I’m probably somewhat behind the times, but it’s worth a mention regardless.  The Humble Bundle.

The first one I saw was the Introversion bundle.  If you’re not familiar with Introversion, they are the guys behind Darwinia, Uplink, Defcon and not forgetting Multiwinia.  Four games worthy of note in their own right.  But the humble bundle is awesome.  Pay more than the average (yes, you get to pick what you want to pay) and you’ll also get a couple of tech demos from Introversion, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Dungeons of Dredmor and Aquaria as a bonus… oh and did I mention you can also get the source code for Darwinia, Multiwinia, Defcon and Uplink too?

To say that this bundle is a bargain is an understatement, great games, great price and source code too… amazing.

So, if you’ve not encountered the Humble Bundle yet, head over to The Humble Bundle and check it out.

I’ve travelled quite a bit on business in the last two years and as a consequence, I’ve had the opportunity to dine out at a number of different restaurants.  Every night I think to myself “I’m going to write up a quick review” and every night I get busy with work and forget to post.  Tonight, I’m going to post and then get down to some work, so without further ado, here’s a quick review of the place that is possibly my favourite restaurant… The Barking Dog, Malone Road, Belfast.

Everytime I come out to Belfast, I normally stay at the Wellington Park Hotel which is just up the road from The Barking Dog.  I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve eaten there and I guess that should give you an indication of how nice the food is there.  I can honestly say I’ve never had a bad meal there (no, I’m not on commission and I’m not getting a free meal out of it).

Tonight, I had a couple of tipples… a pint of their own Barking Brew which is brewed by The Whitewater Brewery in Kilkeel.  This was followed by a bottle of Whitewater’s finest… Belfast Black, a nice dry stout.  Both are really nice drinks, Belfast Black is possibly my favourite… the only beer that comes close is Black Cullen (a beverage I sampled around this time last year in the snow in Inverness at a little pub who’s name escapes me at the moment).

Food wise, I tucked in to flaked crab on toasted sour dough, roasted barbary duck with green beans and pumpkin gnocchi and I broke with my normal starter and main meal plan and had a treat in the form of banana tarte tatin with homemade fudge and clotted cream ice cream.  It was an excellent meal, everything I’ve come to expect from possibly the finest restaurant it’s been my pleasure to dine in.

So, good food, nice beer and to top the evening off, the first fall of snow for this winter… OK, it didn’t stick around, but it was definitely snowing and it just kind of finished off the atmosphere.  That’s another thing I should mention about The Barking Dog… the atmosphere… there’s always nice music playing, the place is lit by candlelight and the staff are attentive but not overbearing and unlike a lot of restaurants, they don’t seem to come along with the question “Is everything OK for you madam?” when I’ve just put a fork full of food in my mouth.

As I say, this is perhaps my favourite restaurant so because I’ve always had a good meal there and the service has always been excellent, I’m going to give it a 10 out of 10.

This is just a little nugget that may prove useful to other users of Kindle for Mac (and maybe PC).  I noticed the other day that I had somehow acquired a book that I hadn’t purchased.  It appeared to be an Italian book… I’m not sure of the title as that kind of information wasn’t available.  It just kind of sat there.  When I tried to download it, I was told I had reached my limit and I was given the option of deauthorising a device or purchasing another copy.

Of course, I didn’t want to do either but no matter what I tried I couldn’t get rid of it.  And no amount of searching on-line provided any assistance.

Today, I took a punt and managed to rid myself of this un-purchased baggage with no complaints from the Kindle software.  So, if you too are afflicted with un-purchased items popping up in your book list, this is how you can fix it.

• First, find you Kindle content folder.  On the Mac you can do this using Finders ‘Go to folder’ option.  The Kindle content folder should be located in ‘/Users/<YOURUSERNAME>/library/Application Support/Kindle’.  If this doesn’t work, you can find where it is from the Kindle software preferences.
• Once you’ve found the folder, delete the ‘Cache’ directory (making a copy of course just in case).
• Start Kindle

And hey presto, if all has gone according to plan, the spurious book will no longer be visible in your list of books.  I suspect the same thing will work for Kindle PC, but I’ve not had the opportunity to try it so your mileage may vary.

Well, well… I never thought I’d see the day… but it has arrived… I am no longer a Mac virgin

I have a number of long standing issues with Apple… namely I don’t necessarily agree with the way they conduct themselves at times and I have a dislike of Macintosh computers following a somewhat unfortunate incident involving a crashed Mac classic that I couldn’t eject the disc from.

