Archives for July, 2011
The Dick Turpin Roadshow
Jul 29, 2011 (about 9 months ago)
Recently, Becky and I were invited to co-host episode 6 of the Dick Turpin Roadshow. We have been friends with the hosts, Matt and Pete, since we met them at the first OggCamp, so we jumped at the opportunity to join them on their podcast.
We had a great time recording the show. We ended up chatting for a good couple of hours and we discussed all sorts of nonsense, including Linux, trees, black holes, Ubuntu/Unity, CoCs, LUGs and much more.
If you are interested in listening, you can grab the podcast here. I hope others enjoy it as much as we enjoyed recording it.
P.S. The podcast could be considered NSFW.
New job, CodeIgniter, WordPress & Unity
Jul 4, 2011 (about 10 months ago)
Real life has been keeping me pretty busy of late and I have not posted to my blog as much as I would have liked. In fact, I only managed one post last month, which might not have been so bad, but the post only contained a single sentence.
**sad face**
So, why have I been so busy? Well, mainly because I have taken a new position as a PHP developer.
**happy face**
I am now working for small local business, developing some interesting projects with great potential. There are just three developers in the office and it feels great to be working within a small team. I am really enjoying it and loving the challenge.
As part of my new position, I have been working with CodeIgniter, a rather nifty PHP framework. Now, I have always steered well clear of frameworks for my own projects, but I have to admit that CodeIgniter is really quite nice. It has some fantastic libraries and helpers, yet manages to stay quite lean and lightweight. At some point in the future, I may take a look at rewriting some of my own little projects to take advantage of some of its features.
WordPress is something else that has been taking up a fair amount of my time, which is quite surprising as I kind of lost interest in it a good few years ago. Anyhow, I wanted to take another look at it in more depth as I have been thinking about using it for a potential project; so, I took a look, and I am still looking; interestingly, or not, I get the impression that once you strip away much of the crufty (subjective) features/functions/widgets etc, it is pretty much the same old WordPress that it used to be. I wonder why I have perceived it to be anything else?
Finally, there is Ubuntu and Unity. Now, I installed Ubuntu Natty with Unity a good few weeks ago, and surprisingly, it is still on my system. I thought I might have been slightly premature in declaring my love for Unity last month, but as it turns out, the more I use it, the more I like it. It really is a pleasure. Sure, there are a few little bugs here and there, but for the most part, it just works. And I’ll be honest, after a good few years of wrangling with putting CrunchBang together, a vanilla Ubuntu install with Unity comes as a bit of a relief — please, do not flame me for saying that.
Talking of CrunchBang, I am currently on hiatus from the project. I do feel kind of guilty for not being able to spend time working on it, but sometimes, real life and other interests have to take priority.
Oh, wait second, I nearly forgot to mention my conversion from Bazaar to Git. Yes I have seen the light, finally!