It's a little grainy but you should be able to see the settings I've been using for DX, VMWare and PKR.

This doesn't mean that future verisons of PKR or VMWare are going to work btw.

I use twitter every day to send out really quite boring messages. "I've had some chocolate" and "I like lossless encoding" are all stunning examples of how boring my twitters are. Sometimes they don't appear on twitter for hours... occasionally they don't appear at all.

As an engineer I think I have a fair idea of how twitter works BUT I have a code base full of my own problems. I tend to spend my time thinking about those rather then fixing twitters by proxy.

So I'm asking the internet, can you all just shut up about fixing twitter. I am sure they are aware of their deficiencies and how it would be better if they didn't do X or did do Y. Let's leave it to them to solve and if they don't I'm sure one of the genius twitter fixing bloggers can make his own distributed erlang über resilient systems that only blogger can create.

Here endeth the rant!

Putting yourself in the place of a normal user is, basically, impossible but every programmer/ui designer attempts to do this EVERY day.

Why am I talking about this? Well my dad's hotmail account was hacked over the weekend and of course I was called to look in to it. Of course my first thought was that he had a weak password. So I ask him "How good is your password, does it contain numbers and puntuation?". He paused and said "No, it's a word, they asked for a pass WORD".

Now it's easy to think that this is my dad's fault. But when you think about it, he did exactly what was asked of him. He entered a pass WORD a single word. A word from the dictionary, that's where words come from for normal people.

No one programmer or designer has failed him. An entire industry asks to world for passwords. To the industry, this is normal. It knows what it means by password but to normal people it means a word.

With this in mind I've raised a ticket for New Metal Army to change the word password to pass phrase (after asking my dad what he thought it meant of course).

Check out the video!

You can read more here

The next day (determined to get somewhere) I run VMWare Fusion, go in to IE and after a million click sounds I start downloading the Mac version of Flash CS3. So I need Windows to download the Mac version...grr

Being a good netizen I decide to file a ticket against the problem:

EUROPEAN ENGLISH! There is no such thing as European English. There is English and American English. One of them is correct, the other is a phonetically correct abomination.

I didn't realise my 30 day trial would be such a trial.

Well this scientist has an excellent story about how HE was expelled from the queue for the movie... but there is an awesome twist to the tale.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/03/expelled.php

It did however appear in Google Reader. Stou from http://www.siafoo.net/ noticed the spam and kindly emailed me.

It is completely my fault. I've known that my install of WordPress was quite old for sometime. This was the kick in the arse I needed to upgrade I guess. So if you are looking at this in a browser you will have noticed it's got the basic WP theme. I'll be bringing my unique design skills back to the internet soon.

Once again thanks to Stou for being a good internet citizen.

edit: you may see a lot of drug adverts on the site for a few days till google sorts itself out!

dazza@macpro:~>history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' |sort -rn|head
96	svn
85	python
44	nosetests
40	./start-tgmetalinfo.py
37	ssh
28	tgenv
20	mate
16	cd
14	curl
13	ls
 

that's a bit weird. I do a lot of svn as I merge from development to release. I'm surprised (and pleased) to see nosetests (unit test suite) being called so frequently. tgenv is an alias I have for setting up my workingenv for TurboGears (I have many different version of turbogears installed). mate is the command line call to TextMate (text editor) from the current directory. I think the curls are there from debugging calls to AWS (Amazon Web Services).

Email Standards Project - Gmail Grimaces from Mathew Patterson on Vimeo.