So imagine the turmoil I feel when my brother asks me if I’ve ever thought of writing iPhone games!!!

The short answer of course was “Yes, I have”. The full length answer was “Yes, I have, but you need a Mac to do the development and then you need an iPhone to test with, so you’re looking at a shed load of cash and whilst I like the idea of trying to make some money doing something I enjoy, I object to giving Apple shed loads of cash”. Thankfully though, my usual partner in crime, Spirit, and my brother seem really keen on this venture.

The later stating he has a whole bunch of ideas, and talking to him, he does indeed have a bunch of cracking ideas. So, with all that in mind, I’ve been pondering whether to bite the bullet and buy a Mac for the last couple of weeks. I have read the Apple website so many times and have spent quite a large amount of time walking around various stores that sell Macs.

Finally on Friday night, I relented and gave in to my wants and am now the proud owner of a MacBook Pro.

And I have to say, I like it… I like it a lot.

I said I’ve got a few problems with Apple, one of those is NOT their design. Take the iPod for example… yeah, I’ve done the whole anti-Apple thing and bought a Sansa and I’ve looked at other devices, but I found it very difficult not to keep ending up back at the iPod when I thought about buying another music player. The iPhone is also a nice piece of design and the MacBook Pro is not disappointing with it’s sleek aluminium case, illuminated keyboard, and… I could continue with what is turning out to be a nice list of funky features that just go to make this one of the nicest computing experiences.

I’m not saying it’s perfect, because it’s not. The keyboard for example… no DEL key But a key or two, I can live with. These things are seriously powerful… 2GHz quad core… Nice And I can use some of my funkier software like Reason, Cubase and Zebra… Sweet

Now all I have to do is learn Objective C, how to get the best out of Xcode and hey presto… we’ll all be rich! *crosses fingers*

If you’re a netgamers.org IRC user, you’ll probably have noticed they are having some technical difficulties at the moment which have taken the whole netgamers.org domain off the web. The IRC infrastructure is, from what I can see all up and running (certainly there is at least one server up along with the services bot P), but you will need to connect to:- netgamers.webvictim.net

As soon as I know the DNS issues are sorted, I’ll pop up an update post.

Update (19th Nov 2011 – a bit late I know, but better late than never) – They appear to have resolved the problems that beset them earlier in the year.  I’m not sure when it all got sorted, but from what I can gather it was down to an expired domain name.

Linked Pages Version 0.2.3 has just been released. This version adds a menu facility which uses the current posts ‘link field’ content to find pages that are also linked to the parent page (allowing a more menu like operation from the widget). The configuration of this feature is available on the widget control panel in the ‘Search For Similar’ section.

As usual, it’s available from the WordPress plugin directory, comments/questions can be left here and the somewhat sparse wiki is available here.

Over the course of last weekend (Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th June), I wrote another WordPress plug-in, which I have just released for public consumption in the form of my Linked Pages plug-in. I got a comment about ACFW from a guy called Emerson who wanted to use it generate links from page to page in his site thisintersectionsucks.com.

Turns out ACFW wasn’t the right tool for the job, after trying to find something suitable for him I figured it would be easier to write a plug-in to meet his needs and so my Linked Pages plug-in came into being. I didn’t link to his site on release day as he wasn’t quite ready, but now he is I figured I’d post and let everyone that’s a regular reader know about his site.

I think it’s a great concept and he’s done a great job on it, so pop on over and check it out. I think it’s a really good example of what you can do with platforms like WordPress these days.

Seems my collection of plug-ins is growing…. enter Linked Pages. This was created in response to a user request, but more on that later when he’s finished his site.

Linked Pages allows you to create page pickers in the post editor which can link a post to a parent using custom fields. These links can then be displayed using the widget contained in the plug-in.

At the moment, it is primarily designed for use with custom post types (these make it easy to select pages for the pickers) and each page can only be linked to one parent of a particular post type using a given custom field. As time allows, I plan on extending it to provide more functionality (like being able to establish multiple links and an improved widget with more options).

As an example usage, lets say you’re a mad football fan… you create a post type ‘Football Clubs’ and one called ‘Players’. Using Linked Pages, you can link players to their club and have a list of players for that club displayed in your sidebar in seconds.

