Thanks to Kevin Worthington for his installation instructions. Comments are closed on his post so I’ve added these notes to my own blog.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’d like to apologise on VPS.net’s behalf, my blog has been slow and unresponsive for the last couple of months. Despite a SAN upgrade and my VM being moved to a different hypervisor, and my VM’s disk performance being ‘tuned’ by tech support … eventually it falls back to a snails pace. VPS.net have been plagued by their SAN choice for a while. I’ll switch to Linode over Christmas.

Merry Christmas to all!

This isn’t my affidavit of being a copy and paste programmer. vim has recently become my code editor of choice, having used Eclipse for years, and Netbeans for most of this year. Poor network performance at work means both of those IDEs slow me down.

One annoyance with vim is pasting text from another application. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve watched the world eulogise Steve Jobs over the last 48 hours. To me, there’s no better testament to his brilliance than quantity of profound quotes. I found one particularly poignant on focus and simplicity:

Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple

This quote stood out to me because it epitomises what I aim to achieve in my code, I can’t say I’m always successful.

Farewell Mr Jobs, consumer electronics will be a little less brilliant without you.

My contract finished with O2 many months ago, I patiently waited for the release of the iPhone 4 … June 24th came and went, and to cut a long story short, I stuck with my iPhone 3G and (last week) switched to Three.

If you’re running iOS4 on your iPhone, save yourself some time and stop reading now – this only applies for iOS 3.x. Read the rest of this entry »

This month I’ve got a couple of trips to the US, one work, one leisure. I’d like to be able to use some of the dead time during the flight to do some development work. Instead of running PHP, Apache and MySQL from my Mac, I run it from a Ubuntu virtual machine via VirtualBox.

My previous configuration was to use a bridged network so the host could see the guest and access services running on it. Perfect … except when you don’t have a network connection, like when you’re on a flight. Read the rest of this entry »