Steve Mactaggart's Blog

So I’ve failed..  I didn’t post evey day of January, so I could just give up and consider myself beaten.. But no I won’t. Its more like the world has been conspiring against me in not being able to post. 

I could have copped out and said, nothing much happening so not worth boring the world with random dribble, but thats not true, so lets recap. The last post was last Thursday night, so I’ve got nearly a week to catch up on.

Friday 12th – I’m sure it existed

Friday was such a long time ago I can’t remember what I did.  I expect very little, as it was the start of my blogging down time.  If I remember I’ll post an update.

Saturday 13th – Home body

Saturday was basically WOW.  I slept in (as Rach had to work), got up, WOW’d, had lunch, WOW’d, that was the day. Nothing exciting… See why I didn’t post about it.

Sunday 14th – Ten Pin Tupperware

The girls had organised a tupperware party, and so in good guy fashion we decided to vacate the house and leave the plastic container fondelling to the chicks.  We trundlled of to Knox to go tenpinning. 

Kev’s played a bit recently so we all expected to get crushed, and Garth had never played, so it was going to be a mixed bag. As expected Kev crushed us, I got 101, not that great.

We had paid for 2 games, and so took into the second.  Kev choked early, and from nowhere Garth found form.  Kev eventually found his rythmn again but Garth had a handy lead.  It came down to the final frame, and Garth needed 14 or so to win.  9’d then spared and then got 7 with the last ball to win by 3.

Monday 15th – Is you phone engaged?

Big news day… We headed out to Knox for Michelles birthday, and wouldn’t you know it, we also find out that Matt and Michelle are engaged. Big congrats to them both, with a bub on the way it wasn’t going to be long. and after all the effort Matt went to for a special weekend, how could she say no?

Tuesday 16th – Hot in the city.

Hot, Hot, Hot. Thats all I can say. oh also Blackout.  Tuesday was the day Melbourne went into meltdown. I really couldn’t have posted if I wanted as the server was down overnight due to power failures.

Something like 1200 traffic lights were out in Melbourne, as well as trams and trains running on a very restricted timetable meant many hot and bothered travellers had to sit around in a 40C afternoon in Melbourne.

Our office power went out at about 5:45, so I jumped in my air conditioned car and had a normal trip home.

No ride this evening, way too hot and it was Sharkey’s mums birthday anyway.

and the all imporant Wednesday 17th – umm Today?

Garth had the day off, as he and Kim got the keys to their new place in Forest Hill.  They started moving over some of the smaller stuff and just get a feel for the place.  Rach is helping out with their re-location on the weekend, but I’m going to be away (more on that later).

We had Misty’s final puppie shot, (at 12 weeks) and then headed over to have pizza in their new place with no power.  Looks nice, will be better when there is acutally furniture in it.

Also today we confirmed my travel details to London then home via LA.  What didn’t I tell you?  I’m heading out of the country for a week, so now I will really have a real excuse not post. The purpose of the trip is to go to a mobile gaming confernce and so I should have lots to report from my hotel room each night.  Its then back via the US to see a company over there about some work we might do together.

I fly out Friday at about midnight for a wurlwind trip of the globe. More details in tomorrows post.

Night

Posted by at 9:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So what did Thursday bring. Another hot day thats what.  The Vic Rebels returned to the court tonight.  Its been about 6 or so weeks since our last game of Indoor Soccer, and we did pretty well.

I was expecting all of us to be unfit and unable to play out the full game, especially with the heat of the day. But to our credit we did play out well, and even gave ourselves a serious shot in the last 2 mins.

They lead the entire game, but we always kept on coming back, and we ended the game loosing 3–4.  They had a lucky chance that was really just a blaze, but it was tipped in around the goalie for a lucky one.

Not much else to report today, was too hot.

The Right Odds #21 was recorded.. I think it was a bit flat, probably due to the heat, but the content covered is still great.We’ve got the Video version worked out and I’m just waiting to see if I can get it up on YouTube or something at some stage.

Night.

Posted by at 9:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With this daily posting thing I have been stretched a couple of times to find a name for the article, but todays is straight forward.  With Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld going nearly 2hrs I had little else I could fit in todays post.

For those that are living under a rock, Apple Inc (their new name) released their first public viewing and demo of the new iPhone.  Now being an Aussie sucks as we don’t look like seeing it until way after 2008, but we can watch and dream.

Jobs is really the master of the long product launch, he has a passion for his products and although sometimes he’s a bit corny his demos always inspire a WOW.  I guess he does have the advantage of showing off some of the best products with some of the most innovative thought and design put into them.

So the iPhone…  It will probably cost way too much, probably have sucky battery life, the touch screen will probably fail or not be as good as we all expect..  But do I want one.. Of course!

