Sean McNamara

Just took an interesting test on “What is your programmer personality?” It is based of the Myers-Briggs Personality Test and has been changed to relate to your programming personality type.

Your programmer personality type is:

DLSB

You’re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a Low level.
You’re from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don’t mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.

You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There’s no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

Find out what kind of programmer you are here!

So Halloween’s over now, today’s the first day back in college!
Trying to keep the blog active but it’s hard work with all the college assignments and a recent kick the immune system in health leading to falling behind in said assignments! Ah the fun.. thank god we are doing Java, any other language and I would be SCREWED by now! So head down now till Christmas, 5 weeks to go till the exams!
I’ll post when I can, till then friends, keep an eye out!

So nearly two months ago at this stage an order was put in at www.r4cards.co.uk for my younger brother for his birthday. The Product? A £26.95 8gig R4 card! It clearly says on the site that mainland Europe deliveries can take between 5 and 7 working days and that products are dispatched within 24 hours. It all looked good to me.

Then the nightmare of dealing with an online company without a phone line began.

After a week I emailed stating that I hadn’t recived the product yet and was told that I had not given them my shipping address, even though they had my billing address and it was the same, but I let it go, forwarded the address again and hoped for the best.

Another week past, another email was sent this time to no reply, I sent another email the next day. No reply.

I said I’d give them a month and then alert the bank to cancel the credit card transaction. A month came and went, still no card in the post. So I sent of another email to the customer service department letting them know that if they did not respond promptly I would be cancelling the order on the credit card.

STILL no reply!

So I logged on a couple of days ago [having not yet cancelled the order on the credit card] and see a note beside my account number saying [fraud].

I have to be honest, I had to laugh. What sort of a thrown together company is this? How am I the one committing fraud? Needless to say the bank has been contacted and the charge is going to be cancelled. I wont be using r4cards.co.uk again.

What kinda got me though is if you look at the website there is nothing but great reviews. All either 4/5 stars or 5/5 stars. Which leads me to believe that noone has encountered a problem with this company before [or they would have realised how easily their emails are ignored], or the far more likely, all those reviews are fake.

Anyway, I’ll be forwarding this post to the company now and hope to see a reply!

What is Earcandy?
EarCandy is a volume manager for PulseAudio that fades applications in and out based on your current activity. Meaning it can do handy things like muting your music playing when you decide to turn on a youtube video. EarCandy can sniff out applications to tell what kind of application they are

Some Screenshots:
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Video of it in action:

How to install Earcandy on Ubuntu Jaunty
You can do this by using the following command:

Then add the following to the end of the file:

Then you can install earcandy by using the following command!

My address has finally been sorted, there was some confusion with the post man and where I lived since moving into the newly built apartment, but today kubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” came through the door!

With its world-renowned Ubuntu core and the KDE 4.2 desktop, Kubuntu 9.04 gives users a well-rounded, feature-filled and elegant desktop.

Best of all these cd’s are free thanks to Shipit and ubuntu! Check it out here! I recommend anyone that has to fix computers to get themselves one, live cd’s really can be a lifesaver!

If you use URL shortening services like TinyURL, it may be worth your while to setup a domain shortening service on your own domain. This is quiet easily done with a WordPress plugin now.
YOURLS is a free PHP script created by Lester Chan and Ozh Richard that allow you to create something similar to TinyURL.

• It is easy to install.
• It has a statistic side that allows you to keep track of all the URLs you are currently using.
• It also easily allows you to choose between making your service open for all or just for you.
• It lets you have customizable links instead of random characters.
• Lastly it has a bookmarklet that allows you to make TinyURLs on the fly!

Download it and try it out!

This is a sponsored post..
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Try VIPRE Antivirus Software with their 30 day trial here!

The developers over at Google have come up with Noop, a new language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine.

“Noop (pronounced ‘noh-awp,’ like the machine instruction) is a new language that attempts to blend the best lessons of languages old and new, while syntactically encouraging industry best-practices and discouraging the worst offenses,” according to a description of the language on the Noop language Website.

Noop supports dependency injection in the language, testability and immutability. Other key characteristics of Noop, according to the Noop site, include the following: “Readable code is more important than any syntax feature; Executable documentation that’s never out-of-date; and Properties, strong typing, and sensible modern stdlib.”

Read More

I suppose your thinking why another language? Google explain this:

Our experience has been that developers often create code that’s hard to test and maintain, without realizing it. On a large software project, this can create problems later on for the whole team. In analyzing this problem, we found that the root cause in many cases was language features – like globally visible state, misused subclassing, and API’s that are easily misused. Noop will try to avoid these problems.

Noop avoids these problems by being opinionated, meaning it pushes you toward using good practices while developing software. It does this by;

I’m still only learning Java myself, have to this year with the course. But I hope to mess around with Noop sometime soon in the future!

If your using Ubuntu you can now start using Chrome, or Chromium as its known amongst the linux community. Daily builds of Chromium can be got from here.

You’ll need to add the following repositories to get Chromium:

Note: Substitute interpid with jaunty or hardy as needed!

Then you can then install it by opening a terminal and do the following command:

Of course this is still in Pre-Alpha so make sure to keep another browser installed!

This website is a little gem I came across last night. Will take and countdown from any time, given in words or figures. Even when open in a tab you can still see the timer continue to countdown! Have to say I like the use of these “subdomain” websites!

Go to E.ggtimer.com ->