• Money Chart. I love these kind of data visualisations. (0) #

Devotion to Apple

I read Marco’s post about the Asus Zenbook and I have a bit of an issue with his view. Is he certain that logic board design was Apple’s and not Intel’s or a manufacturers like Foxconn? Even if it was Apple’s did they not simply copy the overall product design of companies such as Sony, who have had a range of powerful yet portable laptops out for a while, or Dell (with the Latitude X1) with the MacBook Air?

Don’t get me wrong I’m a fan of Marc’s blog and I’d love a MacBook Pro laptop again but I do have an issue with the blind devotion some Apple users have to the Apple brand sometimes.

• Coding Horror: Serving at the Pleasure of the King. Great article about the Apple ecosystem. I agree with Jeff as a consumer I love Apple and their products but as a developer I have major issues with the way they control their ecosystem. (0) #

• Google/Amazon Platform Rant. Pretty interesting read about service platforms at Google & Amazon from Steve Yegge a current Google employee. His follow up post is about working for Jeff Bezos. (0) #

• Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support (via) - this is a major issue with the Android ecosystem that needs to be resolved. Google/handset manufacturers need to remember consumers are being signed up to 18-24 month contracts. (0) #

JUDCon 2011: London

I had the chance, thanks to work, to attend JUDCon 2011 with Matt in London last week. It was a great conference overall, well organised, talks on relevant subjects, held at a great venue, even the complimentary wifi worked well!

The most interesting subjects for me were:

BoxGrinder - A tool for automating the creation of virtual appliances from installing the operating system to downloading and configuring 3rd party software like Apache HTTD.
JBoss Forge – An extensible CLI tool to incrementally add framework support to Java EE projects.
Arquillian – An extensible enterprise test platform that takes your test to the container. It also integrates with Selenium (otherwise known as Arquillian Drone).
JBoss AS7 – The JBoss Application Server completely rewritten from AS6, based on JBoss Modules (OSGi).

Best talk of the conference had to go to the last one we saw from Andrew Lee Rubinger who gave a great overview of JBoss AS7, specifically the re-write, Arquillian and rapid enterprise programming.

Hopefully JUDCon will come back to the UK again next year.

What motivates us

My manager sent me the link to this video today, the message of the talk was something I’ve felt personally for a while but it’s good to see research back it up. It’s why I code at evenings & weekends on my little side projects such as Twitile.  The visualisation of the message is also quite unique.

The author also has a book out on the subject called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

• Unproductive Day || Joel Bradbury. I love the minimalist design of Joel’s site, this is exactly the kind of design I want for this site if I ever get round to it! (0) #

• HTC Desire 2.3 update begins via DIY install. Not too happy about this poor attempt of an update, it was only offered due to the backlash they received.  This is the second flagship HTC Android phone I’ve had that has been abandoned after a year of me having it. This has got to be sorted out if networks are going to offer these phones on 18-24m contracts! I’ll be looking at other brands of Android phones next. (0) #

• Complaint Sent to BBC Regarding F1 Coverage. – I totally agree. This is terrible news for F1 coverage in the UK. (0) #