Well it’s been a while… a very long while.

First things first - you will have noticed a theme change. Previously I was using a custom WordPress theme that I’ve grown bored of. So recently I’ve decided to change it in order to inspire me to blog a bit more. This seems to have worked well so far, as I’m writing this!

Secondly, one interesting thing I’ve been meaning to share. I use TextMate a lot, and recently went on the hunt for a decent new theme that works well in highlighting different types of syntax. Then I discovered Monokai. Put simply, it is pure syntax highlighting beauty and works a treat when I’m coding in the usual (x)HTML, CSS and PHP. I particularly find it works well with OO PHP and more specifically, CakePHP, which I am now using pretty much everyday.

So go download it, you won’t be disappointed!

A preview of some CakePHP client work using Monokai TextMate highlighting

If you’re like me and you can’t understand why the headsets aren’t used for anything purposeful other than hurling abuse, shouting of “I ****** your mum” statements, trash talk and general crap then you might want to read on to solve your problem. Keep reading »

It has indeed, as I have been a bit busy lately.

To update you, I have recently started my own freelance company called Fivetwelve, which specialise in web design, development and a whole host of other things. Keep reading »

Recently I’ve been seeing Zend Framework pop up more and more. Since the aim of a framework is to “provide a skeleton application” that basically saves me, the developer, time; I was interested. Keep reading »

Does anyone remember the game called Spore that was announced what seems like a decade ago? You probably don’t because it hasn’t been mentioned for a while but you can soon get up to speed if the feeling so strikes you.

I’ll explain if you’re too lazy to click. An expert game designer (one of the best the industry has seen, in fact), Will Wright, announced a couple of years ago a culmination of all his previous efforts into some kind of “you play God and control evolution of a unicellular organism right through to the space age” game. It’s even a massively online single player game, which is a bit different. Will Wright was obviously the man behind Sim City and The Sims, but you knew that already. Hence why Spore is a bit of a morph of both with new concepts as well.

Let’s move on and get to the point. Finally, the game is set for release to a few platforms at the beginning of September this year. But just to trigger some drool amongst avid followers of the development process, EA decide to release a small taster to the community in the form of creature development. If you watched the video, you’ll see what I mean by creature development.

This new software is known as the Spore Creature Creator and is available for PC and Mac users alike, and is a stripped down version of the full game’s creature creation module, for free. The idea is that lots of people with different levels of creativity (and sometimes sanity) start sculpting weird, wonderful and slightly concerning creatures that are sometimes more fit to be shown to a courtroom during a sanity hearing. Then, they hit a little share button and send them to the “Sporepedia” which is a database of lots of creatures that will apparently be used to document in the full game lots of combinations that can be made by the game. At the time of writing, there are 860,902 creatures. And that’s only ones that people have bothered to upload… it’s like a new breed of social networking. It’s like some kind of distributed imagination!

How many games do you see where the blurb on the back says “your imagination is the only limit”? Well I’ve seen lots, and I can tell you that it certainly applies here. Naturally, I decided to put the theory to the test and made some very strange discoveries.

My Spore Profile
Click, if you dare, and check out my creations. I’ll be adding new ones all the time.

Bit of a passing post here. I’m busy packing some stuff up and just put a song on that I should of shared with everyone a long time ago… but I kind of forgot about the whole riff of the week thing I had going.

But more to the point, if you haven’t already heard it, get hold of Slip And Slide (Suicide) by Kosheen. It’s off the album Resist (which is fantastic). Buy it off iTunes - I got mine for about £6.99 or something similar. It’s cheap, easy and great for lazy people who don’t like fighting through hordes of pensioners in your local high street, or waiting for the very useless Royal Mail to bring your copy from Amazon.

Enjoy!

Sorry about that, had a spot of down-time over night. I was making some changes to the local copy of my site that I use for development.

One change I made was the wp-config file which specifies the criteria for Wordpress to log in to the MySQL database. Naturally, my local copy is different to my remote copy, and I accidentally copied over the remote copy with the local file…

It’s all sorted now though.

A few months ago I remember speaking on the phone to Microsoft’s support team because I couldn’t activate a copy of Office 2007. Because I was using it on a Boot Camp partition and sometimes booting it from within OS X with VMware Fusion, naturally the whole Microsoft activation system got a bit confused with the constant hardware changes. So they thought I was a software pirate…which I’m not, despite being completely aware of the whole activation process after years of experience working with the stupid system.

But anyway, on the phone to their team, predictably somewhere in India, I got absolutely nowhere after speaking to a bod, a supervisor and a manager. The result: a downgrade to a dodgy copy Office 2003 and a complete waste of money with regards to Office 2007. So if you read this, Microsoft, why not get in touch and help me activate my software? Don’t complain about the copy of software I’m using when I can prove my purchase of Office 2007 and it’s down to your incompetence that I’m doing it. It’s just pathetic.

With Apple, things are massively different. Recently my MacBook developed a crack in the plastic, resulting from wear and tear near where the clamshell magnets meet the main casing. It’s still well within warranty, so after discovering it seemed like a common problem, I took it into my local Apple store in Kingston.

For those who don’t know, Apple support works in a unique way. Here’s the difference. With Microsoft, you ring a number that costs a body part per minute and speak to an Indian lady who doesn’t even know the difference between a washing machine and Windows XP. With Apple, you go onto their fantastically designed website and use a system called Concierge to book an appointment with a “genius” at your local Apple store. Granted, there aren’t many stores nationwide. But I’m lucky in that respect.

Genius - that’s a good word. Things are slightly different when you do it the Apple way, because every store has at least a genius (I’m guessing) and every single one is sent to the HQ in Cupertino, California to be intensively trained. Wow.

So I go and speak to the genius, who has a unique passion for the product and the brand which just radiates from the communication. Straight away he admitted that the crack was a design fault and even if the MacBook was out of warranty, they’d replace it for free because it was their problem. With Microsoft, you just get told you’re a software pirate by someone with an IQ of 7.

“Our current lead time is seven to ten working days, unfortunately. But we will replace the entire case, keyboard, and so on” he told me. That’s a long time, but I explained that I’ve got a new MacBook Pro on the way so I’ll wait for that to turn up and then bring in the old one for repair. The conversation was far from over. “Will you be looking to migrate your documents over to the new notebook?” he asked. The conversation continued with him explaining the best way of moving over my accumulated digital junk to my new purchase. Wow.

Making the most of his expertise, I decided to ask him about my Leopard upgrade woes. “Yeah, sometimes stability can be an issue when doing an upgrade from Tiger, but if you choose ‘Archive and Install’ as an option from the lower right of the installation screen, I’ve found that can make the difference from a sound install to a bad one.” he happily told me.

Well there we have it. That’s Apple, going the extra mile. If you came to this page looking for reasons to go Mac over Windows, here’s your answer.

At the moment I’m aware some of the styles are slightly off what they are intended to be on this site. As far as I know, the image border problem affects IE and Firefox users. It seems to be ok with Safari.

Over the next few days I will look at solving the problem.