I finished my radio play off today and will be sending it to the BBC next week. Quite excited about it but not really holding out a huge amount of hope because there isn't a lot of point getting too worked up about stuff.I've been reading num

Way back in the mists of time men were just men. They had the dominant role in society, at least in theory, and women couldn't compete with them in the workplace because they had other things to worry about. In some ways this was less of an issue

One of the consequences of meditating a lot over several years is you start to see how your own mind works. Obviously, this gives you insight into other people's too.If you are feeling down and oppressed by the world, well, how about getting the

Comment left here ... and that's why I use RoR. 90% of the "anti" opinions here don't get it. It's quick, it has a low entry barrier, and, if you want the Ajax stuff, it's very easy to do simple things. If you want stuff tha

Start here to see what this is in response to. ... how many of you go back to the pre-web days? I do - graduated in 1987, I've had to practically start again 3 or 4 times in the last 20 years - Un

Comment left here  Didn't realise that phorm were the timewasting bastards who were behind 121 - spent many a happy hour trying to get rid of their viral nonsense from a machine my then 10 year old son was using (no idea how they got past hi

Comment left here  I am a Rails developer who uses a proper IDE (Netbeans for Ruby) and Windows. Installed Cygwin to give me the bash shell and the other tools I need to talk to our Linux server backbones. I started on Unix/Sun workstations, wen

Following on from the talk I tried to give on why Java is bad for your brain at Barcamp I thought I'd dig out some of my old blog posts and present them here - try and explain the argument (which is more of a feeling

I was getting this: undefined method `to_f' for {}:HashWithIndifferentAccessThis was happening in the after_create method. We have a table that lists fields and what validation is needed, we use this to pick out the value in the record so we can

Comment left  Eschew bullet points - they are there to prompt the speaker Use diagrams and pictures - people think in pictures Give handouts - That's where screeds of text belongs. I read a paper that says one of the shuttle disasters was i

Birthday Message

I installed Mandriva Linux on an extra drive I put into my big server machine. Could not get the US Robotics wireless card to fly at all. Found some stuff on source forge but it didn't work for me (needed kernel source to build it - way too hard).Wen

Notes on our time in Amsterdam

MySQLDecided to move my project to MySQL because it seems to be more of a standard compared with Postgres. This is a pity because I like Postgres a lot, but you have to go with the flow and if I'm going to work on some non-Oracle skills I should at l

Lots of competent people, who think carefully about the problem, making small contributions is how it works. Don't knock it. I'm a bit jealous of people who have made a contribution, which I know is weird of me. At times I feel like I'm trying to do

What's the matter with peopleToday I remembered why I hate driving.Incident 1:Coming up to a set of lights just before a 30 zone. I'm in the outside lane, doing about 40. Car on inside wobbles part-way into the outside lane, sees me and wobbles back.

I got my Java 1.4 Certification at the end of January. Now I can move on and look at the more interesting certifications. I think the next one will be the Business Components one. I need to write off to Sun to get the logo.I thought maybe I could do

In response to this:Hi JohnWhile I'm sure a lot of people would feel very angry at the way this idiot behaved, and I agree with them, I think that his sentence is very harsh. Drink drivers who kill people often get less than this - it's on a par with

I was talking about solving problems at a meal today and said that some may not be soluble (to be fair I pronounced it solu-able). Someone corrected me and said that the word was solvable. In fact, soluble is the primary word in my dictionary and so

For those of you who don't know, my father killed himself when I was 8 years old. All I have left of him are his silver cufflinks and the vague echoes of his genes. Nothing else.I was giving Jon a hug today before leaving for work and it hit me that

In response to this:Hi Philip,I've just been working with Oracle's XML DB for 10g. It does functionally exactly what you say IBM are thinking about. You appear to be ill-informed and have bought the IBM FUD. You should be more careful about what you

If you hurt someone else you give them permission to hurt you back because you make hurting people OK. This is quite tricky to understand. It's one of the ways that karma works. Karma just means "action", like Newton's law:For every action

I decided to try using Mozilla Firefox as my browser of choice. After I got the Java and Flash plug-ins installed it works fine. I like it a lot, particularly the tabbed interface, where you aren't constantly going back to favorites over and over aga

Was half way through a post when the Mac seized up. Hopefully the laptop will behave a bit better.We had a birthday party for him on Thursday at a local sports centre. It was a football party and most of the kids joined in. It was a little weird wher

BirthdayBirthday on the 8th, we went paddling in North Wales (Llangohlen and the Treweryn) that weekend with the club. Stayed at a nice pub called The Goat  where the kids had a good time. Poor Pete had a bit of an epic on the Trewy, but enjoyed it