Static IPs in VMWare Fusion

It’s a simple problem, but one I keep forgetting how to resolve whenever I need to nuke a box. So in case anyone else needs to do it, here’s how to give a static IP to a guest OS in VMWare Fusion.

Billed Under Client Code “Frosty”

Dear client,

my apologies for not being diligently working as I probably should have been today. If you were not aware, it’s been snowing the past few days and being the rather large kid that I am, I decided that we were unable to get to the office (despite it being eight steps from my bedroom).

To compensate for this, I did something much more productive. It’s a prototype implementation of a Briggs inspired solution to the classic winter design problem:

Yep, I engineered a freakin’ snowman. He’s 5ft 8in tall, a few feet across the shoulders and should hopefully last at least a few days.

Normal service will resume tomorrow.

Barcamp Manchester

Photo by Cat Ashton

Can I sleep yet?

Barcamp Manchester 2 happened this weekend (twitter: #bcman2). As you can guess by the title, this was the second barcamp run in Manchester, and at 200 people, was one of the biggest community event held in the area for a while. We had a great range of people turning up, from Londoners bringing N900s, through to locals playing with giant robots. What happens when you take that amount of people, a near limitless supply of tea, coffee, soft drinks and sweet things and put them in an awesome space? Sessions happen, discussions are had and people come up with ideas^tm.

Venue

Barcamp this year was run in the Contact theatre (twitter: @contactmcr), which is not just a phenomenal space (several stages/cinemas, rooms and excellent communal bar spaces), but comes with THE BEST STAFF I HAVE EVER KNOWN AT A BARCAMP. Seriously, considering they were there for two days solid, they came into sessions, ran session, did some beatboxing and honestly added to the atmosphere. They really wanted to get engaged, and even came up on stage to do some powerpoint karaoke. You guys rock – we’re definitely working with you again!

Talks

I admit it, I didn’t get to many talks this time around. We got a little wrapped up in making stuff happen, then sleeping, then taking a much needed walk. I did make a talk on Monotouch, the port of the Mono project the the iPhone. Looked cool, especially as a .NET developer by trade.

For those that are visiting my blog from my android demo talk, you’ll find the resources on the talk and the code on this blog post. If you have any questions, catch me on the usual channels: twitter and e-mail.

Food

Pizza. Cheese And Ham Coissants. Sushi. Ice Cream. Nuff said.

Fredrick’s Ice Cream. At Barcamp, we serve only the best.
Photo by Cat Ashton

Evening

Paul Sylvester – Magic’s Best Kept Secret rocked the floor yet again. This time he was performing close up magic, working with small groups at a time. The perfect combination of magic, pizza and some light drinks was spot on, and the magic kept going all evening. People splintered out for some Beatles Rock Band (note: next time – bring the lot. If I ever hear another Beatles song it’ll be too soon), and then we moved for the time honoured tradition of Powerpoint Karaoke. I take it no-one got videos of my impression of a Sweedish IKEA designer? I’m not sure I can repeat that gig.

Thanks go to all the organisers for making it happen and the army of minions which spent the weekend running around making sure that stuff happened. We now need a month to recover. WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S GEEKUP MANCHESTER TOMORROW?

Euro Hotels London – Place to Avoid

Fawlty Towers from Wikipedia

I travel quite a bit. Mostly around the UK, I end up visiting clients all over the place. A travel and stay cheaply, I require very little. I ask for a clean room, half decent shower, and pleasant staff. That’s about it. I have stayed in some dodgy guest houses, scary hotels and borderline B&Bs. But on no occasion have I been a place quite like this. I was so impressed by their attempts to thwart my enjoyment of my stay I decided it deserved a blog post.

This is a long post with pictures. More below the cut.

Read more »

Geek Girl Dinner 4

Photo by Cat Ashton

We like Geek Girl Dinners. Pleasant company, good food, good conversations. Cat Ashton and I attended the fourth geek girl dinner in Manchester, this time being hosted at, Sweet Mandarin (who also host regular tweetups). This time, we had the company of Dom “The Hodge” Hodgson talking on http://www.geekery.in/ and community events, and Liv Wild from Thoughtworks, discussing productivity and happiness.

Good food. Good company. Awesome.

Also an awesome announcement that BAE Systems would be putting a large amount of cash behind the entire GGD movement. There’s also some mumblings of organising Girl Geek Teas, as a more frequent meet up with the same ideas of Geek Girl Dinners.

Here’s a few videos from the event. Apologies for the orientation – you would have thought that Youtube would give you an option to rotate them once they’re uploaded. Audio quality is a bit pants as well, taken on the phone. As is the video quality. In general, they’re a bit pants – but you can at least get a feel for how the evening went.

An Android App In 20 Minutes

Wikimedia Photo

On Saturday I presented a short talk on building a basic android application in 20 minutes. This was the full process, from generating the shell project, to writing the code, generating the layouts, testing on the emulator, signing the application and uploading the binary. I wasn’t able to do this as “live” as I would have liked – I’ll perfect the routine in time for Barcamp Manchester, but the group did a good job of being a dummy audience.

