il maestro ignoto

A very old man once told me he couldn’t stomach the disdain kids-these-days showed for the value of monet*.

[excerpt]

me: i don’t understand sir, what do you mean?
old man: here you belligerent fool, i ‘ll give you an example…

mutters to self… chews his tobacco stained gums for a while and continues..

old man: Take 12K or as the yanks call it 12Gs. Now what is that? Give the monet* the respect it deserves. It’s Twelve Thousand …… more mumbling and chewing
me: …smiling nervously in the awkward silence
old man: errrmm, who are you darkie?

[/except]

He might have been a racist senile idiot but he made a bloody good point.

After a concerted effort from my colleagues and I - we have established ourselves as a formidable team with an excellent product to be reckoned with.

This, as well as securing “Twelve point Five Million US Dollars ($12,500,00)” in a second round of funding, ensures we ‘ll be here for a lot longer, bringing you more people, more sessions and more of those 1 minute wonders we call woome sessions. Come on over and see if you can WooMe

Disclaimer:
This is my personal blog and in no way reflects the views of my employers in any way whatsoever.

Looking for details? See this article

despite our (the cognizant human race and google) best effort, the internet still remains a wild jungle or poorly organized collections of knowledge. it is to this end that I write this - in hopes that someday someone out there might find it useful.

You have an iPhone

It’s pre- 1.1.4 (the version of the software powering you phone)

It’s jailbroken

i.e despite being told not you, you decided to unlock your phone for use on other non-sanctioned networks or have installed applications not blessed by Curpertino, USA

You are afraid you might lose everything should you upgrade your iPhone to the latest software.

This is how you do it in N simple steps

1) Connect your iPhone to iTunes. When iTunes informs you of the outdated software. Click on “download only” to fetch version 1.1.4. It’s a 160MB file which takes a couple of minutes depending on your connection speed. Once this is finished.

2) Go to the iPhone summary screen and click on “Restore” - Not upgrade. Yes, you should back up your iPhone before you do this. However, iTunes does this automatically for you anyway - including contacts and old text messages. The restore will wipe out your iPhone, restore to factory settings and automatically upgrade to the shiny new 1.1.4. Lasts about 5-10 mins. YMMV

3) When this is complete and the phone has restarted ignore the message iTunes will say about activating. Unplug your iPhone and plug it back in again to make sure iTunes picks up the phone of its own volition. Download a piece of software called iLibertyX from here ModMyIphone and follow the instructions to jailbreak and activate your iphone. This is automated and involves little else from you besides pushing a button to kick it off. Screenshots are available.

Some pointers, iLibertyX will shut down iTunes and reopen when it finishes - this is OK and necessary.
4) Once complete all you need is to resync your iPhone with iTunes and you are ready to go back to whatever “illegal” activities you need a jailbroken, unlocked iPhone for. iTunes will ask if you wish to register the phone as a new iPhone or use the old settings. Chose the old one and you should get back all your songs, movies, textmessages, contacts and call history.

Now, the next time you discover how to do something, please write it down and tag properly so I can find it more easily too.

Due to this …

twitter fail,

I can’t do this ..

And so ….

I turn to this outdated medium called blogging. Kind of like the telephone: - used to call mama cos she won’t get a twitter account despite my best efforts.

Today’s title was chosen in deference to @cv who detests the use of the term µblogging to describe tweets*.

* tweets are twitter update messages.

London, England. 0700 hrs GMT

I had just picked up my MacBook Air and despite having previously maintained an aloof curiousity about it, I could hardly contain my glee - so much so that I ‘d bounced out of bed a full hour before to head to the secret pickup point. Do bear in mind it’s a sunday.

As it lay, deftly balanced on my lap while I admired the thing, I wondered if every/anything I’d heard about it was true? “Was it really too slow to be useful” - my primary concern.

