I still can’t decide how much I should publish right now about my product plans, but I’ve achieved a couple of technical milestones in the past few days, and I am therefore happy. So there. I’ll have to leave you in suspense about what those milestones might actually be.
I got branded on the weekend by my friends at Pepsmedia.com. It was quite a revelation – watching Andrew extract a few ideas from me (really, just what colours I like, and a list of websites that I liked) and throw together a website. Quite a talent!
The best part of it was that the bug survived! Andrew rotated it 45° and, as if by magic, it looked cool! Well, at least, a lot less daft than it did before. He’s also grown thicker legs and a thicker shell, err, line around the edge. So here is Bug Mark IV.
I’m going to have to pick a name for him one day. Things like Boris or Bertie are a bit too obvious. Maybe “Bitty”, except that to anyone who hasn’t seen Little Britain it just sounds nerdy (and to anybody who has, it’s just plain scary). Hmmm (thinks…) Suggestions welcome…
I was reading about the built-in dictionary in Mac OS X. I didn’t know that it appeared whenever you held down Command-Control-D. Cool feature!
I happened to move my mouse over Adrian and Taylor, and the dictionary reported that they were both cities in south-Eastern Michigan. It’s true…
Where are your names?
I’ve realised that the name “Macrobug” is quite similar to Macsbug. But I suspect all the ‘new Mac users’ (post iMac or OS X) won’t have used it. It was the evil low-level debugging tool which sprang up in the event of a crash on a Mac. (If and only if you had it installed, of course).
It was quite clever really, although I can’t remember much about it.
The Macrobug user interfaces will be much less frightening than Macsbug, of course!
CodeWeavers have just released a beta of WINE for Macs. Sadly I don’t yet have an Intel Mac so I can’t give it a go, but if anyone has one, can they give WINS a go on it? Maybe also the CodeWarrior compilers, perhaps even with Tomsci’s X-Code Plugin for Symbian development?
Lots of good stuff here: OmniGroup’s list of their favourite Mac shareware.
I really wanted to find a name for this blog that wasn’t just “Macrobug Blog”, as I don’t want it to be too closely related to what I’m working on.
For a while I was going to call it “Ade on a Train”. Why? There are two reasons.
Firstly, I’ve been meaning to get around to starting a blog for about a month now. I only finally did it because I happened to be on a train and had nothing better to do. The few articles I’m posting now will kick-start the blog and cause me to spew forth all sorts of snippets about things. So, the fact that I was on a train is what finally got this blog started.
The second, more important, reason, is that it sounds a bit like “Joel on Softwareâ€. This is in homage to a similar blog (www.joelonsoftware.com) written by Joel Spolsky which describes the activities of a larger (50 person?) software start up in the US.
Joel’s blog, as you can tell from the name, talks quite a lot about software development. Not really the software itself – but more about techniques for software development. Mine, however, will look more at the business side of things.
I’m also not quite sure when Joel’s blog actually begun, but mine is starting from the very embryo of the company. So you get to see the very earliest beginnings.
Why did I not call it Ade on a Train? Because it was a very rubbish name.
Obviously, starting a software company you need to have a Source Code Management system. I chose subversion, because I know it, and it’s well regarded, and open-source.
Installing it on MacOS X turned out to be quite easy, once I’d found this Apple article (everything else I could find referred to older versions of MacOS X).
I used the latest versions of Apache (2.2.3), SVN (1.3.2) and PHP (5.1.6), and the walk-through still worked!
Everything worked fine, except:
My wife managed to leave her keys in the door last night (we think) and they have since got pinched (we think). So, we’ve spent all evening running around changing locks.
Normally, she’d shoot me for posting this in public. But she seems to be very excited by all this blogging lark, and wanted me to tell everybody that when changing a lock, they should take the old lock with them to the DIY store, to make sure they get the right sort of replacement.
Bless.
I’m sure I’m going to get into trouble for posting this anyway.