Hopefully by the time they get approval in Australia, we will have rev2 out, or at least I will have had the chance to read reviews from actual owners who have lived with it.

I did think that they got a lot right, the dragging sort of scrolling while seems obvious now will be the kicker. The click wheel was the iPods innovation, and with all the talk of the different features of the iPod I think the best bit is the drag scrolling.

I’m not sure if it was deliberate, but it seems that what they did was turn the click wheel around 45 degrees, and so instead of playing on the wheel, you start to scroll on the surface or Tire..  Very nice.

I expect the press to jump up and down and cover the iPhone to death, but the other cool thing is the iTV (sorry Apple TV).  I’m looking for a way to extend my home pc to my home theater and while I don’t think its for me it does look like another thing that will help the convergence of computer and lounge room.

Ok so thats a lot of Apple love..  But a bit too much for this article, so let me balance it up.  Of all the things apple does well, I think their biggest hole is iTunes.  Now with the iPhone and AppleTV syncing through iTunes its becoming a much more core application.

On the surface it works well, click, push and your there, but it really limits the power users ability to configure it.  I want to be able to have a podcast listed in my directory, say IT Conversations, now they publish heaps of podcasts that I don’t want so I’d like to see the items and then mark them manually for download.  For other podcasts, like Twit or the JavaPossie, I want them as soon as possible, so just download them when they appear in the feed.

This is just a simple example of how apple pushes its design on its customers, and in most cases its wrong, but sometimes the fits not right, and so I’m reluctant to jump whole heartily into the Apple camp and invest my hard earned as it won’t exactly fit.

I’d like to see a more Open software stance, given that they give most of their software away free couldn’t they take a Firefox kind of approach and have a highly configurable add in system that allows us developers to build and change their products as we see fit.  Now I know that only power users will understand and install addons, but thats the point.  It also fosters development and eventually, like in Firefox, the popular features may be absorbed by iTunes itself for the world to enjoy.

Just my thoughts, but I’d love to get an airport connected to my outdoor speakers, an Apple TV to the home theater and keep my contacts and photos synced to my iPhone, but the jam in the sandwich is a little bit off for my liking.  Once iTunes opens up and we can customise it our way, add in our own sections and sync it with other data sources I’ll just have to admire from a far.

Also, any note of Java on the iPhone?  Hope so.. Fingers crossed, full JRE.. No J2ME.

night.

Posted by at 9:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sharkey and I headed out for our regular ride, I can call it regular can't I it has been 2 weeks in a row. So anyway we headed out after work like usual leaving FTG and met up at knox and headed out the same path as usual, down the track to Jells Park then on towards Dandinong.

We seem to have this magic distance of 18ks, as it seems no matter where we start or where we ride get get abou 18ks before deciding to turn around. Today was no different, still 18k's for a round trip of just over 36. I really want to work on getting to 20k's each way in the next week and then add an extra 2-3 each week or fortnight.

Plans will be to head out on a much longer trip at some stage, something like a trip to Carrum and back, which from our place is probably like 80-90k's.

What else today, headed into the city for a couple of meetings, was really nice to take the time in on the Tram then stroll around the city to each of the meetings.

We really are lucky to live in such a great city, the CBD is really cool and its been a while since I've been in there but still amazes me each time I head in to the city and look up at the buildings. Cool.

Today's special code is: 103 +U

night

Posted by at 9:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mondays usually a pretty flat day for exciting stuff. I've had the weekend away from work so I usually have some energy to actually get things done. Today was no different its a day to get stuff done, but that makes for a boring post. The monotonus slog of getting work done doesn't make for exciting reading so a change of topic is required.

But what to change it to.. Umm must have done something today that was a little bit exciting.

Mondays are The Right Odds Review day. The review is our Monday show where we get the chance to discuss all the sporting results and news from the weekend, as well as give our early thoughts the upcoming weeks results. This weeks show was a really good one, in my opinion, its review #20, and we got into some good conversation about Cricket and the A-League.

Anyway head over to the site, theres a player inline there so all you need is sound on your computer and your right. Just click on the big "PLAY" button to listen there. Any feedback for us, send it to feedback@bestbets.com

The day did end on a fun note, a bit more WOW. Dalaran was down to start with, so I played around for an hour or so creating an Alliance character. I might get a bit more involved in that side later, but the investment in the Horde side so far is too much and I guess I'll stick there.

Last comment: Mages wrock!

night.

Posted by at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know most of my janblguary posts have been WOW related, but I have been chasing the others to catch up, and although I’m not a lot closer I did get to spend a good chunk of the last 24hrs playing WOW.

My main warrior (Talac) is now a level 37, and most of the way to 38.  He’s got a couple of quests left that are pretty straight forward and so should push him to 38 in the next day.

