Reading Challenge

One of the blogs I read regularly is Robert Rapier’s R-Squared Blog. I always find it an interesting read as it is a little different from the computing blogs I tend to mostly read. His blog covers an increasingly important topic and I appreciate his honest appraisals.

Anyway, one of the things he resolved to do was to read at least 40 books in the year. I don’t expect I can read that many books so I’m setting a more modest target of 12 books. The books can be of any sort or style but must be read completely. I’ll keep track here.

Actually, I set this goal privately last year but I’m pretty sure I didn’t make it. It’s funny because I read a tremendous amout but it is either online blogs and magazines or I tend to read just the bits and pieces I need from software reference books, etc. I’m hoping that making a public declaration will give me some additional motivation.

Atlassian += Cenqua

Today, Atlassian acquired Cenqua. I think it’s a great development and a very good fit.

That means that I’m now an Atlassian employee and I’m really looking forward to working with all the Atlassian guys. The Cenqua and Atlassian websites are being updated right now and they’ll have all the details, FAQs, etc on the transition. I won’t duplicate that info here. It’s very much a case of steady as she goes, of course.

For me personally, there will be a few changes as I change from working at home to working in an office. It helps that the Atlassian office has got to be one of the nicest office environments I’ve experienced. A big-ass Mac Pro doesn’t hurt either.

There’s going to be lots of interesting development as we add new features to FishEye, Crucible and Clover. Truly exciting times.

Safari on Windows?

I decided to give the Safari on Windows beta a quick test drive, from curiosity rather than any pressing need.

Look and feel wise, I found it interesting that it totally disregards the Windows conventions. For example, there is a complete lack of resize handles on all window edges. There is also no aero support, the scroll bar sliders are very mac-like, etc. iTunes, in comparison, seems to be only halfway along in its “maciness”.

Browsing worked quite well. I had one glitch on the store part of Apple’s Australian website but that came good on the next visit. Since the apple store is totally unusable for me in Firefox, that is actually an improvement 🙂 I don’t think text rendering was as clear as Firefox or IE. Maybe tinkering with the font settings would have improved that, but I did not invest the time in that. I had some minor issues in Crucible which will be worth looking at.

I’m not sure what is Apple’s motivation in making Safari available on Windows. I think it will be good for testing purposes, but I will stick to Firefox for my everyday browsing.

My Google WTF Moment

If you ever read the dailyWTF, you’ll know they occasionally have a gallery of funny dialogs, messages, etc. Today I had a WTF moment when attempting to login to Google Apps for Your Domain:

gafyp1det.png

I did wonder if this was some sort of advanced captcha approach 🙂