Ex-director-y, Part 11. Not so Ex-director-y now.

Looks like I've moved from being an ex-director to three new directorships in one go!

1. Tin Cloud. Not a company yet, so I'm not a director in the Companies House sense, but director nonetheless. Aworka is included in this.
2. Vacancy Informer Ltd. This is a company that pre-dates the new vacancyinformer.com web site, to be directed separately to Tin Cloud.
3. ARC Foundation. This is an incorporated charity for animal welfare and rescue, so I'll be a director and a trustee.

Watch this space!

Ex-director-y, Part 10. Myers Briggs for Programmers

I just found an article relating Myers Briggs For Programmers. Quite interesting, if you like stuff like this (which I confess I do: I automatically try to 'type' everyone I meet!).

There are a few points of interest to me (as an ENTJ):

1. As an E, I shouldn't really be working alone. It's true, I do struggle sometimes, and often talk out loud to myself!
2. The Author couldn't easily relate F for programmers, which from my experience doesn't matter: few programmers are F!
3. J's would tend to prefer C++ to Smalltalk (or Ruby), because they need to fully understand things. I would tend to agree that I found Ruby almost too powerful at first, asking myself how it could possibly do some of the things it does. P's wouldn't care; they would just use the power. How did I cope? I wasted loads of time finding out how Ruby (and Rails) works!
4. Very few (software?) workplaces have high N. I have experienced this too (much to my frustration). S's will tend to resist change, opting for tried and tested approaches, or the quickest (not necessarily best) solutions. This might be OK for business in the short term, but there is a risk of falling behind more progressive N companies, who define bolder goals and invest to achieve them. As I've mentioned previously in my Ex-director-y posts, I wish I'd been tougher on this, but I wasn't and that's why I had to go...
5. I'm gratified that Google is ENTJ, and Microsoft is ISTJ. This makes complete sense to me. I have looked inside a few low N, high S led organisations and the most frustrating thing for me (as a strong N), is that it is exactly an S quality not to appreciate the need for some N, which leaves them floundering about in the present rather than moving towards a future. Microsoft obviously hasn't always been an S organisation, but it clearly is now, so was Woolworths.
6. I'd most like to work with an N-F, to blend their wacky with my mighty.

Ruby on Commodore 64

Yep! But of course, real progressives would expect nothing less than Ada.

(And I thought my ideas for Object Oriented Assembler were nuts...)

My New Commodore 64

My computing career began at age 13 with a Commodore 64. I originally wanted a BBC Micro, but couldn't save enough pennies, so bought a C64 instead. In retrospect, this was a good decision: BBCs were mostly for skiers; C64 for snowboarders (even though snowboards probably weren't invented then). Anyway, I'm not sure what I did with my original C64 so have just bought a similar one on ebay because I decided I ought to own the computer that changed my life! I think I've still got some of my old programs somewhere, including a drum machine (Drumz) and a half finished side scrolling shooter game (OffWorld) (all in assembler of course).

The screenshot shows a Power64 emulator, behind my real C64 (through an EyeTV).

Has anyone got any spare 5.25" Double Density floppies?

ExpanDrive

I mentioned ExpanDrive in a recent post. It makes a remote server connected via SFTP, FTP or Amazon S3 seem like a USB drive plugged into your Mac. Everything happens in the Finder, so it's a more elegant solution than utilities like Cyberduck or Transmit (although it presumably lacks some of the advanced features of those, e.g. file permissions control). It's probably the best way to edit remote files in TextMate (which lacks an integrated FTP client like BBEdit or Coda).

There are two reasons for another post about ExpanDrive:

1. I found a coupon code that gives $10 off the usual $39.95 price, which is valid at the time of this post, but could expire at any time: 6NI1DW5ZKW233HYI
2. Another utility MacFusion appears to be very similar to ExpanDrive (MacFUSE does the heavy lifting for both) but is free.

Perhaps one day, Apple will build this functionality into the Finder... Also, I notice that there is a version of ExpanDrive for Windows too, so I guess Windows Explorer doesn't support SFTP/FTP out of the box either (not that I know or care about that).

Why Subversion?

Despite all the more interesting links in my last post, my use of Subversion was the only one that sparked any interest, so I thought I'd explore my reasons for sticking with Subversion, despite the current Git frenzy:

1. My subversion repo is on another server so when I commit, I'm also backing up. Git does commits really fast, but only because everything is happening locally until you push (I think). I'd end up committing, then pushing every time to maintain my 'backup', so I presume the Git speed advantage would be lost...?
2. Subversion was designed to be a better CVS, and I already knew how to use that, so switching to Subversion was easy for me. I believe Git has a bit of a learning curve?
3. I'm not working in a huge distributed team so wouldn't benefit from Git's more sophisticated branching/merging/rebasing (whatever that is).
4. Subversion has better clients: e.g. how sexy is Versions? It's also integrated into Coda. Git support/integration is gradually appearing, but it's not widespread yet.
5. My Brightbox VPS came reconfigured with Subversion support. To use Git, I believe I'd have to install something like Gitosis...?
6. Git is difficult on Windows (or was). Wait a minute, that's a plus point for Git!

Don't get me wrong, part of me wants to switch to Git, perhaps just because it's the latest greatest thing. On the other hand, I can't really see how it improves things for me. Feel free to convince me to switch to Git, or defend Subversion, or recommend something else (Bazaar, Mercurial?).

Links to look at

1. CocoaSQL has been superceded by Sequel Pro. Nice. I like the query window: You can write multiple queries and execute whichever you want via Run Selection: nicer than using the Query History. Ah, but I've just found Querious... not free ($25) but includes SSH tunnelling and user admin, which Sequel Pro does not.
2. Mingle 2.3. Still haven't used this in anger, but still think it might be the dogs for collaborative project management.
3. C++0x. Better than C++ as we know it? Oh yes, but what's it for? Err.... device drivers?
4. Windows 7 the best OS Microsoft has ever produced, but a bit like the latest Chris De Burgh album Footsteps: it's all relative (but at least he can play in Iran).
5. Rails 2.3. Rails just gets more exciting.
6. Subversion 1.6. Not sure what's in it for me, but it can only be good!
7. RubyMine 1.0 Released. Well I've been trying it and there's a lot to like... but it has that horrible Eclipsy Java-ness about it. TextMate, RubyMine, TextMate, RubyMine... dunno. And what about Coda (which is half price at the moment!) and now supports plugins, which means it could soon see more of the bundle cleverness of TextMate.
8. Amazon S3 The end of home backups?
9. Globrix is the best way to find properties and Zoopla is getting better.
10. Got to love Spotify. Oh dear, could be the end of iTunes? Oh deary me... could be coming to iPhone.
11. Google Apps gives you free email for your own domain and supports the same users across multiple domains if you like. Excellent Spam filtering. Easier than setting up you own mail server.
12. DroboPro Now it's got 8 drives and iSCSI.
13. MacPorts is a package manager for OS X, and Porticus is a great way to interact with it.
14. ExpanDrive is the FTP/SFTP you wish the OS X Finder had built-in. Time to ditch all the other FTP clients? Maybe, if you don't mind spending $40.
15. Project-Voldemort You know, if you need to store blobs of data securely around the place...
16. Tin Cloud What a great site!