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Been neglecting my geek muscle…

By on April 22, 2009 in Technology

I’ve been neglecting my geek muscles way too much lately. It’s time to get back in the game and immerse myself in the new stuff that is hitting the market. Basically do stuff for The Plan minus the Open University stuff which I’ve dropped.

From a infrastructure technology point of view I plan to dive in deep and dirty with:

On the development front I will be reading the small mountain of books I have on:

On a personal front I will be finally studying some mathematics and reading through the huge pile of unread books I have bought over the last year.

Books to read Books to read. Click for larger view

This weeks events in Belfast (DevDays and BarCampBelfast) will be a good springboard to get back in the geek game…

Email as a communication tool is broken

By on April 14, 2009 in Technology

Like most people I get a stupid amount of email in work. Most of it I don’t need (cc’ed to me) or it’s something that could have been addressed by someone coming to talk to me. In the past it was perceived that sending an email was better than going to talk to a person, as you wouldn’t be disturbing them. I think we’ve passed a tipping point. Email is now a burden. I’ve been as guilty in the opposite direction in the emails I’ve sent to people. I recently decided to make a change. This was another of these type of decisions.

I have decided to only send an email in work if I have to. If I need to communicate with someone then I will try to talk to them or use Yammer before emailing. The order of trying to get in touch with people will be:

  1. In Person
  2. via telephone
  3. Yammer
  4. Email

It’s early days with Yammer use in work but it’s looking good so far. Now if I can get people to stop sending me emails…

New stuff from Macworld Expo 2009

By on January 5, 2009 in Technology

This entry will be a place to find the new hardware and software that gets released this week to coincide with Macworld 2009 and CES 09. Check back over the next week or so as this page gets updated with stuff that catches my eye.

Productivity Applications

Apple iLife ’09 – Latest version of the best available consumer media suite.

Apple iWork ’09 – Update to Apple’s productivity suite. Nice additions to Keynote and Pages. Endnote and MathType integration with Pages is a nice addition. I’ll be using Endnote and Mathtype a lot for courses I’m doing. This might mean I don’t have to use Microsoft Word.

Microsoft announce that they will make it easier for Office for Macintosh 2008 to connect to and use SharePoint services.

Music Creation

Toontrack Drumtracker – Convert audio drum recordings into drum midi data.

Development Tools

Widget Press ModelBaker – Web development app to quickly build web apps, iPhone & iPod touch web apps and Android web apps.

FileMaker Pro 10 – latest iteration of the easy to use database application.

Odds and Sods

Xsilva Lightspeed – Mac based Point-of-sale system. Run your retail business on Mac!

Plastic Logic eReader – Upcoming ebook device. Loots very nice.

An Introduction to Regular Expressions

By on September 15, 2008 in General

Drew McCormack has just posted a 13 page PDF tutorial on regular expressions.

If you’ve ever wanted to learn about regular expressions, here’s your chance, because I’m attaching to this post a chapter on regular expressions that I wrote recently for a Master’s level Python course. Although it targets the Python language, the regular expression syntax is virtually the same across the board, so anything you learn should translate pretty well to other languages and tools.

[From An Introduction to Regular Expressions | MacResearch]

Northern Ireland Cocoa Developers

By on June 18, 2008 in General

Some of us from Northern Ireland, who were at WWDC, are thinking of setting up a local Cocoa developers group to met and discuss development and technologies related to the Mac OS X and iPhone/iPod touch platform. It is envisioned that there will be periodic meetings, a mailing list, a web page, possibly guest speakers, etc. All this is still to be determined. The following 5 domains have been registered for the group to use:

nicocoadev (.org, .net, .com, .co.uk)

nicod.org

If you would be interested in participating in the group then email me using the contact link in the sidebar on the right of this page.

Feel free to pass this information on to anyone else who you think might be interested.

BBC iPlayer

By on May 26, 2008 in Technology

Virgin Media’s cable TV service now provides access to the BBC iPlayer service.. Excellent. It’s the best way to watch any TV programmes that have been on the UK BBC channels in the previous week. Just watching the first episode of Dr. Michio Kaku’s Visions of the Future.