Published by Mike Nolan on May 3rd, 2007 in Edge Hill, Rants.
My life outside work is managed by Google Calendar. In fact, I’d prefer if my life in work was managed by Google Calendar as well because GroupWise calendar sucks. I have several different calendars to manage different types of event - Explorers, Birthdays, General etc - but only your primary calendar gets notifications. Until today that is. So imagine my excitement when an announcement came through in Google Reader saying that they’ve introduced SMS and email notifications on secondary and subscribed calendars!
So I logged on to take a look and couldn’t find anything. Went to the Google Calendar Group and started reading some threads but the instructions didn’t seem to work for me. Then I read this. I know I’ve been banging on about “Release Early, Release Often“, but come on, sort it out Google! And while you’re at it, please stop sending me day SMS notifications at 4:30am, and sort out synchronisation with mobile phones, and add to do lists, and…
Published by Mike Nolan on April 26th, 2007 in Edge Hill, Web.
Web services have finally got a blog! Well, they’ve had one before but this time it’s going to get maintained and looked after with a bit of TLC 
It’s a team blog so friends of mine, please bare that in mind before posting comments! I’ll be posting about all sorts of work related developments and technologies and I’ll reference the more interesting ones from here too.
Published by Mike Nolan on April 26th, 2007 in Symfony.
With more sites dedicated to symfony including Trac moving to a new domain and symfony-forge coming on stream I’ve found searching for symfony things is a bit more tricky - Google’s returning results all over the place. So I’ve created a Google Co-op search engine for symfony.
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=010539329620469924541%3Aq5kvm3-tc5c
Only a few sites on there at the moment but I’ll add more as I use them. Let me know if you have any suggestions.
Published by Mike Nolan on April 22nd, 2007 in Funny.
Published by Mike Nolan on April 13th, 2007 in Web.
Ed Parsons points to the new 3D Google Maps that’s available for certain US cities and Tokyo. It would be nice to see some of the user-generated models being places on the maps because otherwise my local area might be flat for quite a long time to come! I’ve been reading Ed’s blog for a while now and it will be very interesting to see what he brings out of Google
Published by Mike Nolan on April 12th, 2007 in Symfony.
The idea of SymfonyCamp is being mooted on the symfony mailing lists at the moment. Sounds like a good idea to me and it seems to have worked in other open source areas. It would be good to find out if any of the Sensio guys or the rest of the symfony core team are able to fit it into their diaries as I’m sure it would be good to have them involved.
Published by Mike Nolan on April 12th, 2007 in Uncategorized.
Just watched the joint broadcast from the BBC, Sky News, al-Jazeera and CNN. Really good to see four big news organisations coming out publicly to support the message. The day news organisations scale back their broadcasts, even the ones we don’t agree with, will be a very sad day indeed.
Published by Mike Nolan on April 3rd, 2007 in Funny.
For anyone who thinks that juggling three balls is easy! Just came across this video of Chris Bliss:
I think I can do about six of those tricks
Published by Mike Nolan on March 27th, 2007 in Symfony, Web.
Thought I’d post quickly about the joys of GNU Screen. I’ve been using it properly for the last six months or so since starting at Edge Hill. It’s a terminal multiplexer for *nix systems allowing you to connect to multiple shell prompts at once and switch between them at will. But it’s better than that - you can disconnect and reconnect later, even from a different location. If your SSH connection dies you don’t lose anything, simply reconnect and carry on from where you left off.
I use it to connect to the server to manage symfony projects. I constantly have a screen connection with the live and development sites for each project, web logs, home directory and usually a few other locations. There’s too many shortcuts and commands to mention here but Ctrl-A followed by 1-n changes screen; Ctrl-N creates a new screen; Ctrl-A Ctrl-D detaches your connection. If you’re a heavy shell user, especially remotely from Windows with an SSH connection then I strongly recommend taking a look at Screen.
Published by Mike Nolan on March 26th, 2007 in Scouts, Walking.
Really nice and pretty relaxed weekend up in the Lakes for DESC. Went up Friday night with Hugh (thanks for driving!) and the realisation that I had to camp in March came to me all of a sudden. Tent looked its usual saggy self once put up on a GT slope but managed to find a line for my thermarest between the mounds. Wasn’t too cold at night once I’d wrapped my towel around myself for a bit of extra insulation.
Saturday Martin and I got permission of go off and do our own thing so we met up with Tim for a little walk. Parked up in Patterdale and walked St Sunday Crag, Fairfield, Dollywaggon Pike, Nethermost Pike and Helvellyn. About 20km in all taking 8 hours. Tim’s done the business on spareweekend.com so check out the details there.
Sunday the Explorers tried out the new low ropes course at Great Tower. It’s pretty cool and a great asset to the site. Unfortunately one of the trees has fallen down taking out a couple of obstacles so it’s not a complete circuit at the moment.
Numbers were down for DESC but in terms of atmosphere and activities it was as good if not better than previous years and I think the Explorers catering in smaller groups is a model for future events. But please someone stop me from making scrambled egg next time