Archive for the ‘geek’ Category

31
Oct
2009

3

UK’s first Code Retreat this November

I’ve been running Coding Dojos for the Tech community in Glasgow for a while now. A Coding Dojo is a 2 hour coding session where programmers of varied skill levels come together to work on a common task. The task is simple in scope and difficulty. The goal is to learn, teach and improve with fellow software developers in a non-competitive setting.

Events

I was approached by Adrian Mowatt and Rob Lally from AgileScotland about the prospect of getting involved with a whole day coding event in Glasgow. I eagerly joined these two pioneers and we are happy to announce the first Coding Retreat in the UK.

We will be getting 20 keen software developers together in a room, putting them in pairs and seeing what they can achieve in 40 minutes. Every 40 minutes the pairs change and we start again.

We have selected the Ruby programming language to be used by pairs on the day.

It’s happening on Saturday the 21st November 2009 at Glasgow Caledonian University from 9am to 5pm. Tickets are completely free and available from EventBrite.

We’ll be providing breakfast and lunch as well as drinks throughout the day. After 5pm we full intend to retire to a nearby watering hole.

We are limited to 20 people. So please sign up quickly as we won’t be able to increase the amount of tickets!

Posted in code, fun, geek | 3 Comments »

10
Sep
2009

7

Tools you need to use #4: Launchy

launchy_logo

One killer feature on the Mac that I desperately craved on Windows was the Spotlight feature. If you press Apple+Space it gives you an option to type some text. This text is then used to search through all the applications and files you have. It searches your email, music, dictionaries, basically everything on your machine. I use it as the primary way of opening applications and files on my MacBook.

spotlight

I still use a Windows XP machine at my work, which means I have to manually search through the Start Menu for whatever application I need. You can use the quick launch bar but that tends to get filled up fairly… well… quickly. Launchy solves this problem.

Launchy starts up when you log into Windows and offers you an on-demand dialog from a key combination. This dialog allows you to launch any application on you machine.

You simply hit Windows+Space (default is Alt+Space) to see a dialog, type ‘f’. and press return to load Firefox.

It remembers your previous choices and quickly becomes optimised for the way you think.

launchyfire

Windows Vista has a similar feature but it only works on whole words, which makes it pretty unusable. Luckily Launchy works on XP, Vista and Linux.

If you work in a job which requires you to use the Start Menu to launch applications, you can become much more productive (and happy) by using Launchy.

Other tools you need to use

Posted in fun, geek | 7 Comments »

03
Aug
2009

1

Announcing my new technical blog

I’ve been running this blog for quite a while now and I know that the readers are either people who known me personally or professionally. I’ve often been tempted to post very technical posts on this site but I’ve resisted as I know it wouldn’t fit in well.

To get around this, and encourage me to blog further, I’ve created a new site Joejag Tech which will allow me to talk about unixy, ruby goodness without confusing my parents.

I’ll mainly be posting short articles on how to solve specific problems. Occasionally I might go over a code kata in detail as well.

Posted in code, geek, job | 1 Comment »

05
Jun
2009

3

Tools you need to use #3: Twitter

Following on from my last 2 tools you need to use: Google Reader and Delicious. There is a massively hyped tool which I can heartedly recommend.

Twitter is an opt-in version of IRC. Think about that for a second. Now imagine the IRC chat room has people you respect (for me Charlie Brooker, Stephen Fry and Martin Fowler), and you can hear their thoughts. If there’s anything we have learnt about the Internet over the last 2 years it’s that stalking is at an all time high. It’s also becoming mainstream.

I was very sceptical about Twitter. Seeing it as a way for people I sort of know spamming me with fascinating anecdotes about getting pished with their mates the other night. But it’s quite simple, just keep it professional and only listen to people you know and/or respect. If your life is all about High School Musical then you can listen to the ramblings of the stars from the show. If you are deeply into software development, then all of your heroes are already on board.

I think to get the most out of Twitter you need to either have the iPhone/Android/Blackberry application, or not have it unblocked at your work. But it really is a genuinely interesting new source of information I check multiple times a day along with my SMS, email and rss feeds. I feel more connected and as the circulation figures for gossip magazines will tell you, people love being a little too intimate.

Feel free to follow me!

Posted in fun, geek, life | 3 Comments »

03
May
2009

3

Talk Talk Talks

This week has been a great week for hearing about new tech. On Tuesday I did a presentation at work about Hudson and Sonar. Hudson is a CI server and Sonar is a great way to track metrics on your codebase.

On Wednesday I went along to the Java User Group Scotland and checked out a great talk done by Selcuk Bozdag on Flex development. Flex allows you to make pretty cool Flash based applications which can talk to remote services. It isn’t tied to Java like I originally thought. There’s an awful lot of out of the box charting and video tools which seem useful.

On Saturday I went along to the Microsoft sponsored Developer Day event. They had 4 different tracts offering mainly .NET and MS SQL Server talks. I enjoyed listening to the Virtulisation and Ruby on .NET talks especially. I then managed to find some Perl/Flex developers I could talk loudly about the evil that is IE6 to restore the balance.

While at the conference I was approached by some guys from the disposable memory project who were at my talk the previous week at the Glasgow Techmeetup. They handed me a modded film based camera with instructions to hand it to someone else after a single usage and after all the exposures were used the last person would hand it back to someone else. Hopefully I’ll get to see what this led to!

Posted in fun, geek, life | 3 Comments »

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