I swear we missed out a few days this week. No? Maybe it’s just me then. Either way, this week has flown by! Work is picking up again with more and more clients asking for work and deadlines piling on like nobody’s business. Time to crack out “Getting Things Done” again me thinks.
In other earth-shattering news: my iMac is being replaced after just a few days! I know, know, shocking isn’t it? Apple can’t do any wrong can they? Well, this time they did by shipping me an iMac equipped with a lovely bright green stuck pixel in the middle of the screen. It’s one of those things that don’t bother you until you notice it, but as soon as you notice it then you are always drawn to it. Luckily Apple was uber friendly on the phone and are going to send me a replacement unit and pick up the old one free of charge. Balance has now officially been restored in my love for the fruity company.
I must apologise before we start as this week’s post isn’t going to be as rich as normal. It’s been a rather hectic week sorting out University, iMac replacements, and that little thing on the side called work, so I didn’t have much time to compile content. I promise I’ll be back with a vengeance soon, bringing a whole variety of new funky stuff to the blog!
Let’s crack on with a roundup of events over the past 168 hours.
This week’s news
Gmail went down on Monday evening with only the following as an explanation of the problem:
We’re sorry, but your Google Mail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to use your account while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.
It caused an uproar on Twitter and really shows how much we rely on Google for important, business critical services. Luckily the situation was sorted out within a few hours so a good job from Google for keeping the downtime short. On a slightly related note, has anyone noticed how stable Twitter has been of late?
PHP 4 bit the bullet recently with the release of 4.4.9 – farewell my ageing friend! This actually happened last Thursday, but I missed it and think it’s an important development in the programming world. We need to learn to let go of outdated technology and stop prolonging things by our insistence to carry on supporting them for no viable reason other than that people “don’t know how to upgrade” (IE6, I’m looking at you!).
Yahoo’s new location based platform, Fire Eagle opened up to the public on Tuesday. I applied to the beta of this a while back, but it’s great to see it out in the public’s hands. I have to admit I was a little dubious about how useful Fire Eagle would be as it doesn’t do much on it’s own, it’s basically an API that developers can use to store and retrieve location based information. After using it with a few of my iPhone applications I’m officially converted and I reckon this’ll really push the new wave of location based applications we’ll be seeing over the coming years.
Another one from the Yahoo camp this week was the preview release of the user interface library: YUI 3.0. I’m going to put my hand’s up right now and admit that I haven’t spent much time working with YUI, but from what I’ve seen and heard I’m really impressed. I’m even more impressed that Yahoo are happily giving this out for free! Maybe 3.0 will help tear myself away from jQuery and try something new.
Towards the end of this week the internet was victim to a manga revolution, most noticable on Twitter. Avatar creating software from Face Your Manga spread like wildfire across the social network, resulting in profile pictures all over the world being manga-ised.
As you can see, I joined in on the fun. I’d heartily recommend everyone creating a manga version of them-self – let’s take over the world!
Links of the week
- Naming variables – Choosing the name for programming variables is always a tricky one. This post hopes outlines the case for more verbose naming of variables
- Top 10 CSS table designs – Smashing Magazine are back with an article outlining a variety of ways to display tables with CSS
- Use the best available ampersands – It’s no secret that Dan Cederholm loves ampersands. This post lists all the coolest ampersands that come installed as default on most systems
- 7 Reasons why you should persue your own projects – After reading this article you’ll have no reason not to start pushing your personal projects forward
Site of the week
Elitist Snob
Sexy gradients and a lovely attention to detail. Plus he’s a Mac user so that’s instant kudos with me!
Lessons of the week
I was feeling greedy so learnt two things this week:
Don’t take people’s opinions so personally
Not allowing yourself to make mistakes is one of the worst things you can do if you want to become better at something
I think the second one is most important to me as I always find myself trying to make things perfect before I even start them. All this does is prolongs my realisation that “perfect” doesn’t exist and that I’ll have to go with what I’ve got. Doing something to a decent standard is much better than doing nothing to a perfect standard.
Track of the week
“Assassin” by Muse. I’ve always been a big fan of the Devon boys, but after neglecting them for so long I decided it was about time I hit my catalogue of Muse tracks with a vengeance. Roll on the new album!