echohelloworld

Today, I want to talk about work. I like my job. I love to learn new things and be met with new challenges, and in my job that’s my daily bread. I like to challenge myself, too. Every project I undertake, I do better than the last one. That’s not to the discredit of the last one, because it was as good as I was capable of at the time. I challenge myself to get the job done with less code, smaller files, less-to-no repetition. I hate to compromise, even though the web frequently forces me to do so. I even hate to compromise when the compromise is better than what I was initially aiming for, because I had to forego something that was unachievable. I don’t like to admit that I had a bad idea (even though I can, and I consider it very important to be able to).

I think I’m good at what I do. I take a lot of pride in my work, and it shows in the enthusiasm with which I present myself and my work.

However, with each project I finish, I become more aware of and frustrated by the limitations that are inflicted upon web-workers on a day-to-day basis by certain aspects of the web. The problem is split about 70/30 in my eyes between users who use and insist on using antiquated software and the software itself. Looking at it from this angle, it would be easy to say that users are 100% of the problem, but I don’t think it’s right to let certain vendors get off scot-free, being substantially arrogant to release ridiculously sub-standard software.

The crux of this small point (I could go on but, as I said, all my midnight oil is gone) is that there are a lot of developers who have a real passion for user experience, right down to the stuff that you don’t even think about, and we do it as a hobby even when we’re not getting paid!

This is why I’m not obnoxiously telling you that you’re an idiot for using a Microsoft web browser - as a user, the majority of the reasons I want you to switch aren’t important to you, I’m simply asking that you try one of the amazing alternatives that are free, faster, easier to use (everything new involves a learning curve) and created by people who actually care about your experience and aren’t just putting a browser out because being seen as having a large market share is important for their image as a software giant. A couple of weeks ago, 8 million people downloaded Firefox 3 in one day, and I’d really appreciate it if you did the same, it would definitely make my life a load easier to be able to drop support for barely-capable browsers.

If you try and don’t like Firefox, definitely take a look at Opera, another amazing browser.

You’ll thank me for this later.

Awful Monday today. Just awful. Disturbing phone calls at midnight, back to work after a long weekend, wild variations of configuration on development and test servers, javascript misbehaving, Postfix on OSX not picking up \r\n in headers; preferring \n and missing the early pre-order of the iPhone 3G, Charlotte’s car started driving funny just before I landed on our drive. Get out of the car and I’m greeted by this lovely flat tyre. I wasn’t even going to begin to deal with this in the rain, so it will be ignored until tomorrow night.

I’ve just reminded myself that my car doesn’t have any petrol in. Tomorrow could be fun too.

I love my car. It’s brilliant! For the last (at least) 12 months, it’s been reliable as hell. Sure, it failed its MOT but I was prepared for that and it wasn’t an inconvenience.

Last night, however, when I was supposed to be going go-karting with the guys from work was an inconvenient time for my car to break down. Being the impulsive guy I am I big-fat-went go-karting anyway and left my problem until 11pm last night. Irritatingly enough, my problem hadn’t vanished by 11pm; my car was still overheating, idling high and (seemingly) overfueling. Great. So I think “I’ll try to get it home, then use Charlotte’s car”. This didn’t work. I got to between junction 9 and 8 on the M27 by 11:15pm and that’s where I stayed til 12:15pm when the nice AA man arrived to give me a lift home.

This would be all well and good, I don’t mind spending out on my car because it costs me so little normally, but I really wanted to get a tattoo this month and now I can’t! I also need to look for cheap reasons to test why my car would be playing up, and this definitely doesn’t mean taking it to a garage - I always get the distinct impression someone is trying to steal from me when I go to the garage.

So I couldn’t figure out any way of doing this, and I can’t stand stuff like this beating me so I’ve been messing about with it for the last hour and it’s finally working so I thought I’d share what I’ve done. Maybe this will get spidered, but mostly it’ll be here for my future reference!

The long and short of this situation is that OSX includes sendmail, but it seems to be some sort of alias for postfix, so you should actually be configuring postfix. Right now, I should probably clear up that I’m by no means an expert on any of this and it’s all been trial and error for me so far so if it doesn’t work for you, I can try and help but I can’t promise anything. (more…)