On Holiday - Kinda!

Normally the rooms of our home echo with shrieking, strange music and argument. Now there is but silence. My Beloved and I have the whole house to ourselves for a week and it is utter bliss.

I don’t have the whole week off (I have to go in for Tuesday and Friday), but it’s enough to make me feel much more relaxed.

So far, I’ve managed to get the bulk of our wedding invitations sorted and tidied up a bit. Hopefully we can get a some painting and music done later in the week.

I have decided to learn to sight-read Piano music. We constantly seem to be missing an accompanist for many of our endeavours, and I figure it can’t be much harder than learning to touch-type!

Just a little focused effort should do the trick…

Compiz Fusion in Fedora 7

I switched to Fedora 7 a while back and as a Beryl user, I was glad to find that Compiz Fusion was included by default.

After making sure I was using the latest nVidia graphics drivers, everything worked fine. But a lot of the plugins didn't seem to be installed - particularly Expo, a plugin that zooms out to shows you all your desktops at once and even allows you to move windows between them while zoomed out.

I worked out today that all the Beryl plugins are installed, but the control panel no longer gives to access to them.

All the options are available in gconf-editor, under /apps/compiz. To enable a plugin, add its name to /apps/compiz/general/allscreens/options/active_plugins.

I really don't know why the Fedora chaps haven't put in a friendly interface for this stuff, at least there doesn't seem to be one in the repos.

I think this sort of eye candy is one of the things that could draw people from Windows to Linux, so let's not hide it!

Note: I've since found the package that installs the GUI compiz setup tool. It's called ccsm, and can be installed from Add/Remove Software.

Rails IDEs

I use Ruby-on-Rails to develop my own sites. It also makes up the majority of the projects that I am involved in at work. I will happily sing its praises and there’s no other language I’d prefer to be writing code in at the moment.

Our other Web applications are written in Java, so our IDE of choice is Eclipse. It’s a fantasticly fully featured open source IDE that is also a development platform if you care to use it as such.

Until the end of 2007 we were using and watching the progress of a couple of Ruby and Rails plugins for Eclipse called Ruby Developent Tools and RadRails. These Ruby development some of the same tools that graced the Java developement environment in Eclipse.

Sadly though, another larger Eclipse plugin vendor called Aptana made the developers of each of the existing tools an offer they couldn’t refuse. RadRails and RDT were absorbed into the monolithic Aptana plugin.

Aptana is downloadable as either a standalone application or as an Eclipse plugin. It has various versions that include Jaxer (an AJAX server), tools for developing against the Apple iPhone and Adobe’s AIR platform.

I have nothing against large applications as long as they are well written – although I would state a preference for the small is beautiful philosophy.

Unfortunately, since installation of Aptana, our Eclipse based development machines run like dogs and crash all the time. Evenutally after having to kill the eclipse process time after time, some corruption creeps into one of the plugin files and Eclipse will no longer start up. We then start the process of removing, downloading and reinstalling 79MB of Aptana plugin that can only be installed using the automatic update site.

The ruby/rails plugins are the best that we’ve found, allowing us to visually debug rails applications, run tests and browse our applications intelligently, but at the moment they’re wasting so much of our time that we’re seriously considering going back to a plain text editor.

Marriage Proposal

Here's the video of my proposal to Penny in front of 170 or so people. They'd come to see our production of the Farndale Mikado, which had an unusual ending.

Farndale Mikado

We're into the last handful of rehearsals for our next stage production, which differs somewhat from October's performance of The Gondoliers in that it's a spoof Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. The full title, which takes a little remembering is...

The Farndale Avenue Housing Association Townswomen's Guild Operatic Society's production of The Mikado

The majority of the cast are women, alongside myself playing David the acerbic producer and Bruce Vyner playing the vicar - Reverend Reginald Bishop - who has been roped in to play Pitti-Sing (one of the Three Little Maids)!

Anything and everything goes wrong with the production. From the moment you enter the auditorium, you're part of the action. The script is side splitting when simply read aloud. The show itself should be hilarious - although I would say that as my partner Penny Gerken is directing it.

Come along if you're anywhere near Poole or Bournemouth, it's only six quid and you'll have a riot.

Google Andriod

Wahey! This is the pot of gold at the end of the Google-phone rumour-rainbow. The Open Handset Alliance have released the first API and SDK for the Andriod platform.

Android is an Open Source mobile phone platform based on a Linux kernel and written under an Apache 2.0 licence. The OHA is led by Google and includes members such as HTC, China Mobile and other huge players in the mobile market.

First impressions are good. The SDK includes an emulated handset running the operating system and tools for creating your own Java based applications that take advantage of the proposed hardware.

The emulation looks good, including basic phone software but strangely no messaging support yet (SMS/MMS/e-mail). It does however have a Google Maps application and some developer demos and tools.

Overall the GUI has the simplicity of design that Google tend toward, though not quite so much as Apple does with the iPhone. We must however remember that this is a first developer preview release. It's unusually slick for a version zero Open Source project, but then I'm sure Google has been pumping cash in to get this party started.

Anyway, this could be the next big thing, so I'm off to try creating an application for it...

Gorgeous Day

The weather is stunning. It's November and we've been sitting outside the local pub in tee-shirts, enjoying the autumn colours. There's nothing quite like a nice Friday lunchtime with work colleagues and some good food and drink.

The conversation flitted over T3's DIY efforts (We have many Tims), including a partial loft conversion. Very impressive. We're thinking of converting our loft and it'll cost at least 20 grand. T3 seems to have achieved the same in just over a thousand quid! Food for thought, although we are planning to get a full staircase put in, which will be the majority of the cost.

Other reasons for jollity include the fact that we have achieved our commitment for this iteration and that we included an afternoon of ''Innovation'' for exploring non-purchase-order based ideas. It's all a bit Google and I can only hope that it continues along similar lines in the future.