More ramblings of another IT Architect type…
Then you might want to speak to Melissa Maimann who is a fully qualified midwife specialising in home birth in the Sydney, Central Coast, Blue Mountains, Wollongong and Southern Highlands but also supporting those seeking a hospital birth in the same area.
You can visit her website at http://www.essentialbirthconsulting.com.au/
Posted in Tech.
I made a comment on Twitter a moment ago about how every time I pass judgment on Confluence I collect a follower from Atlassian – and if I collected the full set, did I win something?
This got me thinking about relationship there seemed to be about commenting on a product and suddenly being followed by the product on Twitter.
It doesn’t bother me, in fact with some companies I’ve found it very useful to stay in the loop with their product releases and announcements.
It seems some companies are like a fire-hose, burying your tweets(@sun), some like over eager puppies, gushing breathless about their product(@evernote), and some are mostly factual (@atlassian)
So I thought I’d invent a game (I assume I’ve invented it, I haven’t googled, apologies if I’m the last know).
I’m going to call it Twitter Bingo.
We’re going to take a list of companies, first Twitter user to be followed by all the companies on the list wins… well… my undying respect and adoration ( which is, my friends, priceless (or worthless, depending on your world view)).
The rules – you may not directly ask to be followed 
)
The initial companies I know who follows are:
Atlassian @atlassian
JBoss @jbossnews
Evernote @evernote
Livescribe @livescribe
GroovyMag @groovymag
Further company nominations gratefully accepted.
Happy hunting.
So its been a week since we brought home Herbert (or Wall-E, or ‘the robot’) – our 530 series iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner.
In that time he’s been used daily, both out of need and novelty, and in that time we’ve been impressed with the results we’ve been getting.
For me, the biggest surprise about the Roomba is that its actually a quite effective vacuum cleaner – that may sounds a bit odd, but I’ve been living my life with the expectation that a vacuum cleaner needs to be big, loud and have thousands of watts of screaming power – by comparison the Roomba seems to have the suction of a asthmatic sparrow. Roomba’s secret seems to be that it mainly uses its brushes to pull material off the floor. Suction occurs simply to pull the material off the brushes, not off the carpet.
Watching him (yes, we’ve given it a gender identity) move around the floor, following walls, stopping before stairs, swirling on dirty patches, gives you an appreciation for the ingenuity of iRobot – we’ve only had to rescue him twice, once when he choked on a dropped sock (he shutdown, beeped and then told us to ‘check brushes’) and once when he got himself tangled in some curtain cords.
The robot probably requires the kind of care you might provide to your coffee machine, a 2 minute clean at the end of each job, with a longer clean after a few days to get hair off the brushes and bearings. All the parts that can be removed are helpfully color coded yellow.
Roomba cleans best room by room (don’t let him loose in your entire house) and of course, the floor needs to be clear of socks, clothing, paper and the like.
Roomba is cheaper than you might think, ours being about $AU500 with a 4 year warranty – half the price of the most expensive Dyson upright cleaner.
I’d recommend Roomba to any time poor family who likes gadgets and hates vacuuming, and I wish it had been around when I was single – letting it loose in my apartment when I went to work would have been fantastic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roomba
http://store.irobot.com/home/index.jsp
Posted in Tech.
WebStart should take care of the upgrade automatically, but, as always, you can install it from http://herod.net/twitterfx/TwitterFX.jnlp
Bugs can be raised here: http://kenai.com/jira/browse/TWITTERFX
Here are the changes:
Release Notes – twitterfx – Version 0.15
Posted in Tech.
Okay
Now I’m pissed off.
So, I go to make my payment and the Optus account portal craps out twice during the payment process,
What happens? I get a blank page with the loading icon for several minutes.
So, I try again, and again, third time lucky, then I discover I’ve paid both bill three times.
So, then I try to do an online feedback to get my money refunded and after filling in my details and describing the whole process, I get this:
I mean, seriously. WTF? Does Optus specifically aim to frustrate and confuse its customers?
This is on top of the 3 day 3G outage that Optus had in North Sydney last week.
Posted in Tech.
.. of “This ain’t your Dad’s Java”
I found the passion and information content about the direction of Java very, very encouraging.
JavaFX release is on December 2. Looking forward to taking the final release for a spin!
Posted in Tech.
After watching alot of kids TV over the last few months, I have a few things I wonder about
Posted in Tech.
Things you notice when you are home sick and watching Fox News and Sean Hannity, here are some tips I picked up from him:
1. Interrupt your opponent before they can complete their statement.
2. Use the interruption to redirect the conversation if its not going your way.
3. Use facts that are are correct, but only from a certain point of view, i.e. unemployment over a ‘three year average’ as opposed to the last 6 months.
4. Don’t be overt in your insults, but use your tone to get your point across, when your opponent responds in frustration, use that against them to knock down their point.
5. Avoid the entire context of a conversation, repeat the point that supports your view, allude to ‘other facts’ (google McCarthy for more details).
6. Accuse the other party of bias.
7. Speak loudly all the time.
Posted in Tech.
I’m Australian, so I can’t vote for him, but what’s your excuse? 
Posted in Thoughts.
You need to follow the YourKit instructions for making sure the the appropriate extensions are in your operating systems path
Then you need to run your Eclipse RCP application with the following command line
YourRCPApplication.exe -vmargs -agentlib:yjpagent -Xmx1024M -Xms32M
If it flickers up and disappears again in a split second then you’ve either mucked up the command line or the agent extension can’t be found.
Test the sanity of your jre by running
java -agentlib:yjpagent
You should get this output:
E:\temp>java -agentlib:yjpagent
[YourKit Java Profiler 7.5.10] Using JVMTI (11.0-b15;Sun Microsystems Inc.;mixed mode, sharing;Windows;32 bit JVM)
[YourKit Java Profiler 7.5.10] Profiler agent is listening on port 10002…
[YourKit Java Profiler 7.5.10] *** HINT ***: To get profiling results, connect to the application from the profiler UI
Usage: java [-options] class [args...]<snip>
Posted in Tech.
