Last.fm continues to help me discover music that I already own but haven’t given the deserved attention. This song was featured in two of my favourite shows, Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy, both shows exhibiting superb musical taste.

The video is not an official video as far as I know but it should be. It’s brilliant.

On my mac at home I’ve been using Quicksilver for some time now. I’ve got no complaints there.

At work, where unfortunately I’m stuck with a pc for the moment, I have been trying out application launchers for Windows.

After looking around a bit decided to give two a try, Enso and Launchy. I tried Launchy first. It was very simple, I bound it to CTRL + SPACE as that is my preference, using that keystroke, the launcher appears (which is nicely skinnable), you begin typing, it starts figuring out which app you want to launch. Very like Quicksilver. I can’t fault it.

Enso, to be fair is more than just an application launcher. You can do a lot more with Enso as is detailed on their demo. There is one big difference however and I found it to be a deal breaker for me. (more…)

This came through on my Last.fm recommendations. Turns out I actually had it in my music collection on a Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack and didn’t know it. This track is pure gold. Enjoy.

I don’t know if anyone has noticed, I’m trying to be more active with my blog again. This marks the first of what I intend to be a regular Song of the Week post.

For the last two days I watched as Leopard’s Mail.app tried to download 1 email at an average of 1kb per second.
My internet connection in general was fine yet it looked like it was going to take Mail the entire duration of Lent to download this email.

I figured I must have a setting wrong. I checked Google’s IMAP configuration instructions for Mail 3.x on Leopard. No Joy.
I tried using the information they provided for Mail 2.x setup. Those emails were still crawling down.

Finally I checked Google’s details for configuring other IMAP clients
It says you can use either port 465 or 587 for outgoing mail. I had been using 587, so I changed to port 465. Hey presto! Emails are now flying down. I don’t understand how a dodgy setup for outgoing mail could affect my incoming mail but I’m more than relieved to see Mail.app doing it’s thing now.

I’d like to thank Adobe CS3 developers for my source of utter frustration last night and this morning.

Last friday I did a clean install OSX 10.5.2 on my iMac. When presented with the choice of two filesystems, HFS+ Journaled, or HFS+ Journaled, Case-Sensitve. I chose the case-sensitive option because I am a web developer, I deal with linux OS’s all the time, I’m used to it. It makes sense. How was I supposed to know that 3 days later, when I begin to install Adobe CS3, the installer would drop out immediately with an error.

"the file system of the OS volume is not supported"

I found this on their support area : http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb400587&sliceId=2

What? Why? I’ll tell you why, because those CS3 developers are the laziest damn developers I’ve heard of. A problem like this is completely ridiculous. I can’t begin to comprehend how Adobe developers could blatently ignore some basic common sense coding practice and cause so much grief.

Adobe doesn’t care that they have caused this issue. They know about it alright, it hasn’t just surfaced with CS3 it’s been around for a while. I’ve read that CS2 would go through the install on case sensitive systems and then give problems when it couldn’t find files as you started apps in the suite. Well at least I might have had an opportunity to fix those issues if CS3 would go through the install. But no, this was their fix. Rather than just address their sloppy coding and fix the filenames referenced. The installer refuses to continue.

The only real solution seems to be reformat, don’t use case sensitivity next time.

Nice one Adobe. Stand up and take a bow.

Up to this week I’ve had no trouble with FAlbum (ver 0.7.1). It’s a very useful Wordpress plugin for quickly integrating your Flickr gallery into your site.

I have been using it drive a client’s photo gallery for the last 3 months when this week it decides to stop working. It still showed Recent photos without any trouble, and it could also show a list of photosets, but If i tried to go to any page of photosets/albums or try to view photos in a photoset/album it would just display a blank gallery.
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Recently a client raised concerns that their Webtrends traffic reports were showing traffic well beyond what Google Analytics was reporting. I have good faith in Google Analytics, it would be hard for their reports to be wrong I thought. Fair enough there are cases where the tracking script may not run but that shouldn’t cause the kinds of gaps we were seeing. Webtrends was reporting almost 100% more page views than Google Analytics and roughly 30% more unique visitors.

I had to see for myself which tool was wrong so I took a sample of the server logs from Feb 1st to run a comparison.
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I’ve recently started using Ruby on Rails. I use Noobkit.com constantly for reference. It’s the best Ruby/Rails reference I’ve seen. It just drives me nuts that I have to scroll back up to the top of the page any time I want to search for something. I always felt that the header position should be fixed. It would be more consistant for the design and more usable.

I created a simple Greasemonkey script to put me out of my misery.

Download it here (Right Click > Save As): Noobkit Header Fix

Just apply it to http://www.noobkit.com/show/*

How about that eh? I found no reference to any problem like this online, but I found a fix myself so I’m posting it in case some unfortunate soul encounters the same problem. It’s really quite easy.
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So Google aren’t building a GPhone afterall : http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/wheres-my-gphone.html

Instead they have been working on a Linux based, open mobile platform called Android.

Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications — all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation.

Google haven’t been alone in this venture. The Android platform has been developed in cooperation with the Open Handset Alliance which includes some big players in the mobile industry like Motorola, T-Mobile, HTC and Qualcomm.

There will be an Android SDK available for this some time next week, but don’t expect to see any handsets running this OS till mid next year. I’m excited to see what comes from this. Over and over we have seen that truly innovative and useful applications from an unhindered development community. They sky’s the limit with Android powered phones.

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