Delicious with home made beef burger.
First new potatoes
June 7th, 2009A miserable weekend in Yorkshire?
April 18th, 2009I am perplexed by the current television advert in the UK which is purportedly for spending a weekend in Yorkshire.
Why on earth would you end with a scene of people looking miserable? The last things you see, hear and therefore conceptually link are “a weekend in Yorkshire” and miserable people.
Similarly perplexing is the current advert for, I believe, Aviva. This shows a long queue of people. So I now associate Aviva with long queues.
Why on earth would you voluntarily link your company with a domain that describes your product as defective?
April 12th, 2009This morning, I came across an interesting story about Goldman Sachs suing a blogger. It seems that they are going after his use of a domain with their company name in the domain, http://www.goldmansachs666.com/ although clearly they must also be displeased with the content of the site.
In so doing, they have generated plenty of publicity what is otherwise a small site. However, as it seems to be bank-bashing season, perhaps they feel that not enough negative publicity has been directed their way?
The same blogger reportedly (http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2007/sep/12/lennar-stuart-real-estate-broker-settle-suit-out-c/) formed a similar site about Lennar homes, blogging on http://www.defective-homes.net. If you visit this same domain today, you find it redirects to Lennar’s site: http://www.lennarcares.com/. An interesting marketing strategy, linking a domain that describes your product as defective to your company.
WANEm source
April 12th, 2009Recently I looked into WANEm, an open source WAN Emulator. However, despite being open-source, GPL-licensed, the source of the actual emulator elements (scripts, PHP site etc) did not seem to be available outside of the ISO live CD image. Whilst the live CD is very useful, it is always nice to access the code without needing to fire up a virtual (or real) machine.
So, in order to learn a little more about what was happening in the code, I’ve uploaded the source to GitHub:
http://wiki.github.com/ajcollins/wanem
MacHeist
March 26th, 2009Yesterday evening I purchased the MacHeist 3 bundle. Primarily this was to pick up a copy of Wiretap Studio. Audio Hijack would have been slightly cheaper than the $39 bundle. However, some of the other applications look rather interesting so I jumped in. It would be splendid if Espresso were unlocked.
I have already used Wiretap Studio to convert a couple of old cassettes into MP3 format and am quite pleased with the results. The rest of the more interesting cassettes should follow suit, perhaps over the weekend.
Screencast: an introduction to Web Application Testing In Ruby
January 4th, 2009After an exquisite amount of procrastination, alteration and working around defects, I’ve finally completed my first screencast.
The screencast covers an introduction to WATIR - Web Application Testing In Ruby. This is an open source library for programmativally driving web browsers. I have made considerable use of professionally and really value all of the hard work invested in to it and the community which supports it. It is a superb tool for writing automated testing, demonstration and data loading scripts and is very easy to extend and customise.
These screencasts are in m4v format and should play using Quicktime. I’ve not tried playing them in anything else. Please let me know if there are any issues or improvements I could make.
Downloads:
- An introduction to WATIR (small) 27MB
- An introduction to WATIR (large, zipped) 36MB
- A search using Google (small) [this is a subset of the introduction to WATIR] 9MB
- A search using Google (large) [this is a subset of the introduction to WATIR] 17MB
Drop-down terminal for Mac OS X
January 2nd, 2009Visor (http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-visor/) makes an excellent addition to the default Terminal.app on Mac OS X, allowing the terminal to drop down when you need it.
PRINCE2 - Getting things done.
January 1st, 2009I’m currently reading about PRINCE2 to prepare myself for a new project. Whilst reading chapter 4 of the practitioner’s guide (Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2) I came upon the following:
“To get anything done in the project, you need a decision maker and someone to undertake the planning.”
I believe this should be rephrased as:
“To get anything done in the project, you need a decision maker and someone to do the work.”
Planning will not ensure that something is done. Planning should be an essential part of one’s work. Whilst planning is important, there really is no substitute for doing.
Ecofont
December 23rd, 2008An eco-friendly innovation? A font with holes in to attempt to reduce ink usage.
Photos
December 21st, 2008Photos have moved to: http://photos.ajcollins.com/