The wiki is a little incomplete (by that I mean there is a holding page) so I’ll be adding to that as time allows. As usuals, comments etc. can be left here.

I was going to write a review, but for things like Redmine, I find reviews aren’t necessarily the right outlet for useful information. The same could be said of any review, but for software development tools there are a lot more variables than say… if you like platformers, give this game a go. So instead of a review, this is just a collection of my initial thoughts about Redmine, my first real brush with Ruby and Rails.

For the uninitiated, Redmine is “a flexible project management web application. Written using Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database”. Nice summary I think. So what does it provide…

Access to a number of version control repositories (Mercurial, Git and Subversion to name three) as well as scanning of commit messages to extract time spent and issues addressed by the commit
Issue tracking (each project can utilise a number of different trackers for things like bugs and features, each with it’s own configuration)
File and Document stores
Activity reporting
Gantt charts
Multiple project support

The list of features is quite extensive so I would recommend reading the Redmine website for full details.

Installation was fairly easy. I installed my instance on a Linux server running Fedora 8, MySQL 4.1 (for development, MySQL 5 is required but more on that later), Apache 2 and Subversion 1.5.something. All of which were already setup. Setting up Ruby was a snap, as were the base requirements for Redmine, largely due to the ease of using Ruby’s Gems. The one thing I had a problem with was setting up Passenger (which was one of the recommended routes in one of the how-to’s on the Redmine site). However, once that was sorted, it was up and running in a very short space of time.

The user interface on Redmine is pretty neat. Not bogged down in flashy garbage that serves no purpose. The standard templates are clean and crisp and the layouts of the pages are all pretty good. There one or two quirks, like the fact that files ask for a description when you add them to the store but it’s only displayed as a hint when you mouse over the filename (actually easily fixed with a minor tweak). Overall though, it’s one of the nicest interfaces on an application of this nature that I’ve seen.

One of the nice features about Redmine is the plugin system. There are numerous plugins out there, so far I’ve stuck to the ones that are listed officially on the Redmine site. Once I got my system up and running I went hunting for a whiteboard style plugin. I elected to use the Backlogs plugin, I don’t really recall why, but so far I’ve not been disappointed (my only complaints at this point are the fact that when you enter a new story from the backlog you only provide it’s title and not an accompanying description, it only works 100% on Chrome). This was where I had problems setting up… it requires the rmagick gem which in turn has a dependency on ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick (IIRC). Getting this side of things setup was a nightmare. My recommendation would be install ImageMagick from source and use that as that actually worked first time (I spent an age hunting RPMs and trying to resolve dependencies). Once that hurdle was out of the way however, it took no time at all to enable it and hook it up to a project.

I’ve been using Mantis for ages and I would, until I got Redmine running, have picked it over anything else for issue tracking. But thats all it really does… yes it has roadmaps and change logs and you can integrate it with Dokuwiki (nightmare – the integration, not Dokuwiki) and Subversion (IIRC this requires the use of Subversion hooks). Redmine does all of that out of the box, ok, so the wiki isn’t expandable like Dokuwiki which is IMHO one of, if not the, best wiki packages around, but everything else is just there, integrated into a single neat solution.

So far it’s all positive, so lets add a little bit of negative to the mix for some balance. My gripes… firstly once an issue is created you can’t edit the title or description… actually, I’ve just looked again to make sure I didn’t embarrass myself by missing something and sure enough… I found it, although it’s not obvious… update the issue and there is a ‘(more)’ link on the ‘Change Properties’ section of the page… click it and the description etc. are displayed for editing… a bit more positivity then… negatives… off the top, apart from the issue I mentioned above with the file store list, I can’t really find anything to criticise. Clearly if I was writing a review then we’re in the running for a good score, but it’s largely meaningless as I’m raving about Redmine because right now, it fits my needs remarkably well, your mileage may vary so my advice would be to setup your own test instances of the products you’re thinking of using and actually use them in anger. Possibly in parallel so you can compare how each one fares against the others. I decided I would setup Redmine and use it in anger to get a real feel for how it works and what it can do and it was a good decision as I’ve found it so much easier to get along with than say Mantis.

