With the Yahoo Hackday coming up at the end of this week i’ve started to think about myself and how my development habits have changed over the last 5 years.

I think the big changing point for me was back in Jan’05 when i moved back down to Bradford from Newcastle after 7 months contracting for the South Tyneside Council. At some point within the first few days of 2005 i suddenly lost all my web work i ever had thanks to my hosting provider doing a runner and leaving everyone with no access to there past content.

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Although i’ve been working on the web for many years now (almost 10 years commercially!) i’ve never really got involved with the more social side of the web.

For some strange reason i’ve always avoided events like WordCamp, not because i’m a pure geek refusing to meet with other people but because i just never really had the time or energy to devote to it.

Then last weekend i bumped into my old work mate Adam Ray (I need you URL Mr Ray!) and he started going on about the Yahoo Hackday that was coming up on the 9th-10th of May and told me that i had to go down with him. It’s a free event that starts of with a couple of tech talks about Yahoo’s new APIs and interfaces but then they have a 24hr Hackathon where you are encouraged to mash up there apps and see what every one produces.

I’m really excited about the event now as i’ve also found out that Chris Garret of chrisgarrettmedia.com will be down for the event, now i’ve never met Chris in real life but it will be really good to do so and we may even get together for a bit of collaboration hack on the weekend. I’m sure his design flare will trigger Adam’s senses!

Well i’ve been running OS X on my PC for a good couple of months now in my little hackint0sh form and i’ve loved it - i’ve been ranting and raving about it like a true fanboy.

People have turned on me for switching, i would have done just the same to others who made the switch myself. But as soon as i started using it, i just fell in love with it all although i still argue that there overpriced and this is causing me a problem now!

You see i wish to buy a Macbook so that i can use OS X at work and when i’m out and about, but i just cant justify paying nearly £1000 for a notebook that has the same specs of a £300 Laptop

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I would like to introduce my new theme for my humble little blog, for many years now this site has been left to gather dust in the corner of my mind while I constantly struggled with my desires for being creative. But then a couple of days ago i started to play with 960.gs grid system and instead of stopping after a couple of minutes like i usually would i carried on… and this is where i am three and a bit days later.

Now, you will have to bare with me as the theme is no where near finished, i mean where are the catergory links? where is the home button? why have i released this now?!?!? - is what i hear you all screaming but don’t worry i’ll get there it’s just taking a bit longer than i wished as i’m really enjoying the design process at the moment.

One thing i will be looking at doing with this new theme is making more use of “Social Media” outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, humyo and of course last.fm which is the first one i have implemented.

The last.fm disk line (What else would you call it?!) on the homepage is powered by fmTuner but was inspired by komodomedia.com’s sexy music album overlay images. The disk line is still not 100% complete as i plan on adding a little animation when you move between disks and i would also like to keep the last selected disk highlighted.

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I’ve come across a couple of great javascript write ups over the last couple of days and instead of forgetting them and never reading them i’m going to stick them on a post up here instead.

JavaScript explained

Explaining some dark corners of JavaScript, browsers, or Dojo for the 100th time I realized that I already did it on numerous occasions, and some of my answers are published on public web sites. So I decided to round up the most general ones I posted on StackOverflow and publish links to them here for a future reference.

Javascript and the DOM by James Padolsey

While frameworks such as jQuery, Prototype and MooTools are great ways of suppressing browser bugs and speeding up development, it’s important to know and understand the underlying technologies. This series intends to tell you what you need to know about JavaScript and the Document Object Model (DOM). Even if you swear by a particular library this will still benefit you - knowing how something works under the skin can only be a good thing!

Last weekend i made my first big “Whoopsy” in the world of OSX and as usual it was triggered by trying to tweak things to work better, but i failed - which caused me to have to re-install OSX back onto my PC. After doing this i thought i would take the chance to try out some other finder.app alternatives as i had started to find Path Finder to be a little bloated for my tastes.

So i started searching on Google for something else and this is when found FolkLift from the guys at Binary Nights. Straight away the simple interface really impressed me as it was just what i was looking for… at the time, but i suddenly found it to be a little too plain for my likings.

I’m still using it but i’ve found myself reverting back to finder.app as it was a little bit too simple and didn’t allow me to customize the view to my liking. I don’t think i’ll ever find anything like Windows Explorer for the mac but it really is interesting to see just how frustrating i’ve found things at time.

I’ll keep looking!

It’s been a month, maybe even two!? Since my move over to Mac OSX and i’ve started to get annoyed by a few things - not enough to push me back to Windows though, but enough to have me muttering “Why, Steve Jobs why!” and one of these grips is the Finder application…

Finder is the Windows Explorer for the Mac and if im honest its alright for your average joe, it gets you from A to B and does its job very well - but when trying to do mass file management like copying tv episodes over to your network drive its just a complete and utter ARSE, until now

Path Finder is an alternative to Finder by the guys at Cocoatech and my word its lovely. I’ve only had it installed for 5 mins and i’m already blogging about it - the big thing i like about it is the ability to have Dual Finder windows open within the same application. That is a great big thumbs up for me as it will make moving files around so simple.

Path Finder is an award-winning file browser and management application for Mac OS X. If you’ve ever wished Apple’s Finder just did *feature X* or *Y*, Path Finder may be what you’ve been looking for.

I can’t tell you much more about it at this stage as i’ve not really used it much so why not just head over to cocoatech.com and find out more yourself.

I have a couple of domain names that i’ve bought over the years for various projects but never really got round to doing anything with them or in some cases built very successful project that have since shut down.

I’ve always kept hold of these domains on the off chance that i will actually do something with them but i think its about time to let them go as i dont use them and someone else might just like them!

eurocss.net
gamer-gear.co.uk
agdgdgwngo.co.uk

The one most people will be interested in will be EuroCSS.NET as it was THE site for EU Counter-Strike:Source at one point - if anyone is interested in any of them get in touch and we can have a chat!

I’m still happily plodding along with OSX on my hackint0sh and still boasting about it to anyone that will listen but there are still a few things that keep tripping me up and today’s one was a mac lack of the ability to “cut and paste” which to me just seems strange as i use this daily with file management.

A quick google and i found myself on this post form Mac Rumours where i was shocked to see this response

You cannot cut and paste a file. It simply does not work this way. If you want to move a file then move it. Cut and paste is not move. What happens if you forget to paste? Lost file.

Maybe its just a Window thing but i though Cut was as common as Copy :S i guess not! Lucky the last response on the thread pointed me in the direction of “FileCutter” a simple context menu extension that adds the ability to Cut before paste or to copy an alias of a file.

Great stuff

Anyone else noticed that i’ve been bloggin a lot more since i’ve been on OSX? I wouldn’t say the quality of my posts are great but least its a start just be nice to see some comments from you lurkers!