Picture by bondidwhat Some rights reserved.

I’ve finally caught the Twitter meme¹ (you can follow me here). I was skeptical about it for a long time but I suddenly realised that my problem with it had always been with the way that the guys at Twitter were trying to pitch it – as a great tool for stalkers to keep tabs on you. The reality is that like most new technologies people will find uses for it that were unintended or unexpected². The people I follow, and who follow me, are mostly just doing what I do; throwing out short braindumps and observations and commenting on each other in turn.

My initial enthusiasm though has given way over the last few days to disappointment at just how flakey Twitter actually is. It’s regularly up and down and tweets³ seem to go missing all the time. They’re probably a victim of their own popularity but there are question marks over Twitter’s ability to support such a large userbase⁴. There now seems to be a bit of herding in the direction of Jaiku and I’ve set myself up on that one although I’m not using it yet.

Seeing as I was starting accounts left-right-and-center I figured I might as well start a tumbelog too. Over I popped to Tumblr.com and started this one here. I’d thought about it before but given that I couldn’t even keep posting to this blog I thought that I’d just be wasting my time adding another outlet for my scribbles. But then, like Twitter, I realised that I was coming at it from the wrong angle and that my tweets, my tumblelog and my blog all had a place in the bigger picture of what I’m trying to do. My blog will be home to long-form articles and braindumps. Twitter⁵ will be for my moment-to-moment thoughts while my tumblelog will tie them all together, importing from my blog, Twitter and del.icio.us accounts using RSS feeds and allowing me to capture all the random things that I frequently want to share but which don’t quite fit into my blog or 140 characters.

Hopefully I have the time and energy to keep posting to them all and I hope that you, my small but appreciated audience, will continue to follow me. Do you have a blog, twitter account or tumblelog? Let me know where you are and I’ll follow you too.

– Fintan

Picture by Joseph Robertson Some rights reserved.

Well I’m back.

It’s been a bit too quiet around here of late but there has been a lot going on in my personal and professional life which has had to take priority¹.

The good news is that I’ve managed to sort a few things out and now have some time to start posting again. There may even be a few interesting changes on the way but I’m going to keep quiet about that for now².

– Fintan

Tap have reformed and are back for a performance at Live Earth. Marty DiBergi presents a short re-union piece over here¹. One of the best lines in the whole thing is when they say they’re trying to get their music added to the list of heavy metal music played to “detainees”:

Marty: Some would call that torture.

St. Hubbins: Some would call it residuals.

– Fintan

I guess I haven’t been stressing WordPress until now but yesterday’s post didn’t quite work out as planned. I’m probably trying to be a bit too fancy with the layout but because I’m using WordPress’ free hosting¹ and don’t have as much control over the layout as I’d like I had to hack it a bit. I’ll be tidying it up a bit shortly but I’ll probably also need to move to my own hosted version as well to give me more control.

A funnier² problem emerged while I was working on editing the post though. For some reason when I edited it after it had been published it was marked as private without my knowledge. A quick Google turned up these posts here and here, along with this thread, about how this is a bug, apparently occurring when editing published posts using Firefox. It didn’t seem to happen to me when I was using Safari³ so this is probably the case. However I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t so much a bug as an undocumented feature⁴.

Essentially what happens is that when you edit an already published post and then hit “Save and Continue Editing” it is suddenly marked as Private. This actually kind of makes sense. If you want to save an already published post but want to continue editing it then you may not want it visible while you’re still making changes. When you’re done you manually reset it back to public and hit save. Perhaps I need to RTFM but I didn’t realise that it was supposed to work like this. I’ll also need to play around with this to confirm it but if it’s consistent behaviour then why does it only seem to “work” on Firefox? Perhaps the real bug is that it doesn’t seem to happen on any other browser.

Follow-up 24/4/07: No. It’s a bug. :-) Tried reproducing the problem while editing yesterday’s post but couldn’t get it to happen.

