John Topley’s Weblog

I’ve decided to take a break from updating this site. There’s a lot going on in my real life right now and I need to recharge my batteries.

Unbelievably, another year has passed and this site is now two years old. A lot has happened over the past year. I was threatened with legal action, SitePoint recruited me to write for them and I decided to diversify away from Windows.

Having become something of an Apple convert, I decided it was high-time I made a pilgrimage to the Apple store in London, so last weekend that’s what I did. It was also a good excuse to see Star Wars Episode III on the digital screen in Leicester Square, but this is yet-another-OS X-Tiger-review, not yet-another-Revenge-of-the-Sith-review!

This one’s a classic. For reasons too dull to go into, I needed to research the UK government’s e-GIF standard and ended up at the UK GovTalk website–setting standards for seamless electronic government. This site is not only very dull but is chock-full of documents about standards, and proudly displays the appropriate badges that proclaim as much.

A few weeks ago I finally got around to getting broadband Internet access at home after procrastinating for a few years in the face of a bewildering amount of choice and uncertainty over technical options.

This morning. 7:15 a.m. Bleary-eyed and reading my e-mails. An e-mail from PayPal asking me to verify my account.

I’m writing this on my new personal computer. It’s a lot more personal then my old one, which I still have. Some would say that it’s more personable too. I’ve bought myself an Apple PowerBook G4 12-inch and it’s just astonishing.

SitePoint have published what is the first of hopefully many articles that I’ll be writing for them. Apache Ant De-Mystified is a brief prelude to a revised version of the Jakarta Struts De-Mystified series, the first four parts of which have already been on this site.

I don’t know what I do for a living. I’m deadly serious, I don’t know what occupation to put against my name on forms, or precisely what to say when people ask me what I do. I want to say something that captures the creativity of programming or the unique thrill when the computer does something that I made it do.

Most organisations of any size that practise software development usually have a Real Programmer. I’m sure you know the type—they have a brain the size of a planet and are undoubtedly masters of their field.

I treated my computer to two upgrades for Christmas, neither of which has exactly worked out how I’d hoped. What follows is an abridged account of nearly three weeks of personal computing misery. It all begins with those upgrades…

Hello 2005, goodbye Microsoft. Don’t worry, I haven’t taken leave of my senses and ditched Windows for Linux at home—it’s a fine server OS but I don’t want it on my desktop. What I have done is finally ditch Internet Explorer and Outlook Express in favour of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird.