John Topley’s Weblog

With 2010 having finally flown the nest of time after spending far too long living off its parents, I once again wanted to record my favourite tweets of the year just passed.

With 2009 receeding to a distant dot in the rear-view mirror of life, I wanted to take a moment to record my favourite tweets of the past year. I think it’s particularly important to preserve them for posterity, as I read somewhere that Twitter don’t store tweets indefinitely.

The Peugeot 308 and “Glove” from The Beatles’ film “Yellow Submarine”.

A comic strip that shows that if you use the keyboard to rename the “My Recent Documents” menu item in Windows XP, it reverts to its default name but the new name is stored in the registry and survives reboots.

I absolutely love this spoof commercial from the Rails Envy guys, so I make no apologies for embedding it here in case you haven’t seen it yet!

I was recently extolling the virtues of the Mac in a guest post on my friend John’s blog and I mentioned that you can buy a five-user Mac OS X family pack for the good-value price of £139.

I just had a nice e-mail from Jesus. It’s cool that he’s a reader. Maybe he’s here for the Ruby on Rails tips?

I learned something new about Windows today. “So what?” you may ask, but I thought it was slightly interesting because if I had to categorise what sort of Windows user I was then I’d probably plump for the expert category. And that means that learning something I didn’t know about using Windows is noteworthy for me.

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.

In order to be considered for the prestigious E-Mail Of The Year award, correspondents have to demonstrate a mastery of the English language that verges on childlike, a flair for getting straight to the point without any of those social niceties like introductions, but most of all, the point that they’re getting to has to be so off-wack as to leave me paralysed with incredulity and completely incapable of replying to them.

Starting a new J2EE project is a daunting undertaking. The technology choices alone are myriad and bewildering. Can you afford to fail by not using RDD?

I was asked today why I favour HTML DIVs over tables for laying out my JavaServer Pages. This is the reply I gave…

There are 10 kinds of people in this world—those who can understand binary and those who can't.