– Fintan

A few days ago Olivier Ansaldi pointed out to me in his usual reserved Gallic fashion¹ that I had an option set on my blog that required you to be registered and logged into WordPress in order to comment on my posts. I have no idea how or why this was set but I suspect it may have been down to complete ignorance when I created this blog early last year. I’ve fixed it now² so this isn’t required anymore.

– Fintan

1 – I think the exact phrase was “this is madness!”
2 – I’ve fixed it good!

A couple of weeks ago I finally did what I’ve been promising to do for months now and finally bought myself a Mac. Originally I was going to pick up a MacMini but I already have one desktop machine in the house and it was going to be hard to justify buying another one.

I did need a new laptop though and so two days ago I took delivery of a shiny new MacBook. First impressions so far are good but I have yet to do anything to really test it. Most of what I’ve been doing is transferring files to it from the PC and trying to retrain my fingers to use the right keys. In the short term I’ll probably still use the PC for a few things, hence the “sort of” in this post’s title, but I expect that as I get used to it I’ll use the Mac for more and more stuff.

– Fintan

Very briefly because I’m at work but Adam Rojek, a former colleague of mine, is out in Bangalore in India for a few months with some of the guys I used to work with¹.

He’s got a bunch of pictures up on his website. He’s a great photographer so they’re definitely worth checking out.

– Fintan

Olivier Ansaldi tapped me up for this ongoing chain letter, blog style so here are five things you didn’t know about me:

1. I’m the eldest of three kids and my parents are divorced. My father has remarried and now has another three kids, the eldest of whom is about the same age I was when my father was the age I am now. He’s English but still lives in Ireland. My mother, who is Irish, moved to the United States about 13 years ago and is now a U.S. citizen. She lives in Austin, Texas and works in the IT industry there. She has also remarried but hasn’t had any new kids of her own. She has acquired a slightly stroppy 16-year old though…

2. For my sins I spent a year and half doing a marketing degree before I fell into this software engineering malarkey. On my first day in class I realised that I knew a few people there but started to get a sneaky feeling that we’d ended up in the course for people who couldn’t do anything else. I decided I was better off doing something I enjoyed and, at the time, computers were my hobby. Marketing’s loss is software development’s gain. Or the other way around, I forget.

3. Plan A when I left school was to study history in college¹. I didn’t get the grades however and was forced to rethink my plans. Unfortunately I couldn’t think of anything else and ended up in Marketing. I still have a serious interest in history though, especially 19th century Irish history at the moment. It’s in the blood though because my grandmother was a published historian who specialised in the earls after the Battle of Kinsale.

4. I should be heir to a small fortune. Before my parents divorced, my father owned about 10 acres of land in what was then a fairly rural part of Dublin. At the time (around 1990) the land was all agricultural and couldn’t be developed so it wasn’t worth very much (even by the underpriced standards of those days). The land was all sold off around the time of the divorce. In the last couple of years a motorway was built through the area and the land was all rezoned for high density development. The land alone would probably be worth close to €20 million today. Bah!

5. Writing is my secret love. I’m not as prolific or as good as I’d like to be but one day I hope to get something substantial completed. I have, what I think, are a couple of really good projects which I’m currently working on and I’m seriously considering entering this year’s NaNoWriMo. In the meantime I’m going to keep practicing here.

Now, I’m supposed to pass this on to five other bloggers… but I don’t actually know five other bloggers I could pass this to. The only other blogger I know is Olivier and he’s the one who sent this to me. The baton will therefore be carefully put away until such time as it can be passed on.

– Fintan

I knew it had been a long time since my last post but Jésus Marimba! I didn’t realise it had been that long. I’ve a bit to talk about but I’d better save them up for the next few days.

- Fintan

It’s been a bit quiet around here for the last week or so… too quiet. Myself and Rachael were away for a few days in Connemara on what was a really relaxing trip. It was very refreshing to spend a couple of days beside a peat fire, book in one hand, pint in the other and not go anywhere near a PC for the entire time. Work was waiting with a vengeance on my return and that, coupled, with a busy St. Patrick’s Weekend¹, has kept me away from this blog for a while.

Watch me while I catch up :-)

– Fintan [listening to Depeche Mode]