TooMuchGreen

Obviously I was keen to upgrade to Snow Leopard this week (who wouldn’t be for €28.99) and was there in the queue at Gravis on Saturday morning. After a rather satisfying chocolate croissant in their cafe we went back in the apartment and an hour later it was up and running on the MacBook Air (Rev A 1.6ghz), OK, let’s see what we have…..  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:11 mins)

Email – the enabler of the electronic age? Our very own technological spokesperson, Apple fan-boy extraordinaire, Ubuntu advocate and undisputed King of Twitter, the man Stephen Fry, nailed it with his recent blog-post “Office Slavery” in which he laments the loss of the office secretary and highlights the resultant time sapping vacuum we drop into each day trawling through our digitised messages, as ever he’s right on the button and I’m not going to further drag out the scourge of lost hours spent replying, forwarding and CC-ing, we’re all more than aware how much our lives are ruled by the keyboard and the inbox. No, in this post I just wanted to drop behind the scenes of actual content for a moment to highlight a few of the technical hurdles mainstream users may not be aware of, you may think with email being the prevalent and integrated norm it is there might be some degree of stability around the majority of services offered to us, however you’d be surprised.  Read more... (estimated reading time 4:10 mins)

There’s a continuing storm of ever increasing paranoia circulating our beaten up world these days, who’s watching who, who’s controlling who, who’s doing what to whoever, where, how and with what and who’s being doing all the above for years….and why, as such we’re all pretty “right on” with regard to safeguarding our personal identities from each other and our personal freedom from big brother, or so we’d like to believe.  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:52 mins)

There’s obviously quite a bit of recycled information on the internet and this review is in part just that, as well as also being part speculation and part *sum* of it’s parts, hopefully (or at least partly anyway)….err….yes….

The Apple Tablet then, hopeful geek myth or concept changing portable shortly to emerge from the reality defining vortex of Steve Jobs designer distortion field? Personally I’d like to think the latter and there’s plenty of evidence stacking up around development of such a product to reinforce an imminent release, including a reported suicide due to a lost prototype (or was it indeed industrial espionage gone wrong?), whatever the story things are getting quite serious about what seems to be just an overgrown iPod Touch….or is it?  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:27 mins)

Optimised I.T ‘Virtualisation’ is finally becoming the realised norm across the carbon hungry server rooms of today, and not before time either.

For those who aren’t fully aware the term basically describes a method of installing multiple software ‘machines’ on a single hardware unit (a server) and saves untold amounts of previously wasted, and increasingly expensive, electrical energy. Contrary to what you may think the vast majority of server operating systems don’t need all encompassed access to the full power of the hardware they’re installed on, those expansive arrays of hard disks and fans which suck up the amps are there merely to provide resilience and scalability than contribute to any high end processing delivery, plus, unlike that desktop PC of yours there’s no requirement for the pull of high end graphics engines either.  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:50 mins)

In the absence of any more imminent Ubuntu releases for a while today I’ve moved back to my other source  of amusement, the iPod Touch, and in particular mobile ‘Document Management’.

Today I’ve discovered the Mobile Studio app from the guys at PixioTech, but what is it, why is it so useful, how does it work, what can you use it for, and how come I’ve only just discovered it?

What is it? Well, it’s an iPhone/iPod Touch app (obviously) and although it’s not free at £1.19 I don’t think it’ll break the bank.  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:57 mins)

It’s here, finally Skype have released their native client for the iPhone, superb, here we go then.

For anyone whose been living in a cave (or perhaps the depths of South Yorkshire) Skype is basically this – it’s a free application which enables you to not only message each other via text chats but also (and more importantly) to hold audio and/or video conversations over the internet for free (yes, FREE, this is Too Much Green remember, we like free software in here).  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:23 mins)

I set up a workgroup print pool for the surf camp office today, and of course being Mac based as they are now it was a breeze, mostly, until I tried to get the shitty old XP box to play too.

The camp has moved over to a predominant Mac base in the admin office (wisely) which makes everything not only more funky but inherently more stable and easy to work with (apart from the lone shitty PC and Rafas grotesque laptop) as such the print share from Joes 20″ iMac was shooting sheets of A4 out from Larrys Gmail in no time, all thanks to Bonjour.  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:14 mins)

As both an OSX user and a Linux developer find a localised LAMP installation somewhat useful. There are a couple of methods to achieve this, the quick way, and the *real* way.

The first method is to simply download and install the MAMP bundle. This comes as a self contained single package which runs completely from it’s own folder with *one click* stop and start (see the header image) , it’s free, it uses it’s own version of Apache and removal is as easy as just deleting the folder. MAMP is quick and stable and it couldn’t be simpler to install, it’s ideal as a quick test platform for your dynamic websites and php scripting however if your drop is more toward the actual ‘LAMP-ness’ of LAMP development you may prefer to install the real deal using a more professional approach, if so here’s the How To.  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:04 mins)

It’s hot here in Costa Rica, but you may expect it to be so, and although it’s all fine and dandy in the air conditioned JING office (whilst alternating between extremes of either marveling at the SQL scripting wizardry of James or watching the goats on my land out of the window) during the days I work from the Cabina in Tamarindo things haven’t been going well, the MacBook Air has been getting a bit toasty.  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:28 mins)