Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

There are quite a few different VNC clients available for Mac, and most of them are, in my experience, pretty disappointing. And totally unnecessary, because OS X actually comes with a build in VNC viewing client which works fine. For some reason though, Apple have kept it pretty well hidden.

Never fear though, because once you know the location, it’s easy to find and use.

/System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app

It’s pretty simple, but then I’ve never found the need for all the extra crap a lot of the viewing clients come with – I just want to be able to control a remote computer!

From time to time, Firefox might try to update itself and get itself stuck an a loop where every time you try and open it, it tries to upgrade itself, fails, closes and then you have to try and open it again and the same thing happens.

95% of the time, this problem is caused by Logitech webcam software.

I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but the problem has hit my system several times and every time after some googling, the suggestion to try and close my Logitech camera software comes up and as soon as I do, Firefox is able to upgrade itself and open fine.

You know, except for the fact that I don’t have a dubiously serviceable spaceship named Serenity (I don’t have a perfectly serviceable one for that matter either). Nor do I have a crew, rugged good looks or such a free-spirited approach to whether to follow the law or not.

Look at him there, what a man.

Pioneers, out there, working for themselves. Well, that is what I will be doing. I recently handed in my notice at Buzz Sports. It has been an amazing three years, but the time has come to move on and establish my own technical consultancy, which will be opening its doors in April.

So if you need help with your software project, get in touch. With expert knowledge of scalable web application architecture and a reassuringly expensive price tag, you’re in safe hands.

Hey, anyone else remember the Sun? You know, the big glowing thing in the sky.

It’s back and we’ve been cashing in. I spent Saturday with Norm, George, Oli and Raby on Millenium Square, soaking in the rays (and in everyone else’s case, soaking in equal amounts of beer). That has been followed up with a lunch in The Box’s beer garden and two lunches in The Oak’s beer garden this week. It’s a hard life.

Last week, I finally made it down to the Leeds PHP User Group.

The meeting consisted of a talk by Lorna Mitchell on Git, Github and Open Source. It didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know, but it was interesting none the less. They also provide free food at their meetings, so I then regretted eating before I went 😀 .

By a perhaps unfortunate coincidence, the next day one of my friends sent me a contact they recommend I speak to about my career. The name rang a bell – turns out the recruitment agency had in fact been sponsoring the event and she was there – if only I had known 24 hours earlier I could have introduced myself in person! Still, there is always next month.

This month’s Wendy House saw Will lose his Wendy House virginity and Hugh make a return after what he claimed was an eight-year absence. That would mean that we was 16 last time he went, though if he settled into looking adult as easily as he has the bumbling old professor role in equal speed, it is in fact a perfectly plausible story.

A far bolder claim, but one I can assure you is true, is that Elettra given took to the dance floor and strutted her stuff! Add that to other things that happened and you actually have quite a strange, but very much enjoyable, night.

Sometimes, you have a number of tasks to complete as an administrator and having to put sudo in front of every command just becomes annoying. Luckily, you can change into persistent sudo mode.

sudo -i

This will then prompt you for your password and once successfully entered, you will be transfered to the root user.

It is much like doing su, except that you are prompted for your own password, rather than the root account’s password.

If you need to get a break down of how much space each directory is using, you can do that using the du command. Using a few choice options it will produce a list of all directories in the current folders and how big they are.

du -sch

If you use the Unix terminal, you’re probably familiar with grep. It’s a great search tool. But sometimes it is a little slow. Luckily, there is a faster version, with the original name of fgrep, though you might be surprised to learn it doesn’t actually stand for fast grep. But don’t be confused – it is faster.

You use it in avery similar way to the way you would use grep. So for most occasions, simply replace grep with fgrep for faster results.

Last weekend we held our house warming party for our new place. Despite the continued and so far unstoppable process of ageing which continues to haunt us, we managed to keep going until gone 5am and managed to polish off around twenty bottles of various spirits – not to mention George getting through two vase-size snakebites.