For those interested the application is called “Barcamp Blackpool” (available on the Marketplace). It downloads the latest 20 tweets with the bcblackpool hash tag and displays them as a list. Clicking on an individual item will then launch a browser session showing the tweet on the twitter website. Basic but functional. The source code for the application is available on Google Code.

If there are other things people would like to see in a 20 minute Android demo – please feel free to comment on this post and I’ll see what I can do for Barcamp Manchester.

Barcamp Blackpool

Photo by Josh Semens

This weekend saw the first Barcamp Blackpool, held at the Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Many thanks go to @ruby_gem for organising the event, and to the various sponsors, including Yahoo for sponsoring the all important bar and Pixel Programming for ensuring we had a venue and noms. My apologies to to all those I may have caused hangovers to for the following day. We also managed to lose Phil Winstanley for a few hours.

Talks were wide ranging, from some light-hearted ones on upcoming social network Pokebook through to code reviews of the new W3C website and my own talk on building and publishing an Android application in 1 hour 30 minutes 20 minutes (code to follow).

Evening entertainment was provided by Paul Sylvester, who provided the BEST MAGIC SHOW I HAVE EVER SEEN (don’t let the website fool you). So much so, there’s speculation about hiring him for one of the next Geek Girl Dinners.

You know, XKCD is right…

You know, it’s absolutely right. We’ve got so obsessed over security of liquids, toothpastes and belt buckles that people appear to have overlooked that laptops, iPods and mobile phones are potentially a hell of a lot more lethal. Maybe we should just point to all people with beards and laptops and scream “terrorist” instead.

Fundamentalists Welcome

Our industry is passioned and opinionated. This is a statement of fact. Be it Emacs vs Vi, Linux vs Windows, iPod vs … errr^[1], people often fall in love with tools, philosophies and companies. And this is fine. Within the industry we call them “holy wars”, since the genuine fundamentalists have gone long past the tenets of logic and rationale (at least to the naked eye).

And like all good religions, their virtuous leaders are exalted^{[2]. Ballmer, Jobs and Stallman, each seen as personifications of the ideals they represent. Ballmer identifies with the corporate world, where big commercial software dominates. A big man with a bald head and a known temperament, he’s a figure people associate with boardrooms and big money. Jobs appears as a slight of a man, usually seen at keynotes with a trademark roll-neck and jeans he’s become the representative of design and cool, embraced by the younger generation. Stallman is another large guy, but rather than corporate groomed appears in t-shirts with long ragged hair and beard to match. A visual throwback to the hippy days, he comes with the embodiment of “free”, leading the free software revolution.}

As any good personification of an ideal, their attitudes and ideas tally with their images. Ballmer has spoken repeatedly about the values of the corporate workplace and denounced free software as evil, Jobs speaks regularly on the functions of design and Stallman denounces any software or standards not truly free as evil.

And this is fine.

Because these contrasting attitudes set up a triangle of views with these figureheads and beliefs as cornerstones. There are those that will naturally gravitate towards these polarising opinions and those that will middle around the centre, or leaning between two points of view, subscribing to different tenants of each.

Some people will insist on using nothing but free software. Some people will insist on using nothing but beautiful, design driven products. Some people are driven by the business world and purely by suits and management. Some people may be primarily driven by business, but enjoy rollneck sweaters and iPods at the weekend. Some people may use free software on top of their proprietary systems. Some people may use free software on top of their business OS to talk to their design driven MP3 player^[3].

And this is also fine.

The strength of a community is based upon the mix of people within it. Even within domain-specific communities, there will be a range of philosophies and beliefs which everyone will not subscribe to. And although we may occasionally decry these firm believers, and believe them to be as much a fundamentalist as their own religious leader we should respect (even if we disagree) their position because they provide the cornerstones of diversity for the community. The more diverse a community, the larger the range of interests and the higher the liklihood of intelligent (if sometimes a little crazy) discourse. The better the quality (not necessarily quantity) of debate, the more life exists within a community, and the higher the longer the community is likely to last. I would like to see those communities I take part in last for a very long time.

Humanist vs Belief
Free vs Commercial
Pragmatic vs Puritan
Emacs vs Vi

So I say welcome to the fundamentalists.
I say welcome to the middlers.
All communities need both.

[1] I’m kidding, there’s plenty of alternatives. I use a Sansa Clip myself. [2] For the sake of simplicity, I’m restricting the set to three. I realise that in reality the triangle is more like a multi-sided polygon, but it creates a more dramatic image this way.
[3] Did I get all the combinations there?

First Techcrunch – Now Forbes

Apparently, hitting the “publish button” on articles that aren’t finished, or in some cases even started is all in vogue this year. First of all techcrunch manage foot-in-mouth syndrome over Spingate, and now Forbes has managed one, publishing an internal memo or note over the Polanski affair. Link available as long as it’s live.

This begs several questions:

• Who is Frank?
• Who are the sources in the Justice Department.
• Does no one even look for the draft button anymore?