Well that was easier than I expected, having not upgraded my blog in years, I figured it was long overdue and am lucky not to have been defaced via vulnerability exploits. Moving from Wordpress 2.0.2 to 2.8.1 was a simple backup and upload of the latest source files. Hurrah!

Well it’s almost been a year since I last posted something here. I’m not even sure this is a worthwhile post but it’s one of the few free evenings I’ve had in a long time. I finally have a bit of time to sit down and log into Google reader and check up on what I’ve been missing.

Like 108,000 other people (at least, according to feedburner) I read Coding Horror. Jeff speaks a lot of sense, though he has deviated this year and if I’m honest I lost interest for a while. I’ll let him off though as I think in recent weeks he’s back on form. One thing I keep stumbling upon – in books (unfortunately I don’t have my Martin Fowler books with me to cite page numbers), magazine’s, news articles and blogs is this…

“Let me be quite clear on this point: if your team leader or manager isn’t dealing with the bad apples on your project, she isn’t doing her job.”

In case you didn’t catch that, I’m referring to the overly politically correct use of ’she’.

Now before I continue, I’d like to point out, I have absolutely nothing against women – I’m no sexist, in fact I think a mixed management/development/whatever team makes for the best results (so please hold off clicking that comment link to flame me for two more minutes…).

But… it’s really grates with me that authors and editors feel pressured to refer to hypothetical characters as female due to the politically correct zealous times we live in now. This particularly rubs me up the wrong way when reading books about programming – as we all know, we have a severe shortage of female programmers in our industry – I’m sure Joe programmer and I won’t be offended if they dare to use ‘their’ or heaven forbid… HE!

I think it draws more attention to the fact they’re not trying to sound sexist when ’she’ is used rather than a gender neutral ‘they’ or ‘their’. OK I’m done.

Ever since Google launched their maps service the direction code has pretty much sucked. Thankfully a long over due feature has now been added – draggable directions!

I think it’s safe to say Google now has other UK/European routing services like the AA and RAC beat. As for Streetmap, welcome to 1999!

For the second time this year I’ve rebooted my Linux box only to have it “kernel panic” on boot with a load of unrecoverable disk errors, bah! (just as I got subversion up and running again too)

So I hopped on to Dabs this morning and ordered myself a new hard drive (taking the opportunity to sample Seagate’s latest offering, with perpendicular storage no less!). Every time I buy a new hard drive I’m amazed at how much storage you can get for your money, I went for a 320GB drive for a mere £70!

Of course with a new disk I’m greeted with a new OS install (and recovering what data I can from the old drive!). I think I’ll give Debian another run as that’s the distribution of choice at Evolving Media.

I also wanted to play around with Creole, having read up on code generation a fair bit recently I stumbled across Propel (which uses Creole as a DB abstraction layer). However with no Linux machine I’ll take the time to catch up with some reading while I wait for my new drive to arrive…

I’ll get down to actually writing some code again one of these days!

Every once in a while I visit phpguru.org, however this morning I was shocked to see his lastest post.

I’ve never met Richard but have noticed his contributions to the PHP community on several occasions, I’ve written plenty of projects using his templating class as a base for my own. He worked at Web-Ideas before I joined them in 2004 so most of the developers I worked with knew him and spoke positively about him on occasion.

Here’s hoping the PHP Guru makes a speedy recovery!