In town on a lunch break recently and as me and my friends walked past a travel agent, I noticed this:

It’s on a little LCD screen which is supposed to display the latest great deals on travel and entice people walking by to come in, but apparently someone didn’t notice that a slight bug crept in.

🙂

Time is very precious. I’m currently working on a semi-super-secret (if there can be such a thing) coding project with my good friend Chris Van Patten. Hmmm… I can tell you this much:

“we’re an events aggregator geared toward artists”

I absolutely love coding. It’s absolutely great fun, but the problem is that precious resource known as time is so scarce. I have to keep blogging, doing all the stuff I have to get done and of course the very important task of staying sane.

If anyone’s bored and has a spare, oh, even just two hours in their day, please if you could lend me the time so you have a shorter day and I have a longer one I’d be very grateful.

The bottom line is – my personal coding projects here might seem to be inactive for a while. Rest assured that I have not forgotten about them, they should get some attention as soon as I have the time to spare!

I’ve been using Fedora as my main desktop OS for over a year now. It’s a very good Linux distribution, but every so often it is nice to get a change of scenery.

Also, I haven’t actually cleared out my KDE configuration files and started from scratch in over a year, which means things can get a little bit clogged up. FC6 on my desktop had been acting pretty slowly and I’m too impatient to wait for Fedora 7 to come out.

So, I’ve just migrated my desktop over to Kubuntu Feisty Fawn. Why Kubuntu? Because you can pry KDE out of my cold, dead fingers. Oh and because of this. And endless configurability. And the promise of KDE 4.

I still grudgingly am retaining a Windows dual boot system, but only just. The reinstall gave me an opportunity to nuke the disk and give Linux a lot more space than it did have.

So far, I’ve had very positive experiences with Kubuntu. Especially getting the Nvidia 3D drivers on – that was undoubtedly the easiest install of those drivers I’ve ever done. I don’t know whether it was clearing out a year’s worth of rubbish, or if it is Ubuntu, but it seems much snappier. Firefox and Thunderbird start-up times seem to have been dramatically reduced, as has boot-up (thanks to Upstart).

The funny thing is I set aside a whole weekend to get stuff migrated over and I’ve done most of it in an evening. Which involves reconfiguring stuff how I like it. Which usually takes quite a bit of time.

When Fedora 7 comes out, I’ll play around with it inside a VM and then re-asses my distro switch decision. 😉

I am very happy to announce that SleekTabs has been nominated for the April 2007 PHP Classes Innovation Award.

This is the second time I’ve been nominated (the first time was for WPGet, and I’m honoured to receive another nomination!

Bearing in mind that I don’t really consider ST to be ready for production use yet and I was just getting the code out there with the intention of working on it and upgrading it to a better standard, I’m really really surprised to be nominated again!

You can of course vote for me if you so wish by going to the Vote page (you’ll need an account at PHP Classes.

As always, you can see the SleekTabs page at PHP Classes here.

A couple of days ago, CentOS 5 came out. On my server machine (I say server, but it doesn’t do a lot at the moment, it’s not even on all the time!), I was running CentOS 4.4, and I was eager to get upgrading.

After about half a day of trying to get the DVD ISO off BitTorrent, and getting 30% of the way through, I gave up and downloaded it off an FTP mirror in a few hours. Why is it I rarely ever have good experiences with BitTorrent?

So yesterday I spent a bit of the day upgrading and migrating all the stuff on there over. First of all, though, there was a 10-year-old hard drive still in that machine, which was basically sitting there and doing nothing. I decided I would unplug it, as all it was doing was killing itself slowly and heating up the box a bit more.

» Read the rest of this post…

Hello again everyone!

After a nice few days enjoying a family Easter get-together in Cheshire sans internet, I’m now back at home here in Hampshire.

I’ve actually been back for some time, but I wanted to catch up on email and feeds without disturbance, so I hid for a few hours! I’m now fully up-to-date with the world (wow – a Debian release!).

I have to say, it’s really great to actually get away from the world. So much stuff happens all the time, and I’m constantly in contact with everyone, constantly being bombarded with information. Not bothering with all of that for a few days is just so refreshing, even if there is a massive torrent of stuff to read, deal with and sort out at the end of it!

The only thing I don’t like is travelling. Especially by car. We actually did pretty well (partly thanks to the M6 Toll on the way in), but I still just hate long journeys. This isn’t the route we took, but to give you an idea distance-wise, here’s a Google directions map.

Anyway, enough travel moaning. I’ll be following up all the things I’ve got in email and blog comments tomorrow, so if you’re one of the people who’s asked something of me, I’ll deal with those things tomorrow morning.

Just to let everyone know who I haven’t already told, I’ll be away from tomorrow to Tuesday. I doubt I’ll get internet access at all, so don’t expect me to be available!

Thanks to the magic of WordPress scheduled entries, I’ll still be keeping up daily posts on FOSSwire, but since I’ve already done all the hard work of actually writing the posts, I do get a sort of break from blogging!

See you all again either late on Tuesday or on Wednesday.

(I wrote this earlier this afternoon, but only just got round to pasting it in.)

This is the second time I have written a blog post outside. The first was this FOSSwire post, that I composed just a few moments ago.

You know what that means?

• I have a laptop (and you know that).
• The weather is getting warmer.

Today was just great. Blue skies – not too cold, but not too hot and the sun was out.

The only bad thing about writing blog posts outside is that I don’t have wifi. So I have to tap them out in TextEdit, go back inside, plug in my Ethernet cable and copy and paste.

Ah well. You can’t win them all.