2012 to 2013

         Blogging · Me

So another year is gone by and another year where I haven’t really blogged much, concentrating instead of Cantemo which had a pretty amazing year. At the start of 2012 I made a list in Evernote of all the techie things that I wanted to achieve and I am going to review them here. New Website/Blog. Well I have started on this. This site and my portfolio site are now quite out of date, www.

Raspberry PI update

         Me

So a while back I got delivery of my Raspberry PI, but I have been so busy developing on our Rough Cut Editor, Annotation Tool and Adobe Premiere support that I haven’t had time to use it. But now I see a project that I really want to try: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/freshers/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/ – Baking PI or basically build your own OS 101. I have always wanted to do this, but have basically all my hardware in operation at once and nothing cheap to try it on.

Firefox video performance

         Me

There is not going to be much decided in this post, rather looking to vent. After spending about 7 hours yesterday looking into performance problems with Firefox I can’t but help be dismayed that webm and ogg playback take up so much CPU time. In my tests it is currently using 100% of one of my cores, but what is worse is that it effects anything else going on at the same time, meaning that I have to be really careful running loops, creating JavaScript objects and generally doing anything else on the same page.

dotfiles

         Me      dotfiles

Having started to change my environment quite a bit by changing from bash to zsh, Textmate (ok I am still using it quite a bit) to Vim and MacVim with Janus, I thought that I would join what seems to be a popular movement and share my dot files on GitHub. https://github.com/timc3/dotfiles

PostgreSQL on Lion

         Me

The installer for Postgresql on Lion is supposedly “unsupported”, which means that they haven’t got it working yet. Looking at it quickly is seems to be the way that the postgres user is being created using dscl. To get it to work, manually create a postgres user from under System Preferences: Then run the installer as per normal. I used the Postgres 9 installer. I also upgraded python to 2.7.2 and installed psycopg2 pointing to pg_config under /Library/PostgreSQL/9.

Quick update

         Computing · Me

Haven’t had much time recently to post anything on here, though lots has been going on that I could write about. Been to Cyprus for a family wedding which was really nice, pity that we had some stuff stolen including my iPhone, Nikon DSLR and video camera but otherwise it was great. At work we are building new HTML5 based tools, improving the look and feel and capabilities of our main product – should really write up about some of the technology being used.

Damn nice bag

         Me

They people have some damn nice bags: http://shop.hardgraft.com/bags/2unfold-laptop-bag-brown

Slow disks on MacBook Pro

         Me      MacBook Pro

I really like my MacBook Pro, but I have no idea why they ship with a 5400RPM 2.5″ slooooow disk. Even with the i5 processor it makes everything crawl. Part of my standard software stack now is Dropbox, PostgreSQL and CrashPlan. All pieces of software I am really happy with, except they all access the disk all the time. fs_usage is a command you can run to see what is current accessing the disk in OS X to see what is slowing down that already slow disk.

2010 – 2011

         Me

EDIT This post has been in draft for ages, I think I am just going to post as is, was going to add lots more personal stuff, but blah – rather do it instead. I think most years I have been doing a summary, something I might revisit if I have the time. Instead I think its perhaps more interesting to think about what I might be doing this year instead.

Dropbox startup lessons learned

         Me

Really interesting slide show by Drew Houston on what they have learnt about starting up Dropbox. http://www.slideshare.net/gueste94e4c/dropbox-startup-lessons-learned-3836587