I spent around an hour piecing information together about how to install this printer on Arch. It seems Canon’s support for this device is near non-existant. Their newer devices seem to be better supported. I recently installed a PIXMA 5350 on my parents Ubuntu 12.04 desktop within five minutes. Installing this older model on Arch Linux wasn’t as straightforward.
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My employer has had a recruiting drive over the last few months. Having been interviewer maybe 30 times throughout my career I thought I’d document some of the recurring mistakes candidates make. None of these points are ground breaking, just common sense – yet many candidates still make them!
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I’ve owned an iPhone since September 2008, so almost 4 years. On Thursday I received my HTC One S from Amazon. I’m still learning my way around but as they’re fresh in my mind, I thought I’d make note of obstacles I ran up against as an Android noobie.
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This might sound heavy handed and radical but it’s widely accepted, particularly among the testing community that statics are evil. Specifically I’m referring to static properties and methods, with exception to self for late static binding and parent used in inheritance.

At first glance, statics are a convenience but as your code base grows, and especially if you try to write unit tests around your code, the convenience turns into pain. Why?
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This was the third consecutive year I’ve attended the PHP UK conference. I bought a ticket for Friday only (this is the first year PHP UK has spanned two days). While I think the event is better organised every year, the quality of the talks for 2012, overall, was not the same standard as last year (with exception to Ian B’s, who’s always good).
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My blog is still crawling and I’m itching to move it over. I’ve taken the opportunity to migrate away from WordPress at the same time. As good as it is, it’s a pure waste of CPU cycles and won’t scale under heavy traffic (not that I’m receiving heavy traffic). I embarked on a pet ruby project to write a published blog system but it wasn’t long before I discovered Jekyll.

So I’m in the process of getting nginx, passenger and Jekyll configured on my new Linode instance. Time permitting I should have migrated across by February. Watch this space: responsive blog coming soon!