Here is something that I found on Reddit.com that made me chuckle. Something for all you super coders out there.

Well I took delivery of my spanking new Dell XPS M1730 laptop about a week ago and trust me when I say that it is an amazing piece of kit. Well, more to the point it was an amazing piece of kit until I woke up yesterday morning to find that it would not startup at all. Not even to the BIOS. It basically just makes a noise and then powers off. Dell actually sent someone out the next day (today) to replace the motherboard. The chap happily fitted the new part and smugly turned it on only to find that it is still broke. He has now ordered a new CPU and SLI 8800GTX cards for it, as they are the only parts left that could be knackered. Unfortunately he will not be back until Monday, which means that so far I have had my laptop working for 6 days and broken for 4 days. I must admit that a 60% uptime is not particularly impressive. I swear that I must be the only person in the world that could buy a computer worth nearly £2000 only for it to break within a week.

Here are a couple of videos of what it “was” like when it was actually working. I know that the lights officially make it a chavtop but I turn them off so its OK

Lovely Media

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I find myself apologising once again for the lack of posts in recent time. Unfortunately I do not have access to t’internet at my flat (but it might be coming soon) and I am usually too busy at work to actually post something (until now that is ).

Well as you all probably know by now, I am currently in Germany and working at Intergral on a new analytics product. You can read a little about the intitial rough release here if you want to know more about it. I was originally only meant to be here until September, but there is the possibility of going to France for 9 months or staying here for a further few months to work on a new software as a service product. Only time will tell which one I actually end up working on.

I must admit, after living back in Stoke for a while after having lived in Cambridge and then coming here to Stuttgart I do not particularly want to go back, so I might start looking for some opportunities that would allow me to move away again. I can’t see myself staying in Germany for ever, but I definitely do not see myself living back in Stoke either. Plus I need to get back to work with Johnny eventually, once we both have the money to continue.

I am now officially a certified Flex developer having took my exam last week at a prometric test centre and passed. It’s something that could come in useful in this media rich web world as I see more and more jobs that require knowledge in Flex/ActionScript. The company covered all expenses and obviously, trained me in the first place so I can’t complain .

They have also been very good by getting me a new laptop for personal/work use. My boss ended up buying my macbook pro from me and they did a deal for the rest. So I managed to get a new Dell XPS M1730 which was very very good of them to do. It is pretty much fully spec’d and cost around £1800 so you can imagine that I am very happy about that. I have not taken delivery of it yet, but Dell shipped it last Friday and it should be here come Wednesday.

I have spoken to John and things are going very well with his Stellant contract. He is going to America for a training course sometime soon and now has his blog listed on the Oracle blog list, which I can imagine is no easy task. Although reading his blog is now a hard task, having to filter through all the Stellant advice to get to the personal stuff .

I hope to keep posting as and when I get the chance. Hopefully this could be sooner rather than later if t’internet is installed in my building within the next few weeks. Until then, keep safe.

Having developed with Rails for a little bit now I have been eager to find out whether Rails in its current 2+ form will actually scale after having heard so much bad press from different areas. I thought that it might be interesting to jot down in one place my findings. One thing that I would like to say first though is that I am not a great believer in reinventing the wheel. I find that I lot of things that already work fine are being “railsified” just for the sake of it, rather than for any particular reason.

1. Speed and Scalability

Firstly Ruby is slower than some of the other popular languages. A fact not entirely missing in the world, but as most things it is being worked on as we speak. I remember not to long ago people bitching about the speed of Java, but over the many years it’s been out it has managed to get faster with each new version. A very good article is “On Ruby on Rails Criticism” is a very good article and should be read. He has a very good discussion based on how communities should embrace honest criticism, allowing them to focus on what should be corrected. Read more »