Live Earth

I managed to get a couple of tickets to the Live Earth concert in London yesterday. Wow it was a good show with some incredible performers. I’m not going to list them all but it was the first time I had seen the Foo Fighters live and they were just superb, loud massive energy and great tunes, they really got the crowd going. In all there were about 20 acts during the 10 hours show, of course there was some pap, Metallica and Genesis spring to mind but then you needed time to go and get a beer or burger anyway. Of the other good or great performances were Snow Patrol, Madonna (surprisingly as I’m not normally a fan), the Red Hot Chili Peppers (of course), the Beastie Boys and the Black Eyed Peas.

It was also the first time I’d seen the new Wembley, even though it was massively over budget and late it is a great stadium. Apparently there were 85,000 there yesterday but the queue for beers and food was never more than 3 minutes. Even when the entire stadium piled out after the show towards the tube, it only took us 90 minutes to get back to my flat.

Overall a superb day, photos are already up on Flickr

Move along

Nothing to see here, work has been crazily busy this week (as with every other week at the moment), but we did manage to get to the pub after work today. It’s important for a development team to just decompress, catch up on what we’ve all been doing all week and what we’re going to do next week. Well that’s the excuse anyway and I’m sticking to it.

Nokia Media Transfer for Mac

Another bit of free software for your Mac. If you run a Nokia mobile phone you’ll know the pain it is to get media across from your Mac to the handset. Syncing contacts and calendars is no problem with iSync, but now we have Media Transfer for Mac which integrates itself into iTunes and iPhoto to allow you to send music and podcasts to your phone and photos from your phone to your computer. It’s in beta at the moment but well worth a look even so.

Mozy for Mac

I mentioned an online backup service called Mozy almost a year ago well they now have a Mac client which is well worth taking a look. You get 3gb storage for free and can upgrade to unlimited storage for $5 per month. The point of .Mac is suddenly becoming even less clear than it was already.

Dinner in the Gherkin

One of the nice perks of my current contract is that I have access to the Gherkin, one of the most distinctive buildings in London. There’s a bar and restaurant right at the top but you can’t get in unless you work in the building. So tonight I’m heading up for dinner in the (apparently very posh) restaurant with my parents. All the reports I’ve heard of the food are excellent and I know the views of London are second to none so hopefully it will be a good evening. We’ve just got to hope that the weather holds as it’s so high the top sometimes disappears into the clouds!

Domino Community Meet Up

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that a few of us London based Domino bods will be meeting up for a beer on Thursday 19th July. Well the date coincides with the first London installment of Collaboration University over near the British Museum, so we’ve picked a venue of the All Bar One on New Oxford Street (map). I’ll be turning up around 6-ish so if you work in London or are just here for the conference then please do feel free to come along.

SuperNTF

I’ve spent a couple of hours this evening looking at Kevin Pettitt’s new SuperNTF application framework for new Notes developers. As it stands it’s a very good introduction to best practice development in the Notes client and the plan is to add in an equivalent web framework as well. If you’re new to the Notes and Domino world (and there definitely are still people just starting out there) then this is a very good place to start.

Good service deserves credit

Ever since selling the car the only issue I’ve had is how to get heavy shopping back home (mainly beers but there are other things as well 😉 ). I thought I had tried all of the online grocery shops, for some reason they don’t deliver to my block, I guess because it’s a bit of a pain to get into if you don’t know where you’re going. Anyway I found the online service for Waitrose, called Ocado and put in a fairly hefty order for all of the bulky stuff which is a pain to carry home. Well it arrived this evening, it was early, and the delivery guy couldn’t have been more helpful and cheerful to boot. What’s more they brought me a free bottle of plonk for being a new customer. It’s so nice when a service does exactly what it claims to.

Busy busy busy

Things are incredibly busy at the moment with a major project in my day job taking up well over 100% of my time for that client. But in the background Defectr is ticking along nicely. We recently went over 500 registered users, of which about 20% are active on a daily basis which I think is not a bad conversion ratio. Hopefully the upcoming release of Dojo 0.9 will continue to improve things. My understanding is that it’s basically a rip and replace of the 0.4 version but once 0.9 is out the API will be basically locked.

In other news I’ve been playing around with Ruby on Rails for a little application idea I’ve had. I know I’m a bit behind the times but I think it’s still worth picking up those technologies which move beyond the fad stage if only to be able to talk to other techies in terms they can understand when I have to explain Domino to them (a problem I was having last week in Germany with some hardcore J2EE developers who were sneering at Domino).

The thing I’m enjoying most about the Ruby on Rails playing is that I don’t need to fire up Windows to do anything, it’s pure Mac and boy does that make a difference. As usual the refrain rings out, “Roll on Domino Designer on the Mac”.

Paypal Problems

I’ve been using PayPal for years and never had any real trouble with them, but I’ve never been entirely trusting of them either so never leave any balance in my account, as soon as I get any money I withdraw it. Reading this site from Andre I’m glad I’ve been cautious. If you can help then leave a comment over there or drop me an email and I’ll forward it on to Andre.