Imagine then my surprise (hardly a coincidence - I ‘ll explain in a second) to find upon locating the first WiFi terminal and booting up Firefox, these two articles in my RSS reader :-

John Gruber’s amusing comparism between the air and a sports coupe “the MacBook Air is like a sporty convertible coupe” perfectly capable of being enough for anyone without kids and with no need for significant storage space.

AND

this from David Heinemeier Hansson (The dude behind the thing they call RoR) - the paucity of flowery macboy-type analogies are made up for by his article being altogether more compendious.

Coincidence? Nah! Coincidence is Jeremy Beadle and Heath Ledger dying in the same week. This is not coincidence, there something much greater at work here.

I think I am going to love any machine that can sense and alay my fears a good two hours before breakfast.

Ha! I wonder what I should have for breakfast? Air?

What happens when spammers decide to move to the 36th century (sic) and run their code on ruby on rails?

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/10919

The Problem

On OS X, when I open a project, switching focus to another application and returning to TextMate.app causes the pizza wheel to appear and TextMate.app takes 10-20 seconds before it responds.

Why

On coming back to work last week, I thought it’d be a good idea to update my local database copy and image farm. As it’s a dev copy there is no need to update this regularly and so I don’t, but it seemed like a good thing to do at the begining of a new year.

It however transpired that between my previous update a month ago and last week, we ‘d quadrupled our userbase (which beggars the question - “was I sleeping while this was happening?”). Anyhoo, 30k more users added a minimum of 60k more files to the project directory - image files in this case.

Shortly after this update, the problem stated above appeared and no amount of tinkering and google searches would prove to be of any help. This was until 1am last night when I sat up with jolt - why do epiphanic moments happen when you are trying to fall asleep.

When TextMate loads a project, it loads every file into memory and when focus is returned to the app it tries to refresh the project. Once I realised what the problem was, it was fairly easy to fix.

The solution

Exclude all media files (swf | mp3 | jpeg | gif | png ) from TextMate. See image below …

You can also exclude whole directories which is what I did and not surprisingly, TextMate went back to running at lightening speeds. Having the option to exclude certain directories and file types from loading is very helpful but loading files into memory isn’t such a good idea particularly in OS X where memory allocation is completely dynamic. Another peev for another day.

Perhaps the guys and gals over at macromates can take a look at this problem.

WooMe hits New York in full force

While I make no assertions as to the veracity behind this rant - I ‘d love to draw your attention to the viciousness of said attack. The vehemence pokes out like nipples on a cold december morning. The delivery, passionate, focused and unrelenting.

As I read, I could picture the author fuming internally, smoke screaming out his orifices like you haven’t seen since the steam locomotives were replaced by the diesel engines (not that I am old enough to remember), voice quivering and of course china flying around as he battled to contain himself.

It is oddly reminiscent of my time at a certain BigCorp^tm.

Don’t just take my word for it, go see for yourself [ I am Seb - On the BBC. ]

After Dim sum with my sister on saturday afternoon - we took a stroll down Regent street so I could get replacement earphones for her well worn, tattered one from the Apple Store.

As is typical of the UK’s flagship apple store, it was teaming with people. It’s patrons, eclectic and ranging from inner city bloggers [a couple of things], out of town photographers [http://flickr.com/photos/zka19] to backpackers booking accommodation for the night and picking up love notes from facebook. (Yes I spy on people when I visit the apple store :p)

Nothing however caught my attention as much as this guy who cut a rather lonely figure taking a picture of the much awaited …….

The iPhone is released in the UK on Nov 9th and will be available exclusively on the O2 network.

The image is available under CC Attributions license on Flickr. Feel free to use it if you wish

“Come now dad, even a bad book has it’s merits”, I remember sputtering at 12 to which he retorted “You read voraciously and without discernment. Boy!”.

While I admit he was right, this smarted a great deal for two reasons, I resented being called “Boy!” and he knew this. I was also, I believed, on a mission to find out what makes great and mediocre authors and books, to do this, one has to be indiscriminate about what one reads - it however doesn’t imply a lack of good judgement.

6 years later, a now ex-girlfriend would shatter that innocence when she recommended I read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

Never again..!