Andrew's blog

I've known for a good while now that I need to make more time out of work hours to look at the things I don't get chance to do at work.  This list gets longer and longer and the time to look at things on it rarely seems to materialise.  I get bits of time here and there to read up on things, dabble and generally do small bit of work but struggle to find enough long chunks of quality time to get a proper project going.  This has to change before the list of things buzzing around my head gets too unmanageable.

The topic of the, seemingly, detiorating levels of respect, politeness and consideration came up several times today.  A few of us went for a walk around the Business Park over lunch and it probably came up after I recountered an event that happened on the way into work today...

It's been a frustrating week so far but thankfully it is nearly over....just one more day.   I've been up to my neck in IE7 performance issues, debugging JavaScript events en masse and generally trying to juggle too many balls in my head with numerous distractions going on around me.

I'm getting a bit tired of lazy recruitment agents and their tactics to try and have an easy ride.   Normally it's just endless email spam about totally irrelevant roles in totally ittelevant locations for a pathetic amount of money.   Most get totally ignored but the exceptionally irrelevant ones get a reply with something along the lines of "What part of my C.V. did you actually think made me relevant for this position?".

For the last few months at work I've been lucky enough to put my RIA hat back on again after a period of absence doing traditional J2EE  and PHP apps with a strong accessibility bent.

A couple of weeks ago I needed to look something up regarding Subversion and headed off to grab the latest copy of "Version Control with Subversion" online.  Whilst looking through it I noticed that Subversion 1.5 had been released without me noticing and that there were a couple of interesting new features.  The main one for me was support for tracking merges up from trunk to a branch.   This is always something I have had mixed success with, normally trying to avoid multiple merge up

After noticing an announcement on availability of the Windows 7 public beta the other day, I sat at home last night and waited for 8pm GMT to come along to try and get my hands on one of the 2.5 million keys.  Needless to say public demand overloaded the servers and MS decided to pull the release until extra hardware had been thrown at the problem.  Today I noticed another announcement that the 2.5 million copy restriction had been lifted and that it would be generally downloadable for 2 weeks from today.

No, it's not another Apple product.  It's a rather simple, yet brilliant, device for those of us suffering poor broadband speeds with noisy lines, a 3-day camel journey away from the 'local' exchange.

Over the Christmas break I decided it was time to replace my aging ADSL broadband modem/router.  I've been using a Draytek Vigor 2600We for quite a few years now and it has given me solid, reliable service.   I hardly ever have to reboot it, months apart, and normally only when I've flooded the wireless connection somehow as it's only 802.11b.  My MacBook Pro supports 802.11n-draft and other devices in the house support 802.11g so it was time to think about a faster wireless connection.

Well a new year is here and with it I have some nice fresh dev tools to use.  PDT 2.0 was released on 29th December 2008 and is something I've been looking forward to as a keen PDT user for a while.  PDT 2.0 is much better with dynamic languages now that it's using the DLTK.  The intelligence and code completion on PHP/HTML/Javascript projects is a real leap forward although it can appear a little sluggish re-building