Roo’s Ramblings

I had myself a wee break in Paris last weekend. Man, that is one amazing capital. The French certainly know how to knock-up a good looking city. ‘Twas vibrant too. Being English means that I’m automatically supposed to hate the French. However, that’s never been the case and I really love the French lifestyle. Would trade Paris for London any day. The only problem with Paris is that it was far too many American tourists!

Anyway, as Skoal put in a request, I happened to spot some funky French buskers. It started off as a rather normal guitar player. Bit boring in many respects. Then, out of nowhere, some bloke turns up with two wooden spoons and starts drumming away on a post. He the man!

I can’t believe it’s taken so long but I’ve finally setup a hosting account. Thanks to Dibble for the heads-up about xs-host.com who have been pretty darn good - and excellent value! I’m such a newbie though when it comes to configuring the databases and software. Still, I’ve managed to get this blog going!

Oh my god! I’m 25. Mid-twenties. It’s all downhill from here…

I spent years using gvim as my main editor for everything, including programming. A year or so ago, I started using Eclipse for my Java projects. Eclipse is not a Java IDE per se. It’s an application framework for which JDK programming modules were implemented. However, you have also find modules for developing C++ and Python within Eclipse too.

Eclipse has grown in popularity so much recently that it’s caused the other OSS offerings - and more crucially, the commerical offerings - to really move up a gear, and I think Netbeans is on the verge of becoming a first-class Java IDE.

I recently experimented with NB 5 beta and finally got around to playing with its killer feature, Matisse. This is NB’s new GUI design module and quite frankly it blows the competition out of the water. Writing GUI code is the most tedious task. Getting a few textboxes and labels on screen is fairly straight-forward, but getting the blasted things aligned properly will ensure you lose an hour of your time!

So, check out the Matisse demo to see what the fuss is about. I think I’ll wait until NB5 is released proper and then I’ll trial it for my next Java project, whatever that may be.

Oh my God! Can you Adam and Eve it? I finally have broadband after about 6 weeks of trying. Phew! I’m glad it’s over. As I’ve said a few times when I endured dial-up to post here, I’ve felt so out of the loop. I’ve not run a pacman -Syu during the last 6 weeks either! I’ve barely posted on the forums and work on Jacman practically ground to a halt.

Anyway, all should change now. More silly blog posts. More surreal AL forum posts and more comments from Skoal! Woo hoo

You guessed it - I finally purchased one of those bad boys last Saturday. What can I say? It just rocks!

About 6-7 years ago I got a Sony DiscMan for xmas. It’s lasted me well, but I’ve been wanting to move away from bulky music players for sometime. I’ve been waiting for the size/capacity ratio to reach a decent balance and I think that 4Gb within the volume of a couple of credit cards is good enough. I wasn’t bothered about getting a iPod per se - it’s just that Apple seemed to be the first to release a media player that fitted my needs.

I do think Apple have got most things just about right, so all credit to them. The only feature I wish the Nano had is some sort of normalising facility so that you don’t blow your ear drums between tracks of different volumes. However, I could do some thing myself to this effect by normalising the tracks directly on my laptop before I copy them over.

Anyway, I’m a happy chappy for now, and no doubt all my fellow commuters are happy, enjoying my involuntary tone-deaf singing

Oh no. The dreaded moving date is getting rather close. As some of you know, I got a job recently that means I have to relocate down south to smelly London. The 28th will be my last day in lovely Leeds for the foreseeable future.

As any English person knows, the north of England is far nicer than the south. Take the county of East Sussex, for example, on the south coast of England. Famous for Eastbourne (a town where old people move to die, aka “God’s waiting room”!) and the Beachy Head cliffs (the UK’s #1 suicide location). Woo hoo! (Don’t worry, I’m only saying this to wind up Dibble - hehe)

The advantages of moving to London are:

• More computing jobs
• More music and comedy gigs
• Food!!! Lots of fine cuisine from all over the globe
• Travel - easy to catch the train to Paris or to fly from the many London airports.
• My girlfriend will stop whingeing about wanting to live in London (yeah, she’s a soft southener).
• Culture - many fine galleries and museums, theatres and cinemas.
• Interesting array of buskers (I’ll keep the Busker review updated, don’t you worry!)

The dissadvantages can be summed up as:

• Expensive
• It’s smelly
• Tourists
• Too many posh people (toffs)
• Can’t get fish, chips and gravy!
• Futher away from my family
• Seems to be a few too many bombs around at the moment too

Anyway, the advantage for you guys is that I’ll be pretty busy next week, so you won’t have to endure my posts!

Can you believe that web developers still write sites that explicitly block all browsers other than IE?!? Are these people deluded or what?!? They must sincerely believe that IE is actually a decent browser.

“Optimised for Internet Explorer” - no it isn’t. It’s been downgraded for IE; it’s gone backwards! Muppets…