Now lets get down to the nitty gritty… if you’re a software engineer, there’s a good chance you’ll want to tweak Redmine to make it fit. There are a lot of configuration options built in but if they don’t cut it, then you’ll have to dive into the code and sort it yourself or use one of the many plugins that are already out there. I was a bit apprehensive when I dived into the code. Ruby and Rails scared me a little when I looked at them a while back, but having seen what’s possible with a relatively small amount of code it’s easy to understand why it’s a nice tool to use. If you want to tinker with the Redmine codebase just make sure you’re proficient with Ruby and Rails before you start. That said, I was able to add a new field to one of the core tables, collect data for it and have it used within another area of he application without too many hitches but it did take me a long time (mostly due to on-the-fly research about Ruby and Rails). For anyone thats interested, the patch I submitted add’s a flag to the project repository settings that allow you to include a repository in a scheduled fetch (I have a local repos which is scanned every 5 minutes and I use a remote repos which is too big to scan every 5 minutes). The patch can be found here.

So what about all the other project management toys I’ve tinkered with over the years? Well, they are all pretty good in their own way and for the people who originally created them, but for me they’ve just never seemed… well… right. I’m not saying Redmine is perfect, because it’s not and I’m not saying everyone should use it, because they shouldn’t, but it is pretty dammed good at what it does and if you’re looking for a software project management solution, I’d definitely recommend you have a look at it and give it a real live try out.

Time for another review… this time, the Kindle from Amazon. The management summary for this review would probably read something like this… “If you’ve not got one, get one and enjoy.”. Nice and compact… just like the Kindle.

So where to begin… well, since their initial release, I’ve wanted one but always coughed at the price, but with the release of the 3d generation and the updated pricing… well, I could resist no longer and I can honestly say it’s one of the best things I’ve purchased in a long time.

I have a bunch of books which I’ve been trying to read for an age… a lot of them are PDFs (most of my Pragmatic Programmers titles) or big chunky paperbacks (most of my Microsoft best practices titles). So, reading them is not always convenient… the PDFs you have to have your laptop running and the paperbacks don’t travel well because of their bulkiness and weight. Now, they are all in my Kindle and I can take them anywhere.

As a consequence of this enhanced portability and ease of access I’ve read about 8 books since January… now I’m sure for a lot of people this is quite a low number, but if I tell you I didn’t manage to read a single book last year, that should put things in perspective. It’s not that I’ve found more time for reading, it’s just a lot more accessible. I’ve been travelling quite a bit for work again so sat in the airport… break out the Kindle… sat in the hotel restaurant waiting for my breakfast or evening meal… break out the Kindle. There is one obvious glitch to this though… that part of a flight where the Captain switches on the seatbelt sign and all electronic equipment has to be turned off. With a paper book you can carry on reading but with a Kindle… it has to be turned off. Still, most airlines have their in-flight magazines and of course there are the windows to look out of.

To 3G or not to 3G that was the question…

Well, I elected to go for the 3G version because I’m travelling a lot. Having the ability to sit in the airport and buy a book and get it delivered to my Kindle in seconds is very appealing. Couple that with the ability (albeit limited) to surf the web using the same connection and well… it’s really a no brainer… an extra 40 quid or so for that freedom.

The battery life is pretty good too. Generally I only turn wireless on when I need it, but I can’t give an accurate assessment of how the life compares with the specified life because I have on of the covers which includes the LED lamp… very handy when I crash out in my hotel room for the night… snuggle up in bed and read… but overall, I’m not disappointed by the performance of the battery… I think I’ve only charged it up three times which given I’ve had it since January isn’t bad.

Reading the Kindle is very easy on the eyes. I’ve not really experienced any glare from the screen and the overall legibility of the text is great. PDFs are a bit of a pain as they generally require you to zoom in and then navigating the page requires the use of the cursor pad, but I don’t read a lot of PDFs on there so no problem there. The tools you get are also pretty good, likes attaching notes and bookmarks. My only complaint, I was able to somehow reset the ‘last read’ position of a book I was reading. I couldn’t remember positions/page numbers so had to page through to where I was which was a bit of a pain, but apart from that, I’ve had no real problems operating the unit.

My biggest gripe is the cost of the books. Firstly VAT… buy a paper book and it’s exempt from VAT… buy a digital book and it’s not exempt from VAT (which, given the rate at the moment is 20% can be a significant amount). That said, there sometimes doesn’t seem to be a big enough difference between the paper and Kindle versions of a title.

Overall, the Kindle is fantastic and for the simple fact that I’ve read more since I had mine than I have for a long time, I’d recommend them to anyone. Couple that with the sheer numbers of books you can stick in your bag and well, you’re onto a winner.