Kung Fu Panda T-Shirt

I previously complained about the lack of a good image for my new favorite quote, so putting my money where my mouth is I took a cut at creating my own Kung Fu Panda homage. I think it turned out pretty nicely! I’ve also ordered it as a custom t-shirt from Zazzle, on the American Apparel black. It looks great, although the text came out a little small. I shall try again soon!

“There is no charge for awesomeness!”

I got a chance to see Kung Fu Panda the other day. It was way better than I had expected, especially from the trailers I had seen. Jack Black was great as the voice of Po, the main character. The opening dream sequence has to be one of the best written scenes I’ve heard in a long time! And it’s where the title for this post comes from. Apparently I am not the only one to think so. Shame I can’t find a really good t-shirt with the quote on it. There are a couple of there, but they kinda suck. Still, apparently someone’s making money off it. Good luck to them!

A new family addition: Sienna Grace

The newest addition to our family recently arrived! Sienna Grace, born on 24th July at 9:36 PM. You can find out more details at the Family blog, and with more pictures and videos of how we are all settling in to our new lives.

The VirginEye visualizer

I’m currently attending the Fuel Conference in London. I just saw Alex Hunter from Virgin talk about the online marketing campaign they ran to launch Virgin America. The really interesting thing showed us was a fantastic new 3D visualizer called the Virgin Eye (click through to view) which captures articles from over 5000 news channels and displays them as a sort of star systems. Much like the Digg Labs visualizer, but still very cool!

Here’s a static view:

Technorati Tags: Virgin Eye, Virgin America

Zero Inbox Widget

I’ve recently made the push to get to Inbox Zero. It’s a productivity technique popularized by Merlin Mann for dealing with the ever increasing deluge of email. It feels great when you get there, but as with every productivity methodology you have to stick at it and continually do it. Sometimes I need a little reminder on things like this, so I created a very simple Dashboard widget to help. I have this running constantly and it acts as a visual reminder every time I flick to my Dashboard of what I need to do to maintain my Inbox Zero.

Download

If you are interested, you can download the widget here. I hope it helps with your quest to get to and maintain your empty inbox.

Technorati Tags: Inbox Zero, Widgets

Continuous Integration presentation

I recently created a new presentation on Continuous Integration. It’s pretty nifty if I do say so myself! I was trying to simplify the message from my previous presentations and also provide some good actionable steps people can follow to implement CI.

Update

My presentation was recently one of the Featured presentations on Slideshare. Dunno if that really means anything, but it’s nice anyway. Apparently a few people added it to their favorites so it can’t be all bad!

Technorati Tags: continuous integration, agile, slideshare

Mac terminal tips

I still love the power of the terminal and command shell. By default however, the Mac Terminal leaves a little to be desired. Luckily, you can use Terminal to er… fix Terminal. Here are a few handy tips.

Make your terminal window show you your current directory:

    export HOSTNAME
    export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}:${PWD}\007"'

Add some color to your prompt:

    export PS1="\033[0;36m\][\u@\h: \w] [\033[0;36m\]\$\[\033[0m\] "

Make your ls commands show directories as color:

    alias ls="ls -G"
    alias ll="ls -lG"

Just add this into e.g. your $HOME/.bashrc file.

Technorati Tags: osx, mac, terminal

Quite possibly the best stop-mo surfing movie ever

As you know, I like to surf. So this movie stop motion movie really appeals to me! ‘Nuff said.

Technorati Tags: stop motion, surfing, play mobile

Unexpected popularity with C++

You know, blogging is such a strange experience. You try to write stuff that will interest people. You try to have a commentary on popular subjects. But you never know what is actually going to be popular. [Of course, I could be writing about the Twitter outages, but why follow the sheep? ;)] Take my post on using libcurl with C++. This was something that I threw out there a couple of years ago as a result of a small project on which I was working. Just a throwaway post really.

Currently, it accounts for at least half of the new traffic to my blog and a large number of repeat visitors. It’s even the top result in Google when searching for libcurl and C++.

Who knew!!

And I’m not really a C++ fan. Not that it’s not a useful language, but it’s just not really my favorite. Donnie would be amazed!

So the moral of the story? You can’t always choose that for which you are famous. Or, in this case, what generates a bit of traffic to your blog (but certainly doesn’t count as fame!).

Technorati Tags: libcurl, C++

Mint Site Statistics Review

For a while now (well, several years) I’ve been using the venerable analog and Report Magic to generate the statistics for my hosted sites. Unfortunately, they have become a little dated in appearance and currency. Nightly reports were fine five years ago, but we live in faster times now!

Enter Mint. A relatively new entrant to the statistics gathering scene, released by the ever present Shaun Inman. Ok, it’s not that new, I’ve been wanting to try it for a while. Version two seemed a good enough excuse. Rather than trawl through your logs after the fact, Mint takes the approach of logging statistics about your site as live as people browse it. That’s pretty common nowadays I guess, pioneered by Google Analytics, with clones like Piwik (an open source competitor) using the same mechanism.

The Good

• The UI is excellent! Orders of magnitude better than the Report Magic reports
• Installation was a breeze, and pretty much driven through the web interface. I had only had to make changes to a single php file before uploading
• Even better, there’s a compatibility suite that will figure out whether your hosting environment is suitable for Mint
• Mint is extremely extensible, something I’m a big fan of, and there is already a thriving community of extensions
• I love the Junior Mint dashboard Widget, which saves me hitting Refresh all the time

The Bad

• The collection mechanism depends on you inserting a custom script link into the HEAD of your pages. This is fine for well structure PHP apps like Wordpress of zenphoto, but more tricky if you have a bunch of static pages
• I find myself wanting to drag and re-order the Pepper containers around all the time, a la “pick your favorite portal”. The mouse icon even turns into a hand, making me think something will happen. Piwik does support this.
• I’d like to be able to “roll up” (think minimize) some of the Pepper containers
• I have session problems from time and time and find myself having to log in again.

Overall, my impression with Mint has been excellent. The UI is great, installation was a breeze, and it’s easily customizable and extensible. What more could you ask for? I do love my Minty fresh stats. And you can’t argue about the beauty of the logo design!

Technorati Tags: mint, inman