my I/O

Photo

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 19:10:40 +1100

QVB Christmas Tree (first of 3 levels)

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 18:04:17 +1100

QVB Christmas Tree (first of 3 levels)

Photo

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:04:13 +1100

I’m really impressed by the camera in the iPhone 4S....

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:59:39 +1100

I’m really impressed by the camera in the iPhone 4S. It’s not as good, obviously, as the NEX-5 I also shoot with, but it’s at least as good as the other point & shoot cameras I’ve tried.

Squawk!

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:51:55 +1100

Squawk!

Here’s to that crazy one. The world I live in is a better...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:37:00 +1100

Here’s to that crazy one. The world I live in is a better place for the technologies he helped pioneer and much better looking and easier to use for the emphasis he place on design.

Photo

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 22:32:16 +1000

Dinner at Din Tai Fong in the Westfield in the city.

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 16:38:02 +1000

Dinner at Din Tai Fong in the Westfield in the city.

Time for a new look for myIO.com.au.

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 12:16:04 +1000

Time for a new look for myIO.com.au.

Photo

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 12:07:45 +1000

Lunch at The Glenmore

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 11:59:29 +1000

Lunch at The Glenmore

View from The Glenmore in The Rocks.

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 11:41:14 +1000

View from The Glenmore in The Rocks.

Building something awesome over here

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 14:34:26 +1000

Building something awesome over here

iTunes Survey

Mon, 16 May 2011 13:02:08 +1000

How many songs: 10170

Sort by song title:
First Song: À l’enseigne de la fille sans coeur - Edith Piaf
Last Song: +81 – Deerhoof

Sort by time:
Shortest Song: It’s Been Emotional - Big Chris (0:04)
Longest Song: Hamletto or Prosciuttino - Anna Russel (27:14)

Sort by artist:
First Artist: A-Ha
Last Artist: 064027125627!

Sort by album:
First Album: Abbey Road - The Beatles
Last Album: 808s & Heartbreak - Kanye West

Top Five Most Played Songs: 1. Will I See You In Heaven - The Jayhawks (47)
2. All the Right Reasons - The Jayhawks (45)
3. Save It for a Rainy Day - The Jayhawks (45)
4. Roadsinger - Yusuf (45)
5. Madman - The Jayhawks (44)

Search… Death: 45
Life: 260
Love: 538
Hate: 89
You: 1157
Sex: 12

Borrowed from jemsweb

Do you want… on Flickr.

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 09:56:00 +1000

Do you want… on Flickr.

The URL alphabet game

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:35:49 +1100

First Tim Bray and then D’arcy Norman did it, and then I realised I hadn’t blogged in so long that I should do it again.

The gist is, type the letters of the alphabet, and see what the browser suggests.

apple.com: Pretty obvious.
books.thepatrick.com.au: I’ve been wiring up my auth system for this recently, so been hitting it a lot.
chat.nodejs.org: a demo of a node.js based chat client
developer.apple.com: Splitting time between the Mac & iOS programs means neither won.
ebay.com.au: Been looking at Cisco ADSL routers lately
flickr.com: I haven’t forgotten it, really
github.com: all my source code lives here
heroku.com: hosts books, decade and auth
internode.on.net: my ISP
jpquake.wikispaces.com: had the shame list of poor behaviour by reporters
kirindave.tumblr.com: a blog of some description
localhost:8080: when your working on things that have their own web server… things end up in the list like this.
mail.m.ac.nz: webmail.
nodejs.org: Living in Node.
online.westpac.com.au: Apparently I visit online banking frequently… who knew ;)
pypi.python.org: For someone who doesn’t particularly like python I don’t seem to be good at avoiding it.
qantas.com.au: Planning two trips to NZ in two months means visiting airline websites frequently.
reader.google.com: I mix up my rss reading between Reader online and using Reeder on OS X/iOS
store.apple.com: Me, waiting for iPad 2? no…
tivo: An address to connect to my internal tivo-content-acquisition-tool
usvideo.org: Is awesome
vitrue.com: is what apple is using for their twitter feeds.
www.apple.com: Oh dear
xkcd.com: Not surprising.
yubico.com: Creators of the awesome Yubikey.
zd.net: Not sure how this ended up there, but hey, ended up reading some interesting news as a result of seeing it here.

New name, new look, same Patrick

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 23:56:46 +1100

Hi to my small number of remaining subscribers, good to have you here still.

