And as if by Magic…

Posted Wednesday 26th April, 2006

…a web site appeared!

The latest version of Nefarious Designs is finally finished and unleashed upon the world; I can finally sit down, have a nice cup of tea and contemplate writing some proper blog posts.

Continue reading “And as if by Magic…”…

A Rainbow for Friday

Posted Friday 21st April, 2006

Whilst browsing my Digg feed, I came across this fantastic set of photographs of a rainbow.

Much like those great photos of China, I thought I’d share them with the world. (Just in case the world doesn’t subscribe to Digg!)

All the photos were taken by a guy called Dan Bush of Albany, Missouri.

Bookshelf Meme

Posted Sunday 16th April, 2006

Matthew, over at The Watchmaker Project, has tagged me (and the rest of a mailing list) with a meme. Here’s the idea; take a photo of one of your bookshelves, upload it to Flickr and add notes explaining what particular books/other items mean to you.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t take just one photo of a specific bookshelf so I took four instead. Three are of my main bookshelf and the fourth is my video games collection (because that says LOADS about me). So anyway, here they are:

Sorry for breaking your rules Matthew… ;-)

Oh, and Happy Easter everyone!

Six Pints of Lager and a Ruby

Posted Friday 7th April, 2006

Recently I’ve been looking at building myself a small server on my home network and installing Ruby. I have a very real desire to get my hands dirty with the latest web development technology and where better than in the privacy of your own network? Once I have that little baby up and running, I’ll get Rails in there aswell!

As primarily a server-side developer, I’ve had experience with a number of different web-based languages running on a number of different servers. Currently I’m Object-Orienting-it-up on PHP4 with MySQL but I’d love to get my hands on PHP5 and RoR. I started out using ASP Script and had a dabble with ASP.NET when it first appeared on the scene, but driven by the open-source community, I got more of a kick out of PHP and stuck with it.

I originally got into programming through my interest in computer games and became quite a competant C++, DirectX and OpenGL developer before getting a taste for Web stuff. (What can I say? I like mucking about with Photoshop aswell!) This propelled me into learning Java, since it contains a majority of the concepts in C++ - it’s a shame I stopped playing with both these languages when I started working at Rentokil some 5 years ago, but I’ve only really got myself to blame for that.

The arrival of Ruby and the Rails framework has seriously wet my appetite for a new language once again, and I’m definately going to get off my arse and delve in. However, I’ve just finished reading an incredibally interesting blog post discussing why Ruby on Rails will never become mainstream. It’s a very well written piece and I heartily recommend it to anyone that’s interested in the way languages spread and progress:

Why Ruby on Rails will never become mainstream…

On a different note; sorry I’ve been so quiet recently - I’m about a weekend away from launching a new design and layout for this site and, unfortunately, the blog has suffered!

Punct!

Posted Tuesday 21st March, 2006

Most web developers have, at some point, experienced the pain of browsing through client-written content to change symbols into meaningful HTML entities. Of course, a lot of the time, we’re even using the wrong entities!

Well, now it’s a little easier with the help of “Punct!,” a client-side script I have created for two reasons; as an experiment in JSON and to save time when cutting and pasting code from Word documents into web sites.

Continue reading “Punct!”…

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