I also continued my Mage (Morlac) hes now a level 8, still young but I have invested a couple of hours in him now.  It’s differnt playing a Mage, nicer to be able to stand away from the action and destroy it.  I teamed up with my first human player tonight and it was great to let him drag and get attacked then I can cast 1–2 spells and kill the enemy..

I also resurected my Priest (Palac) hes now in crossroads and up to level 12. I didn’t realise how much time I had spent playing him, its a good 12hrs or so.

The big WOW news is that I found that Auctioneer is actually working.(link is to a development version)  It’s not an official release but what the developers call a Gamma.  It’s basically finished just a few bugs before they can fully release it. I have it installed and there are a couple of glitches, but the main thing of seeing what an item is worth and what it sold for in the Auction House is GREAT!!

Highly Recommended.

Tomorrow I’ll go through my addons and post them up here as there are a couple I really like.

The other application news to share is that I eventually found the FREE download of AVG. For those playing at home who don’t know what AVG is, its a free virus scanner from grisoft.  It’s only free for home use, but as my work machine is a linux machine there are other solutions for that.  AVG is my first recomendation to anyone at home looking for solid un-obtrusive virus protection. Their v7.1 expires mid Feb, but I have eventually given in to the nag screen and actually downloaded the upgrade to v7.5.

night.

Posted by at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Very hot Saturday. The one thing I notice is that the Study has no cooling, and with all the electrical equipment around it gets hot.  The back story is that Melbourne had another 30+ day, and we have air con in the house.. So obviously I turned it on. But alas, there are no vents in the study and so cook did I.

What else today, watched more of FifthGear, up to the last episode of this season, so I guess that means I watched episode 11 and 12. Got the last episode of the season to go, its one where they give awards for the year so is partially a clip show.

Waiting for TopGear to come back, after Hammond’s bad crash I wasn’t sure if the show would even continue, but it seems that his recovery has been great and so on with the show.

So what does the title of the post have to do with my rants, so far nothing….

But dinner tonight was Garlic Prawns, and It seems I purchased way too much and I had to either eat huge helpings of prawns, or get some assistance.  The call went out to Matt and Michelle who luckily enough were not busy and so joined us for dinner.

At some point post prawns Sharkey asked to check out blacksmithing on WOW.  He’s the lvl 50 odd whos miles above my lowly 37 but he wanted to see some blacksmithing and so we got online. The next thing you know its nearly 2 hrs later and we’ve been doing blacksmith quests all the time.  Off to the auction house to buy the mats, back to the forge to make them, etc…  He burnt nearly 10g of mine tonight.  I’m a gatherer who only really sells at the Auction House, but tonight was talked into, after a bottle of red, purchasing the mats from the Auction House.  It did make the lvl’ing up faster, but seems a bit like cheating to me.

So anywho, am a lvl180 blacksmith now just don’t have the money or mats to make anything else.I leveled up today to 37 with my Warrior by spending some time in Arathi.  Got a few areas to work on at the moment and XP is not to hard to come by.

Anywho, seeing as this post is actually late I should hit submit.

night.

Posted by at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ok so the title is a bit strong, but what a dominant performance by the Aussies over the last couple of months.  Not only have they regained the Ashes, but they have won the series 5–0. England had times where they looked ok, but there was barley a session in all 5 tests where Australia didn’t show some sort of brilliance.

It was great to see the Aussies wrap up the 5th test, but from a competition side I’d love to have seen the poms make a few more runs to allow us to chase a bit more.  I don’t think they were ever going to be able to backup their performance in the first innings, and that wasn’t even that great.  So cheers to Aussie boys, its a sad time in Test Cricket with the retirement of Martyn, Warne, McGrath and Langer, but I know the team is in the good hands of guys like Hussey and Simons.

So what else happened today? Twas a friday so not a heap.  Started working on getting more sports integration with the bookies, which should be good.

Oh yeah, and also watched the Evolution of Dance again, if you havn’t seen it then make sure to check it out. Fun Fun Fun.

Anywho, short one.

Night

Posted by at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Post 3 of Janbloguargy was supposed to start off with a recount of tonights first round back Indoor Soccer match, but as the title says we won on Forfiet.  Tonight was supposed to be the first game of the new season and even though it was about 35C around Melbourne this arvo I was looking forward to it.

Hot day at work again, being Thursday was time to record this weeks Right Odds.  I don’t think I’ve talked about TRO before, so let me introduce it.

A few months ago, probably round 22 weeks ago, Peter Lucas and I had the idea to start a podcast discussing the coming weeks sporing events. 20 weeks ago we started The Right Odds with just a dodgy mike and 5 minuite shows.

After a couple of weeks Pete realised that it needed 2 people and so I joined the show to co-host. We are up to week 20 (this week) and we have even started a second show The Right Odds Review, which runs on Mondays and is all the results from the sporting world over the weekend.