Today I’ve moved my blog to a new domain: myio.com.au, and renamed it from Patrick’s Soapbox to my I/O. I’ve also refreshed the design to be in keeping with thepatrick.com.au.

Coming soon: 2010 In Review.

Software Update

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 23:14:08 +1000

I have changed my preferred way of delivering Rails (and other web content) from my own servers.

First change is from lighttpd to nginx. While lighttpd was a massive boost coming from Apache, especially in lower memory environments, it’s development didn’t seem to be continuing at a reasonable pace. Nginx, by contrast appears to be under active development and to have a lot of nice features - especially a much nicer configuration file format. Nginx continues the trend of lower ram usage for the same number of connections, and also far fewer processes.

Of course nothing is without a trade off. Nginx has traditionally been plagued by poor documentation in English, although this has improved a lot in the last year. It also doesn’t do traditional cgi. At all. Fortunately it does have very good reverse proxy support.

Next big change is from mongrel (and mongrel_cluster) to thin. Thin has excellent performance (and is also very predictable), nifty support for creating it’s own init.d script and a useful CLI tool for generating its config files (which are just yml files). Thin also provides excellent support for any rack app, not just rails ones. (coincidentally passenger now supports both nginx and rack apps).

Thin also solves the lack of CGI - my non rails scripts have been ruby scripts, so it was a simple matter of wrapping it in a little bit of rack and letting thin take care of running things.

One Year Later

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:51:00 +1100

It’s been a year since I last posted here. To say a lot has happened would probably be too much of an understatement. Perhaps the easiest way is to go with the big events and work on the rest afterwards.

As you may have been aware, in March of 2008 my Mum was diagnosed with liver, bowel and lung cancer. After seeming to be fairly good during my two week holiday at the end of August, two weeks after getting back to Canada she was back in hospital and didn’t come home. On September 27th I said goodbye for the last time. She was given 18 months, and managed it almost to the day. I still don’t have the words to say everything I’d like to say on this. It’s been 5 months. It feels like less.

On the way home for the August holiday I had a weekend in Sydney, with the wonderful @limburger2001, who is quite simply the highlight of 2009 for me. In December a job offer came for a Ruby on Rails development role in Sydney (the home of @limburger2001), 4 short weeks later I was here. Four weeks on and I’m loving it. Sydney is the fifth city I have lived in, and Australia the fourth country. I’m getting used to the whole “move whole life to another place” thing. Though I’m planning on Sydney being my home for beyond the foreseeable future.

Short summary of other things since my last post:

My Aunty Jill came to Vancouver to visit
I visited a Canadian ER 4 times in week, saw two neurologists, diagnosed with (a thank god) short lived case of trigemenal neuralgia. Thanks to same neurologists a new prescription drug means I no longer suffer from constant daily headaches (and consequently no longer need to take tramadol two-three times a day).
Taken citalopram, tramacet, hydromorphone, carbomazapine, nortriptyline, codeine, lorazepam, and at least two other prescription drugs I don’t recall. (Not all at once.)
Thanks to the above collection actually hit the ceiling and so my last two months of prescriptions in Canada were totally free. (Ignore the hundreds of dollars I spent before that. Whoever said drugs were cheap in Canada is deluded.)
I built a PVR in Objective-C for Mac owners who have a Motorola HD cable box (with firewire output), commonly found on Shaw cable.
I uploaded 175 photos to flickr
My boyfriend got me a lava lamp. (Notable not least of all because I started looking for one not long after I made my last post.)

Relying on third parties

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:44:00 +1100

As a computer geek I’ve always loved hosting everything myself. My website. My email. My blog. I’m a developer, so of course I like to tinker. The more I think about this the less it makes sense - all the time I spend mucking around keeping my basic things running could be time better spent building fun new things.

So, last year, when google made IMAP available, I moved my email there. I make use of appengine for hosting toy projects rather than having to set up and maintain additional apps on my own servers. I use twitter, because, well, what’s the point of it without the direct connections? Also I’m not sure I’d worry too much about the data loss if it disappeared (the contacts yes, but I’m sure we’d all find a way around that.)

So now begins an attempt at trusting someone else with my blog content. Something I care a lot more about preserving. I’ll see how well I get on here, and then export everything from my SimpleLog blog as HTML and have one less application to worry about.