I looked up the poem Invictus when I got back, the poem Nelson Mandela gives to Francois Pienaar in the film. Although Mandela did have a copy of the poem in his cell, he actually gave Francois an except from a speech by Teddy Roosevelt. Both are great pieces, but I think I prefer the speech. Not sure why the film had to mix it all up, I guess ‘Invictus’ is better than ‘The Man in the Arena’ as a film title.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Teddy Roosevelt

RB Internal Links

Not had a chance to update the plugin with any cool features yet. As far as I know, the only thing people are waiting on is better language/encoding support. I will get round to this soon!

Work

Works been busy but fun, we’ve just launched a new product. It’s a financial content management system (yes, shameless plug) that accepts fund data in a variety of formats and produces graphs and statistics etc. Its also bundled with the usual suite of CMS features, all tailored to the financial sector.

We’re also thinking of moving offices soon, got our eye on a very nice place not too far away. After this summer the lure of air conditioning in every office was just too tempting. It’s also got its own datacenter which will house our development server nicely!

Play

Just got back from a tranquil week away in the south of France. Got to take the new car with me, was a lot of fun! I took a picture on my phone one morning when we went to get breakfast, came out a little blurry.

My C30 in Monfort

Anyway, just thought I’d mention a blog that I set up for a friend of mine, using wordpress of course! It took literally 15 minutes to setup – it looks good and I got all the features I needed from plugins – was really impressed. Its at http://www.rachelinkenya.com, as you may have guessed, Rachel is in Kenya.. volunteering at a local Hospital and staying at an orphanage. Sounds exciting!

Found something cool yesterday too, its a wordpress app for the blackberry. Its still in beta but seems to work pretty well. Glad to see people are making an effort to support blackberrys, I was starting to fear an iPhone monopoly! You can install it by pointing your blackberry to http://blackberry.wordpress.org/install

The trouble was, until now, to listen to music I had to boot up windows, which meant my laptop running parallels or not being able to code in Ubuntu.. and it was annoying. Not anymore! Now I’ll only need Windows to synchronise my mp3 player. Hopefully it won’t need flash either!

Here is a screenshot from the email, looks pretty cool.

1. If you’re coasting, you’re going downhill.

2. At PHP London somebody asked “Whats your agile development process?”. I know there are processes for agile development, such as SCRUM, but if you have a formal process for agile development, is it truly agile? Although having just read the wikipedia article on agile development, I’m beginning to change my mind. Perhaps I was thinking of cowboy coding!

I also liked this snippet:

Agile home ground:

• Low criticality
• Senior developers
• Requirements change very often
• Small number of developers
• Culture that thrives on chaos

Plan-driven home ground:

• High criticality
• Junior developers
• Requirements don’t change too often
• Large number of developers
• Culture that demands order

I’m a bit of a Killers fan. I loved hot Fuss, liked Sam’s Town and am hoping I’ll like new album. I seem to be on the losing side but I like their new song, Human. Once it hits the charts I think people will suddenly change their minds and like it too.

At first I thought the lyrics were “are we human or are we dancers?”. Thinking this couldn’t be right I looked up the lyrics and found its not dancers, its denser. It appears I’m not the only one mishearing the lyrics. Popwatch have an entire article about it, crazy.

I’m 90% sure it is denser now, even if it does sound like dancers. It would be funny if the official lyric was dancer.

P.S. This post is just a segway segue (thanks Ann) so that I can gloat I got Killers tickets.

Edit: Since posting this it seems various other sources are confirming ‘dancer(s)’ as the actual word. I guess I was right, and then wrong, and now just confused.

I came back from lunch today and the guys in the office were looking at me worriedly. I asked why and they went on to explain that while I was away my laptop began to make loud clicking noises. They soon realised it was the magnet and moved it away but it seems all too late.

Why did I put a magnet on my laptop? I have a couple of those twizzly gadget magnets and I was fiddling with them while I tested out the paypal sandbox (see next post). I decided to go get some lunch and without thinking just popped them on my desk/laptop. Same thing? No.

Plus I hadn’t backed up my photos in a month (all work related stuff gets backed up anyway) so lost all my pictures of Rome and the trip through France. Bummer!

I was sceptical at first, the car was a pretty good price for what it was (not always a good sign) and I had to travel 2 hours to go see it! Having checked them out on-line and by telephone I went to take a look. Not only was the car great but so was everybody I dealt with. Most car show rooms seem reluctant to help, as if turning up is causing an inconvenience but not this place.

Having got the car home I found something very small wrong with a part of the interior. The part could easily be replaced for £40 and I had a free 3 month warranty, but the warranty wouldn’t cover it. At £40 I was just going to replace it myself but I gave them a call and after refusing to drive back to Peterborough for a cheap part they happily agreed to just reimburse me if I bought it myself – excellent!

To top it all off, they sent me a Christmas card the other week!

If you found this looking for a review of car world, I’d recommend them based on my experience. If you’re a regular reader of the blog, apologies for the niche topic.