There’s a flash player built into the site to listen right there so feel free to pop by and have a listen.  I’m pretty happy with where its going and what we have been able to do.

Its totally free and goes for between 20 and 55 minuites.  It’s ITunes listed and on other agregators like Odeo and Digg’s new podcast directory.

Yes I did start my new Mage on WOW, I wanted to be a Tauren mage till I found out that they can’t have mages, so it had to be a Troll.  If your on Dalaran (the server) and see either Morlac (my new Mage) or Ralac (my main Warrior) say hi.

Still on WOW, i’m yet to get the latest patch.  Now I know I have a wierd NAT issue, but i can direct http download anything so whats the issue.  The Blizzard downloader tells me I have to map ports, but the issue is my ISP actually does NAT on this connection so mapping ports aint going to help.  The should at least offer a link to a direct download.  The last patch I got of some mirror somewhere so I guess its googling again.

Back off to play some Ralac again.

Night.

Posted by at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I bet you thought I wouldn’t even stick with this month of blogging for 2 days.. But HA, here is the 2nd post, so hold on tight it’s going to be a long month… Now I come to think of it why didn’t I choose February, only 28 posts…

So today… The garthman is taking some time off so we can actually get work done in the office..  Got a bit of coding done, actually got some cool stuff (well cool to me) done.

I’ve just added a JavaScript popup calendar tag to the WAF tags, (not sure what WAF is then you might not want to know), anywho this new tag handles taking any sort of data, a String date, a long value or even a Date itself and renders it to a defined format into a textbox and then (here’s the kicker) renders a link to a JavaScript popup that allows the user to browse dates and select the one they want.. Neat Huh..  Really it is..

So got that tag into most places we use dates in the admin system, works real nice. And due to the fact that it’s backed by a full date formatter I can use any date formats I like, including times.  So the old Date selects can now also be more exact and show the time of the day too..

So enough geeky stuff, not much else, watched some of the 5th test, looks like England are going to actually be competitive this time..  Not sure what the final score was at the end of play as it was a rain delay when I left work but it was pretty even going into the end of the 2nd day.  Tomorrow will be interesting, and then to see if the poms can stand up in their 2nd innings..

Went with Phil Z to play tennis, blowing an absolute gale!  Threw my game right off but was enjoyable, in the 32C temperature.  He took the first set 6–4 then kamesh turned up and we played some American singles which I think I took 6–3, but was really hot and had to head home.

Been home, had dinner… mmmmm spag bol…. and thats about it..

And for those keeping score I didn’t get to WOW last night, but I'm blogging this from my WOW box so there's a chance tonight.  Might even start my new Tauren Mage if I feel lucky.

Night.

Posted by at 8:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is one of the first photo’s we have of our new little girl..  She was only a couple of weeks old here.

Shes much bigger now, 9 weeks I think in these.

Now christmas day, bigger again… God she grows fast.. and with a dog house like that, it might be ok for me to be sent there…

So thats our little Misty, I assume there will be more shots in the future.

Posted by at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm not one for New Years resolutions but seeing as this blog is in serious need of content I decided that I'd try something different. Its been cool this year to look back at the past years posts and see how things have changed and whats still the same. So to try and get some content here I decided I'd try and blog each day of Janurary and see if it works. So heres the commitment, as long as I'm home on in contact with the internet I'll make sure to get a post up.

So given i've already failed, as this is the first post on the 2nd I'll make it a big one, wrap up the end of 2006 and include today.

New Years was at Matt and Kylies with all the normal crew, plus the 2 new additions to our crew, Alanah and Kaitlyn. Great night, we left about 2 for the drive home so got to bed after 3:00....

Most of New Years day was in bed recovering from..... partying... yep thats what it called..

So today was back to work, had the last week or so off (give or take a day) all the crew were there. I actually got some work done, we're working on V2 of the Editorial system, and as ususal I'm holding up the project. It doesn't work to be some sort of manager dude and try and cut code too. I'm to busy in meetings, writing plans or something else, but I think thats slowing down and get more time to do real developer dude stuff.

Last night got updated version of utils, waf and waf-plugins out, might write the release notes for that soon, but also thinking about an ant task that automatically creates the post and uploads it, I already have the rest of the release process automated, one last step.

Umm what else.. Not much at work, recorded the review for this week, and watched the raw video of the other weeks right odds that we recorded as a sort of pilot..

Headed home on time for once, and as my previous post shows I've got back on the bike again. The plan for tonight was to meet up with Sharkey and get some more K's under the belt.. Yep thats right, a Tuesday night. Had a good ride around 2hrs and got another 30ish kms done. We plan to try and get out each Tuesday night, with bigger plans every weekend or so.

Anywho, think thats about it.. Might try and get 30 mins in on WOW before bed.

Night.

Posted by at 9:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)