A few of us went along to day to the A C Grayling and Richard Dawkins’ lectures at the Sydney Opera House today.
There’s something sublime about an English Professorial lecture.
Grayling and Dawkins Lecture
March 7th, 2010CSS Pain
July 7th, 2009I decided to update my blog look and feel. I normally don’t play much in the UI space but I figured I’d have a crack at it to improve my skills.
After mucking around with float:left, auto margins and friends, I can’t help but wonder what really was the problem with using tables?
I’ll keep at it.
Catching Up
March 31st, 2009I figured it was time to start blogging again.
Since I last blogged, we’ve bought a house. It turns out that owning a house requires more that just “owning”, you have to maintain it too. So I’m giving this as my excuse for not blogging much.
As ever, tempus fugit …
Pimping My Build
June 3rd, 2008JavaOne was a little different for me this year for two reasons. It was my first time as part of Atlassian and also the first time I have been a speaker.
Atlassian’s booth was really busy and consistently so for all the pavilion sessions. Being on a booth is hard work although you get into a groove after a while. I thought the ball sorting demo of the Java Real-Time beside us would be annoying but it wasn’t so bad in the end.
I like the fact that the booth was mostly staffed by developers from all the Atlassian product teams. As a developer it’s nice to connect to customers directly.
Speaking at JavaOne was a bit of an adventure. Since our session was on Thursday, it did hang over me a little for the first few days. In the end, however, it was quite good fun. We had way more people come along that I had expected when we first thought about submitting a talk. Our talk was fairly light hearted but we had some messages to deliver. Hopefully the people who came along had some fun and took away a few ideas to make their builds better.
In the Shadow of the Moon
March 26th, 2008Over Easter the family and I went along to see the documentary “In the Shadow of the Moon”. I can’t remember the last time I went to the cinema to watch a documentary but it was well worth it. I doubt the sound and fury of the Saturn V take off would have been as impressive in the living room. One can only image what the real thing must have felt like.
I’m old enough to vaguely remember the first moon landing on grainy black and white TV and, as a teenager, I was always deeply interested in all the space flight programs. Now, as a software and sometime hardware developer, I can only marvel at the achievements of all the pioneers in the space program with what now seems very basic equipment.
All the different recollections and viewpoints of the astronauts were very interesting and I found Michael Collins particularly impressive and humorous.
These days I think unmanned probes such as the Mars rovers are probably the best bang for the buck in terms of science but the manned mission to the moon was something special.
I recommend you give it a look if you have the chance. I found it quite uplifting.