flickr based on the camera used is a big bonus for me. I can also upload directly from my mobile using the mobile tools. Me on flickr.
Delicious (formally del.icio.us) is an online bookmark manager. It seamlessly integrates with firefox using the available add-on. As I have crazy amounts of bookmarks with lots of design sites, code references, inspirational sites or even just sites I like, I can tag them and find them easily. Also, as its web based, it doesnt matter where I am, I can always get the link I need. I previously used Google Bookmarks but found Delicious to be better, easier and more intuitive. I can also share bookmarks among my friends (I have 2!). Me on Delicious.
Honourable Mentions
- Zyb – For backing up and managing contacts from many different sources. Great when you go through phones as often as I do. Me on Zyb.
- Plaxo – Another contact manager. This used to be my primary manager but I found that lately it has started adding so many new features that doing simple contact management is getting to be a bit tricky. Keep it simple, Plaxo! It is also great for updating your contacts with any activity on your social networking services. Me on Plaxo.
- Last.fm – The greatest music site ever. Listen to music via the site or the client based on bands that you like. Over time as you listen to more music, your own personal station becomes more tailored to your tastes. This is almost a ‘could not live without’ but I already had too many in that list. Me on Last.fm.
- Shelfari – This site is for book management. I read a lot of books, but I also find that a lot of the time I see or think of a book that I’d like to read at some stage but then I forget it. Not anymore, I just add it to my ‘like to read’ list on Shelfari. I can also add books and reviews. Me on Shelfari.
- LinkedIn – Linked in is more of a social networking site for professionals. You create connections between friends, associates and business partners. Its like a big online resume where you can give feedback about people you have worked with or look for jobs. It is a good way of keeping in touch with other professionals and see whats happening in your industry. Me on LinkedIn.
- Skylines Australia – Shameful plug for my own site. The greatest automotive site in the history of the internet.
Thats my list. I’ll create a new list soon of web sites that I cant live without (as opposed to web services or applications).
What can you not live without online? Do you use any of these services? Got any alternatives?
isearch, the people finder
Lifehacker today posted about a site called iSearch which allows its users to search for people online.
I read the post and I thought “great, there are a bunch of people i’d love to contact”. I went to the site and was a bit bummed that it thought that ‘Sydney’ meant ‘Sydney, FL’ and not ‘Sydney, NSW’ but anyway… The site kinda freaked me out a little bit.
Not only did I find myself on there with incorrect details (I was never the treasurer of Skylines Australia, I was president of the club and owner of the site) but when I noticed that it had a list of ‘Associates of Christian Biggins’ and they were people I knew, I felt a little strange. Sure, it called ‘SAU Cotm’ (Skylines Australia Car of the month) an associate of mine, it still listed real people there. This site knew my friends.
If that wasn’t enough, it offered an email address for me.
When you clicked on the link, it tried to sell you an email address for $1.69. Looking at the address and the strategically placed underscores, it does actually look like one of my addresses. Of course, anybody who actually knows me, knows that a simple google search of my name will bring up a helluva lot more info on me that this site.
But, it got me thinking. Where is this leading? What information of mine will be available to complete strangers (for a price?) in the future. I have always been a bit laid back about my online privacy as I am not an overly private guy to start with, but this has definitely got me thinking. Especially when you have contributed to as much of the internet as I have (and most of the time not using an alias).
Anyway. If you want to know anything about me. Just ask.
In the meantime, I am going to decide whether I respect iSearch or despise it.
Silly Spammer
For ages I have wondered what the point of some spam messages was. They didnt ask for anything and they did not include a link in the message. I just always thought that it was just some kids thinking they were being funny.
Well, apparently I was wrong. These spammers want you to send them an email so they can try to coax you into sending them money. Sounds silly, like, who would do that? But, as previously mentioned, a lot of people seem to fall for it.
Anyway, I am a pro member on seomoz.org and one of the members of that site decided to reply to a message that most seomoz members received. And, well, read it yourself. Funny stuff.
Looks like Picasa face recogniser needs some help.
Picasa was updated recently to include a new face recognition feature to allow you to group your photos by person once you had updated a few with their names (Like facebooks ‘tag’ feature).
This is a screen shot of Picasa on my sisters computer asking her for the name of her button.
Code merging. Its awful without good tools.
No developer likes to merge their code in with other code after finishing a big project. Its a royal pain in the ass. I find myself having to do it at work a lot (we have a largish team) and at home because at home, I somehow find that I have 84 copies of the same thing. So, I need to merge them together occasionally to keep things maintainable.
Merging is by far 10 times easier on Linux than windows. Linux is such a good development environment (apart for .net – but then, who uses .net anyway?). I would recommend getting VirtualBox, Fedora (or Ubuntu) and installing them on a windows machine. Even if you only use it for coding, profiling and merging / deploying. Its worth it and takes bugger all time to set up.
I am using Ubuntu on my VirtualBox. I prefer Fedora, but I found it hard to get higher resolutions with it. Anyway, I’m off topic.
Once you create your two directories or files that you need to merge or create a diff for. You can open one of the three programs;
My personal favourite is Meld. There are others out there. If you use something else, let me know about it.
Using one of these apps takes the hard work out of merging. In meld, you can match custom rules (for example, you can match all files in the ‘cache’ directory) and then ignore them.
Then, once your files / directories are merged, you can use something like KDESvn to commit them (if you are not savvy enough with the command line SVN client).
All done. Merged, Committed and time for a beer.
If you are unlucky to be on a Windows machine. No real biggy, but your choice of free clients becomes slim.
TortoiseSVN is the app of choice for interacting with an SVN repo.
Once you have the directories, you can merge them with WinMerge. I do find this app a little lacking. It doesn’t display the files in a heirarchical view, so diffing 10,000 files (which I did yesterday) just lists them all one by one and not within their directories.
I have heard a lot of good things about Beyond Compare but it is not free.
Let me know what you use for comparing, diffing and merging files.
Google Chrome released
After an impatient wait of ohh, say, 24 hrs (that’s when I initially found out about Chrome), Google has released Chrome as a public beta.
My first impressions are; wow!
In the ten minutes I have used this so far, I am already very impressed. You can see the feature list for chrome here. Or, you can view Lifehackers screenshot tour.
I loaded up my site Skylines Australia in Chrome and it loaded like it was a text document. It was so fast. I also especially like the source viewer and the DOM element inspector. Also, its minimal interface and the start page are also huge bonus’. Hell I could keep going, but all the features that I love are on the sites linked above. I’m looking forward to the first stable release.
Thanks Google (even if it is just another way to collect data about me).