I’ve even been lucky enough to get down to Liverpool for a holiday and many LFC games. It’s a lot like Glasgow and I love how they’ve developed their dockyard post-empire.

Benitez, like Houllier before him, spent a lot of time developing a paranoia against the board and the media. He won many public battles with the club. Though without new ownership coming he lost the war.

Here is my favourite Benitez moment:

In his parting words from the club; he has says everything you need to know about the man:

I leave you with my favourite Liverpool moment under Benitez. 1 minute left to go and 1 goal needed to progress to eventual Champions Leagure glory:

At this point the baby is the the same size as an Apple pip or a Marble.

Fast forward 6 weeks and we are talking Baseballs and Avocados:

The baby (we don’t want to know the sex) is due on the 26th June. Right during the knockout stages of the World Cup. Alison says she’s going to wait for an England game to give birth!

Baby Instructions

To help me not make some common mistakes I was helpfully given this picture guide.

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!

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.

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.

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

• Twitter
• Delicious
• Google Reader

Tech Blog posts roundup

• Article: The Coding Dojo
• Article: Continuous Integration
• Tip: Using Ruby to parse an Excel document
• Tip: Automatically adding jars to the Java classpath
• Tip: Using Ruby as an AWK replacement

Coding Dojo Talk at Techmeetup

I spoke at a Glasgow Techmeetup recently about Coding Dojos. It’s something I found very easy to talk about as I’ve been running one for over a year within JPMorgan. I’ve volunteered to host one for the .NET crowd in Scotland too.

The audience was different from usual as we had another presenter from the Channel 4 investment fund. So half the crowd was there to ask why he kept rejecting their ideas.

I think my talk went quite well as there were a lot of questions at the end. One bit of feedback I received was that I shouldn’t use my hands in a velociraptor style as it scares the crowd. I’ll look out for that in the future.

Here is the video of the talk.

Joe Wright talks about Coding Dojos from TechMeetup on Vimeo.

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.

I was quite worried that I wasn’t good enough to take part in the weekend so to get my confidence up I read the whole of the Pragmatic Programmers Agile Rails book and did a few quick web apps. At the same time I got a copy of RubyMine installed and learnt all the shortcuts. It really is a fantastic bit of kit.

Kevin McDonagh had previously told me about sicamp, but unfortunately he could not make it due to his unyielding love of dance music (he was at Sonar in Barcelona). I had a quick look over the back of the envelope ideas and decided that I would be best served helping out with the “Changing Places” idea. This idea was to make a user maintainable Google Map of all the accessible toilets in the UK. This was a very similar domain to the Glasgow Green Map which I had previously worked on and the idea owner, Rosie McIntosh from ENABLE Scotland, was very passionate about the project.

The weekend kicked off on Friday night where there was a meet and greet session. As I live in Glasgow I agreed to let 2 strangers stay over who were also going to sicamp. This night was a networking extravaganza! I met a guy who had been on Dragon’s Den and actually got funding as well as many other developers who I haven’t seen at any other events I go to.

Saturday kicked off early with enormous croissants and juice. I setup in our allotted room at Glasgow Caledonian University and read over what we needed to do. A few other people turned up who also were also excited about the idea: @rohan_london and Claire Medcalf from the School of Everything). At first we decided to do all public toilets as well as disabled and accessible ones. We then found the rather excellently named site sitorsquat.com which already did this. Given this revelation we decided it would be best to focus on accessible toilets and what tourist attractions are nearby. This means we needed name to sum up our site. weedayout.com was born.

I was slightly disheartened at first as I was the only developer on the project. Some of the other projects had over 6 developers. Luckily a Sangeet Gyawali joined us as a designer to polish up the functionality I’d made (i.e. make it so someone other than me could bear to use it!).

We eventually got booted out of the University at 8pm that night and headed along to the CCA on Sauchie Hall street. I’m not sure if the CCA knew what hit them, as suddenly 40 geeks with laptops took up all their floor space. Most folk stayed around for another 3 hours then headed back to prepare for the big presentation day.

Sunday at 2pm was the deadline for getting our sites live and having a presentation available to demo to the rest of the teams and interested members of the public. Rosie and I spoke during our presentation which was met with a great reaction from the delegates. During our Q&A someone pointed out that TomTom’s have a developer API and we could push our data through to them.

The presentations showed that each team had spent a huge amount of effort over the weekend and their enthusiasm made me want to help out on all of the projects after the weekend.

The event was judged by a panel from a diverse range of disciplines such as the National Lottery fund, Local arts as well as a respected freelance programmer. We were lucky enough to be given second place for our efforts which means the project will receive additional help over the next 6 months. I intend to continue working on the website and hopefully get a team interested in Glasgow.

I have to thank the sicamp team for putting on a great event that has left me with a smile on my face every day while remembering this weekend.

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!

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!

7pm in Room M329, James Weir Building, 75 Montrose Street, Glasgow.