Big Kids Did It - Mark McAulay and his Blog

Why you should upgrade to IE7

Firsly, I cant believe I'm actually having to write this post...IE7 has been available since 2006, IE6 came on the go in 2001...that's a LONG time ago in todays online world and IE8 is already available as a beta download so we can only assume that it'll be here prety soon....oh and the browser is free in case you were wondering.

So, why do I care which browser you are using? well, by trade I'm a web developer which basically means that I know a bit about how web browsers are rendering the websites that I and countless thousands of other competent web developers build for you.

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1 comments - Posted by mark at 9:36 PM - Categories: Ranting

Aberdeen meetup for web people

A few of us have been mulling this over for a while and decided that we should push ahead with it and have a social get together in a pub for people in and around Aberdeen who are involved with web design, development, programming, video, multimedia etc etc. A quick question to a few people I know show this to be a popular thing to attempt although it'll need someone to say "be here at this time", so, I've nominated myself to get the first one sorted and we'll take it from there...if I do a good job, i'll probably organise the second one...if not, someone will brush me aside and grab the reigns. This is a heads up for all those interested. If you want to post your interest here or contact me using the form on my "contact" page, we'll see what kind of numbers we're dealing with and then choose a date.

It should be noted that I currently attend an Aberdeen coldfusion meetup which I would recommend to anyone as well, although the focus is (quite rightly) coldfusion first, there are often a good mix of people with different skills in attendance and due to it's (slightly) more formal structure, there's the opportunity to see someone present on a subject and there's also a ton of discussion on geeky matters as well as huge scope for booze.

The main difference with this new meetup will be it's not tied to any one thing which will hopefully attract a wider base of people for informal chat etc, it's a perfect opportunity to meet others in Aberdeen working in the industry and figure out who's doing what...as well as the fact that we'll meet in a pub so there's even MORE scope for a beer or two.

Another thing we'll need is some kind of web presence, so if people want to start thinking about that, we can maybe form a little working group of volunteers to get that done too.

thoughts people?

4 comments - Posted by mark at 9:20 PM - Categories: Meetup

Install Eclipse on ubuntu

During my recent reinstall of eclipse(long story but all my own fault!) I decided to do a bit of searching around for the "right" way to do it and came accross the following post: http://www.ubuntued.com/?p=40. Just posting it here for both my own future reference and for those of others looking for a step by step method.

Using the above link I've just installed the latest build (3.4) with no problems what so ever. Hope it helps someone else.

0 comments - Posted by mark at 9:13 PM - Categories: Eclipse

Enthusiastic student

Today at ECI, we had a visit from a 1st year graphic design student from Aberdeen College who is after a work placement over his summer holidays. I don't usually post about these things but I was so impressed with this guy's drive and enthusiasm, I thought I'd share my thoughts a bit.

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2 comments - Posted by mark at 9:15 PM - Categories: Impressed

Graeme Benzie is blogging

The newest addition to the east coast interactive team has gone and installed wordpress. Graeme works with server side technologies and Actionscript and is a bit of a clever sod when it comes to making the 2 speak to each other. Doubtless there will be a few usefull bits and pieces pop up there so definately one to keep an eye on.

You can read all his latest articles/news etc here: http://www.datafake.com/blog

0 comments - Posted by mark at 1:09 PM - Categories: General | Launches

What's wrong with twitter

For as long as I've used twitter, there's been something niggling me about it that I couldn't quite figure out, like most things of this nature, the problem was right there in front of my face.

Now, before I get into this, I need to note for the record that I love twitter. Of all the "social networks" that I've been exposed to, it's twitter that I'm hopelessly tuned to. I've had (and still do have a couple of these) facebook, bebo, plurk pownce, lastFM, coldfusioncommunity(of course) accounts but the difference is that whenever I boot up a computer, and I mean *every time* I get myself an interface to twitter, whether it's twhirl or the website itself, if I'm online, it's a given that I'm also on twitter and as such, I've made one or two observations about the service over the past 770(to date) "tweets".

I'm going to bypass the downtime completely, we're all aware of the problems, instead, I'm proceeding to a much more overlooked flaw. Now this "flaw" as I've called it wasn't always so, it's become one over time and by the evolution of how people use twitter, it's by no means anyones fault or anyones shortcoming, it probably couldn't have been seen coming, but I reckon (IMHO) that it's probably now worth addressing...hence this post. It's there on the interface every time you log into twitter, wrapped up in a simple h3 tag and it reads "What are you doing?" It is the absolute bedrock of what twitter was born on and grew up on but I argue that today, although it is still relevent, it's perhaps not telling the whole story.

Like many other twitter users, the service has become much much more than a simple question of what are you doing?, it's become a service for communication way more than that. I use twitter as a news feed, point of communication with clients, friends and mentors, means of finding out stuff and also, like a ton of other people, means to voice an opinion on one thing or another...therefore I move for the question to be changed to something like "What's on your mind?" or "What do you want them to know?" or something like that. I'm sure the massive twitter community will have other ideas about this and I'm interested to know what these would be so feel free to comment here.

right, thats tweet number 770, what can i do for 771....my twitter addiction is complete!

1 comments - Posted by mark at 12:46 AM - Categories: Ranting

Python code swarm

fascinating animation about how the python language developed over the years condensed down into a cool little video. Apparently the visualisation was done using processing...which means it's cool.

code_swarm - Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo

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1 comments - Posted by mark at 9:38 AM - Categories: Impressed