I have a friend who works for LG and a few months ago he slipped me an LG Optimus One to have a play with.

I had an HTC Hero before and I loved it. When I initially switched to the LG I hated it. My only experience of Android had been with HTC and I thought Sense and Android were one and the same. Imagine my disappointment when all the great widgets weren’t there.

I stuck with the phone though because it was noticeably faster than my Hero, which was starting to struggle under the weight of the apps.

This week I have finally got my home screens setup just so. I thought I might share some of my favorite apps and widgets in the next few days.

I wish I could post screenshots of my phone but it’s not rooted.

Looks like the baddies have got at LastPass now.

They say there is no cause for concern if you use a strong non-dictionary master password…

Who wouldn’t protect every password they own with the strongest password they could manage?

So, I recently installed some software on my linux box.

I saw on the homepage for the software that they were looking to make a new home page. So, I made a new one for them. I just took their content, threw in some divs and made a simple CSS. Took me about 2 hours (I’m no expert).

The project lead quite liked it. I sent him the files and he put it to the dev list.

What happened? The very first response was: I like it but I think it would be better if we had a wiki front page.

This is absolutely typical open source:

• There’s a problem or an issue.
• Someone takes the initiative and solves the issue or problem.
• They put the solution to the inevitable committee and immediately everyone’s hither to unmentioned preference comes to light.

What’s most annoying about this is that often you can tell that the responses are from people that have never put any thought into a resolution for the problem or issue before but now it’s been bought to their attention their brain has wandered off and decided how they’d do it (better). This wandering nearly always fails to take into account that they don’t have time to do it themselves.

What’s even more galling is you know that if you approached “the committee” for preferences before you start, you’ll just get bogged down in discussion and indecision anyway, again taking into account the opinions of people that don’t intend to actually contribute to the solution in a practical way.

So, the work that’s already been done is pretty much discarded and a new solution is proposed, taking into account the newly revealed preferences. As with everything designed by committee, this new solution will then limp along, unfinished for months or even years, because no-one has the time. In the meantime, the perfectly decent solution initially proposed could be filling the gap nicely but instead it sits unused and the time already spent is wasted.

The solution? Well, there’s two possible outcomes but no real solution:

1. get to a point in the “hierarchy” where you just implement your ideas, without even checking with anyone (really ballsy and often risky)
2. you get really fucking lucky and create a solution that everyone likes and meets everyone’s expectations with an almost psychic degree of accuracy

Good luck!

It’s time to do something other than moan about how boring my job is.

So, I’ve started to learn again.

At the moment I’m doing some stuff with PHP but I’m trying to chuck in CSS as I go too.

We were just about to leave the house this AM when my other half remembered we still had to print something. The laptop was already logged into Ubuntu and I thought “Hell, everything else has been so easy, I’ll give it a go”. I added a printer and printed the document in about two minutes. I was as simple, if not more simple than windows. Excellent.

Just spotted something awesome while watching the extras on my Iron Man 2 Blu-Ray.  During the “Practical Meets Digital” featurette you’ll see an ILM guy applying a dust map to the Mark II suit and he appears to be using a GNOME desktop, Firefox and Thunderbird.  Cool.