You don't really appreciate what you have, until it's gone…
Monthly Archive for January, 2006
A couple of people have noted that I haven't posted much to this blog. Don't know whether that's a good or bad thing, though. 
The truth is, I've been extremely busy with everything else in my life that I haven't had a huge amount of time to write on the blog.
So here's what I've been up to:
- After a 3-week break, I'm back at work at Atlassian. Luckily, I was able to stay on at the company for my 3rd work placement! That's keeping me pretty busy, as I'm working full time.
- I'm still plodding along with Mat at The Little App Factory. I've moved us across to use JIRA as our bug tracking system, and aim to also use it as a support system (I guess that's a plug for Atlassian). It's not public at the moment, but that's something I am looking at doing in the future. On top of that, I've been working on the next version of Connoisseur (long overdue). I've taken a different approach this time, and have tried to follow the TDD approach as much as I can, and it's worked quite well. (I plan to write about testing user interface code, such as NSTableViews, using OCMock in the future.) I've had to rewrite much of the table code we were using, but I'm glad to say it's much cleaner and reliable now.
- To top all of that, I've started research for my thesis. I initially wanted to cover agile development methodologies, but have found myself gravitating towards XP and TDD in particular. A friend suggested an interesting angle for my thesis, which I'm also investigating. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to dedicate as much time to this as I had hoped. By the time I've done some programming and the support, it's 1-2am and I REALLY don't want to have to read and make notes on research papers. Ick.
That's about it, really. I've been trying to do more exercise, as I sit in a chair all day and night, and that can't be healthy. Soccer is great, and I hope to play a game of squash each week with a friend.
I would also like to do more with my time. I don't feel that I'm very socially responsible, and would like to be. I live a pretty peachy, comfortable life, and I want to help others who haven't had the opportunities I have been given (yes, it's cliche, deal with it :)). How I'm going to do that, I'm not sure, yet.
Jiminy Jillickers, Radioactive Man! You can now perform Subversion commands in Quicksilver (b48):
(via Rui)
A couple of friends and I went down to Melbourne over the weekend (more on that later, when I get the photos up). It was a great weekend, but a small event on Sunday afternoon really stood out in my mind.
We had just parked along the Esplanade at St. Kilda Beach, when a person from the car that had just vacated the same spot walked over and handed us their all-day parking ticket. We were stunned! Nothing like that ever happens in Sydney. To make it even weirder, as we hopped out of the car, another person walked over and gave us one more all-day ticket. In turn, when we left, we gave one ticket to the people in the car parking in our old spot and the other to another car on the street. They were just as flabbergasted as us!
Somehow, that just made the weekend. A person went out of their way to help us out, and we in turn felt motivated to do the same for others. It's funny how that works. I just wish some Sydney-siders could learn from this - by giving up seats on public transport, allowing someone to get onto the train before you (instead of barging through), or just holding the door open. Simple, short actions, really. It makes a world of difference.
Lucy and I flew back from Brisbane tonight (after spending time with my family in Noosa and going to the Woodford Folk Festival yesterday), but due to some freaky weather conditions in Sydney, we spent 45 minutes circling the city and braving the turbulence, before we were able to land. Needless to say, we're both now very, very glad to be on the ground. *phew*
