White Noise

Read this, its (about) the Law

A while back JW notice that some clever chap had been ripping content from his, and other peoples Excel blogs, and reposting it, un attributed. A bit more dig from part time PI Deb Dalgleish unearthed a few sites, all belonging to the same chap, with yet more content theft. Some of the stuff was from this blog, and I tried to get Microsoft to take it down. No luck there and I gave up.

Today I saw a tweet from Jimmy saying that he’d just raised “another” DMCA

Don't mess with the Jimster

Anyway, yesterday I listen to this podcast from Dot Net Rocks, which is about copyright trademarks and so on in software. It’s really interesting, and might be useful.

Why I can’t live without my iPhone.

In fact I don’t have an iPhone. I have a G Phone (a HTC magic (now)), running Android 1.6. But if I’d have said “Why I can’t live without my G Phone”, people might have thought I was on some Android crusade, which I’m not. This post is about “culture”, well ish…

A few weeks ago whilst on a “keeping the wife happy” trip to the theatre, I lost my then phone, (a HTC Hero, running android 1.6 – T-Mobile custom ROM). So I had to go back to the horrible old Sony slide out 9 button jobbie – true evil.

Worst phones maybe available, but it's bloody unlikely

Now I have never insured my phones, I reason that you get a new one ever year, so if you lose it just cut your loses and wait for your contract to be renewed. And anyway, insurance like this is a massive con right, £70 a year for a free “£350” phone. Unless you’re especially gifted, you’re only likely to lose once every 3 years.

So there I was with the telephonic progeny of Satan pressed up against one ear, and this funny, odd feeling in the other (- ear, and not, I’m happy to add the afore mentioned wife!).

Now, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I had mobophobia, but I did long for the old days. No podcasts on the way home, No Google maps if I got lost, no tunes to listen to at the drop of a hat. Not insurmountable problems I grant you, but why be without the “luxury” when its no great shakes to have it?

So there you go, I went and got a new phone. Now I have it all back, and it feels so good!! Podcasts, mp3’s, chess games, shazam, twitter, the ability to Sky+ TV programmes I don’t really want to watch form the comfort of the pub, and a practically limitless amount of other rubbish that I don’t really want or need. But I can have it, I can have it all, and now I’ve got it I don’t want to give it up!

so there you have it…

Me 0, Mobile phone companies 1!

Down Tools…

The eagle eyed amongst you will have notice that MIE has taken one of it’s now customary hiatuses (?), this has been in part due to project work load, and in part due to a new “bird” which obviously eats up time at the start :-).

Anyway it’s 4:30 on Friday and after one of the worst days, in a year of bad days, I’ve called time and am downing tools (figuratively speaking, of course), the world of enterprise will have to wait until 8am Monday for any more input from Mr Ross McLean!

<dam it, there is one more thing I have to do before I can call time, back in a sec, dam you would of enterprise!!!!>

Just an hour then later…. grrrrrr….

Anyway, enough with the self pity, here’s the reason for the post, a link to a list of code realted podcasts:

http://www.developerfusion.com/library/podcasts/

Have a great weekend, I command you!

Time/Task recording systems

I was asked to report on the time I was spending on different tasks each day. As quick as a flash, I was reminded of Dick’s Excel tool for doing this.

DicksTool

Not too shabby for sure, but these days I’m not always in Excel, and although I could extend Dick’s code, it doesn’t do everything out of the box. So I took a look around, I didn’t look very far to be fair, but I quickly found Rachota. It’s a light weight Java app, its not too bad, but I found it slightly awkward to use. For example to change the tasks you have to jump around the dialog a bit. The dialogs a little ugly, and there’s not much in the way of reporting. Overall a step up from Dicks addin, but still not something I could use meaningfully.

Rachota

My next, and I’m happy to say final, stop was the mighty; Grindstone.  Firstly a bonus point for the name. It’s a .Net app (looking at the grid control 2+). Itlooks nice and is well layout -not perfect mind. I would have liked to see the bottom controls at the top or in the middle of the dialog – better still, if I could place them where I wanted, but no big deal.

Grindstone

At least you can work down the dialog logically. Reporting is available out of the app, it will fill out a grid control which, inexplicably, you can’t copy out of, but you can export to XML. It also has the ability to calculate invoices, based on a rate table, but I have not used this myself.

Over all a lovely little application!

Follow me on Twitter – Or not!

I’ve jumpped on the band wagon and am having a go at Twitter, last night I posted about my Tea, with photos, fish and chips and bangs and mash, amazing times we live in eh!

I can be found here http://twitter.com/MIERoss

Twitter

So far I have 6 followers, amazing, thanks guys!

Not sure I really get twitter yet, but it has already opened up one door for a possible podcast, so maybe its a force for good?!