It’s just so easy to use iTunes. The scenario is usually the same each time. Lying on the couch in a semi stupour watching some vacuous load of nonsense and an advert comes on with a catchy tune. You lift one arm weakly, grab the phone, Shazam it and get a link to iTunes. You think ‘that’s quite good, I’ll take a punt on the album’, buy it, download it and sink back into your lethergic coma on the couch.

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While it’s quiet around 8am I like to catch up on my blogs to see what’s been happening out there but I also thought I’d give blogging about what I’ve read a go. See if any patterns emerge. Chief among them will be whether the pattern of writing about what I read will persist!

So real coffee cup full, Reeder open, what attracted my attention enough to open in the browser?

This year seems to be the year of Big Data, as reported by OSS Watch in The dominance of open source tools in big data, so much so that you can even attend the Big Data University to learn just how big Data is going to be this year and even try and tackle some Big Data yourself using Apache Hadoop. All in all, moderately interesting.

Next up, Ben Orenstein has taken the Wikipedia article on coupling and applied it to Ruby with some good examples. I’ve always felt the best way to learn a topic is to munge it into something practical and this fits the bill perfectly.

There were lots of other nature, philosophy, mountaineering and programming ones too but the above ended up open in the browser. Plus I still have a couple open I’m working my way through from the day before. The thought patterns of success and the guide to the rails asset pipeline. Not mention a slew of Kaltura tabs open and one on unit testing C# applications in Visual Studio.

And so it rumbles on, this joke OS. 10.7 is what I give it out of a hundred. This time it’s the network not coming back after sleeping. According to this thread you can variously turn off/on wifi to get your wired connection back, invoke network in system preferences, or, get this, start a backup. I mean, what’s the point of releasing crap like 10.7? There has obviously been very little testing.

This time it’s XCode. Refuses to install from the app store. None of that fancy leaping from the store into your dock with a progress bar to inform you it’s downloading. Nothing. It just sits there saying “Installing” then installs nothing. Thinking it had opened a wormhole in space and time to download its multi-gig bulk in super quick time I tried XCode in my dock. It blew up complaining it wanted 10.6 back. Sigh. Uninstall the now dud XCode:

sudo sh
/Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all

delete XCode from the dock, login to the Apple Developer site and download the DMG from there. But wait. Where are the commandline tools? Sigh. They’re making it as difficult as possible to develop on this platform now. You need to go into XCode -> Preferences -> Downloads and install them from there. Or you can download them separately from the SDK site.

This is so tedious, having to go through settings putting them back to the ‘default’ before OS X Lion stamped it’s iOS footprint all over them. This time it’s Safari opening with the last page viewed no matter what its settings are. You have to go into a completely unrelated area to sort this. This smacks of iOS interference as that’s what you do on iOS, use the Settings App to change some global settings. Well OS X is NOT iOS.

System Preferences -> General

uncheck this:

Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps

Seriously, are they taking the mickey? I upgraded to OS X Lion and thought the browser had crashed. No way could I scroll down. Then I realised they’d decided my laptop was a phone and I had to scroll as if on the iPhone. Excuse me? Are they having a laugh? Apparently they call it ‘natural’ scrolling. I call it crap and here’s how to go back to a really natural scrolling movement:

System Preferences -> Trackpad

Uncheck this garbage:

“When using gestures to scroll or navigate, move content in the direction of finger movement”

You wouldn’t have liked to have seen which finger I was moving when they did that.

With more and more information coming my way, I decided to rationalise how I manage all that chatter and keep track of what needs doing and when. Now, being a software developer, I need to concentrate on designing systems and writing code, as well as keeping up to date with several fields and managing the development infrastructure such as Jira for issue tracking, Bamboo for continuous integration and Fisheye/Crucible for code reviews. So before I even go near the endless stream of bytes flowing from the net, most of my time is already taken up with things related to what I do. So I don’t really have time to work out how best to use various productivity applications, other than download, install and crudely filter the flow, usually to some local application where I keep notes. (more…)

This blog is mostly for my own education and reflection and the comments reflect that, i.e. not a lot. Plus for every comment I get, I have to clean out around 1000 spams and even of those few legit comments, most are just ‘drop-ins’, lauding me for a wonderful article and by the way, here’s a link to my website, as if readers of this poky blog are interested in the website of commenters who add nothing to the post content. So I’ve joined lots of other bloggers, especially Matt Gemmell, who has gone into blog comments in detail and has reached the same conclusions as I reached. They’re not worth it. If someone feels an overwhelming urge to offer their opinion of one of my opinions, they can do it on their own blog where their opinion can be taken in context, rather than a quick drop-in on my blog, leaving a link to their own website.