Chris Hardcastle - LONDON - PHP

Death by updates

It’s Friday night, I just want to watch a film on my (recent model) XBOX from a portable hard-drive. But I have to connect to the internet because, again it needs to use the driver it can’t store locally. Then and update, it’s 1 hour gone already and I’m still not watching a film. I just get a crappy new interface that’s meant to look like the Windows phone. It’s technology going backwards. The most usable and reliable piece of hardware in my house is the fucking toaster. Thanks Microsoft, kiss my ass.

Now it’s Saturday morning. I just want to listen to my iPod, but it needs to sync with a computer. Another IOS update is required and none of my apps can be saved. That’s just peachy, more waiting. Just wait until I get an Android device. Thanks Apple, you suck.

My first look at CouchDB

I’m about to start a new job and I’m tingling with excitement about it. Even after my first interview, I felt inspired. We talked about alternative technologies and the future of web development. When CouchDB was mentioned, I answered honestly, I hadn’t looked at it in great detail. Now having done so over the last three weeks, I think it has a lot of potential.

“the goal here is to make couchdb the file system for the internet” - Nitin Borwankar, Couch DB, VP of business development.

If your not familiar with CouchDB take a look at the following video. It’s better to hear it straight from the mouths of those who invented it! Checkout this you tube video.

(Source: chrishardcastle.co.uk)

Magic wand: the results

Today was England’s miserable 4-2 defeat against Germany in the world cup. I certainly don’t have anything positive to say about that. But there is something to be said about positive thinking and accepting a suggestion. This really worked out for me this weekend when Reena Gagneja came to my rescue.

Whilst suffering from terrible hay-fever, I was struggling to hold myself up at a summer fair in Streatham. I was about to checkout the homoeopathic stall when she suggested using a magic wand to wash away my symptoms. It may sound like something out of a fairy tail, but afterwards, my hay fever was not so bad. Honestly.

I’m a man of science, but I think there’s elements of this treatment that are really helpful. To begin with, the effects were instantaneous. My whole head felt like it was being completely restored. I’m not sure if a cloud of pollen had lifted from the area, but my eyes and throat stopped itching.

I’d be interested in trying this again. After all, it sounds more appealing than a spray of steroids going up your nose.

My Environment

I loving writing via Tumblr on my iTouch. It means I can get things down whilst being “engaged” with tasks around the house. This post has been drafted in various locations over a period of around 3 weeks.

I thought I would take a moment to describe my current working environment. At work I’m using an exceptionally fast and light weight laptop on a docking station. It has virtual machines for testing. I have Ubuntu 9.04 running with lots of ruby gems as a sand pit play area. There’s a project called Sprout core that I really want to consider for production. It seems like a great framework for HTML5 and device independant projects.

I do have an Ubuntu 10.04 VMware appliance running. Just for fun. I might whop the server edition onto a spare pentium 4 machine that’s on top of my microwave. But that needs a wireless card hardware upgrade or I’m drilling a hole in the ceiling.

At home my huge Dell laptop is all smashed in by my baby son. It still kind of works ok. It’s been good for watching films since my xbox died. I mostly use my Packard Bell Ubuntu 9.04 box for development.

In all environments, bar one, I have LAMP (installed the hard way). And often boot up netbeans as soon as I login. It’s a fantastic IDE for a range of languages including PHP. But I always regress into using Gedit and the Terminal.

All machines have a public key with my github account. I love the fact I can develop in one place and pull that down from somewhere else. Capability is not an issue, it’s all about the time.

Had a look at heroku.com today, looks fun to try. #git #ruby