You’re minding your own business, probably sat at home on a quiet weekend watching some TV when there’s a knock at the door. You answer it and immediately you’re poked in the chest by someone you don’t know! “Poooke! Hi, it’s me! John, from school! Remember?”.

You have no idea who this person is. “Want to be friends?” he asks. You reluctantly agree, hoping it’ll send him away. “Great, where did we meet?”. What? He knows where we met… “Do you wish to ignore this step?”, you look puzzled, what? Ignore? You reiterate to him that you met at school. “Great, can I confirm that we met at school?”. Uh… yes. “Ok cool. So what are you looking for? Friendship, dating or whatever you can get?” You’re starting to get a little worried now.

Then you notice that someone is spray painting a crude message on the wall of your house: “Alright mate! Ya dickhead! lololl”. You inquire as to what the hell he’s playing at. “Writing on your wall! Everyone can see it!”

John pops his head back into view. “So I’ve got some pictures here from school. Remember this one? Look at you, drunk, passed out in the bath covered in sick and urine.” The pictures even have captions! “I can show everyone these pics of you. Your girlfriend, work mates, real friends. You don’t get a say! How great is that?!” says John. You ask him if you can have those pictures. You don’t want people to see them. Nope. You can’t have them.

The phone rings. You answer it: “John has suggested that you be friends with all these people, blah blah, blah. John wants to play scrabble with you. John wants to know where he ranks in your list of friends! John has a host of other contrived mundane requests.”

We’ll end it there, since you’ve probably guessed what I’m writing about now. Facebook. If that happened in real life, you’d get pretty pissed off pretty quickly. Or at least I know I would.
It’s not just Facebook. The web is quickly evolving into a place where everyone seems to feel the need to know everything about everyone else. Why would anyone want to know what I’m upto every 5 minutes with twitter? Who’s sad enough to sit and watch a twitter feed. Who’s sad enough to maintain twitter feed? Is your life that boring that you need to know that in 5 minutes you’ll have a status update of what John is doing on his sofa at home? Is your life that boring that you have nothing more important to do than post your current status to a website every 5 minutes?

What of this whole picture thing? Why should someone be able to post a picture of me online, without my permission and label it with my name!? Sure that’s not a new thing to the internet, but never before would that picture be associated with a page detailing everything about me!

Why is it OK to do these things online when in the real world, this is the exact behaviour that would be exhibited by a stalker or someone soon to be slapped with an ASBO?

Look!

All that’s left now is to hand it in and get my degree!

I graduate this summer, which forces me to face a fork in the road that is my future. (I was gonna write ‘destiny’ there, but it sounded far too cheesy). One of my two main options is to carry on my education and take up the offer from Swansea to study a Masters degree. Personally, I feel that this would help me in my endeavor of finding employment somewhere down the line. Although, people I’ve talked to (and a number of job adverts), indicate otherwise. In some cases it would be self-deprecating to waste the time and money studying a Masters degree when I could find a good job that doesn’t require one.
There’s also the possibility that some employers may even sponsor me to undertake a Masters degree at some point in future, even if that possibility is a minute one, it’s still better than having to pay for it myself, which brings me to the next point. There’s no ’student loan’ for post graduates. There are grants, bursaries and the likes available to eligible applicants, but it’s unlikely I’d be awarded one, considering my financial position.

The second choice available to me is to just start job hunting as soon as possible. It’s been drilled into us that we should have started job hunting this time last year, but seriously, come on. They say that all the good jobs at the big organisation are gone by now - and thats just it. I don’t want to work for them. Screw Microsoft, Oracle and those corporate entities, and as for Apple offering me a job, I think I’d have to come up with something a little more revolutionary than an Xfire client before they’ll start noticing my existence. The main thing I’m looking for is not high profile work, but work that I’d be happy doing. I don’t particularly care how big the salary is, as long as I’m happy doing whatever it is I’m being paid to do.

One of the jobs that has piqued my interest is a small (2-man, I believe) operation located in Fareham, Hampshire. They have two shipping software products for the Mac. The job advert states they’re looking for a junior software developer with experience with Cocoa amongst some other stuff. The benefits of the job include working with the two developers who, according to the advert, have over 40 years combined experience with Mac software development. It’s this kind of thing that I want to do. Small scale, but fun. I sent my CV off, and explained my current situation, so we can only hope. The only thing is that if I was offered the job, I’d have to move closer to Fareham - naff commuting from Cwmbran… that’s a bad road to go down.

So that’s where I’m currently standing. I think I’d be happy with 2:1 and ecstatic with a 1st. But who knows, I guess I’d be a little disappointed with a 2:2. And I think I’d be mortified if I got anything worse. Only time will tell at this stage. I think it’d be a good idea to go look for some more jobs now.

That’s correct, I’ve finished my dissertation entitled Xflame, The Development of an Xfire Client for Mac OS X.

The client, almost a year in the making, is functional enough for topical use. I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone as a permanent solution at this point, but the ground work is there.

Here’s a quick peek:

The finished copies are currently being bound with nice red hardcovers at Abbey Bookbinders. Hopefully, Abbey won’t mess up and miss a page or screw up the order or something… We can only hope.

The submission date is this Thursday and the binding won’t be finished until Wednesday. It’s cutting it fine, but I think I’ll be ok.

So I took the plunge and bought myself an XBox 360 after the price drop. It was too sweet a deal to miss out on.
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time on it since I got it, and I’m enjoying it. I especially like the way you can download demos for free. Good thing.
I’ve also gone and gotten myself one of those 360Voice blogs, so effectively my 360 now has its own blog, which is interesting. It can be read here.

One last thing - The Halo 3 Soundtrack is beautiful. Stunning. Simply gorgeous.

Terminator, Star Wars AT-AT Walkers, War of the Worlds! It looks like us Humans are going to be packing our bags pretty damn soon….

So my thinking was that instead of relegating the Macbook Pro to my bag for the week, why not turn it into a server? After all, my current server is rather noisy and is running linux…

There’s a few things that make the Macbook Pro (or any other similarly configured notebook) suitable for a SOHO server:

• Small Form Factor - Obvious one. It’s a laptop. And a thin one at that. By no means is it an ultra portable, like an Asus EEE or the MacBook Air, but it’s still one of the thinnest notebook computers in its class. Being only an inch thick, it can slide into nice small places, or be kept in a draw.
• Quiet Running, Even Under Load - My current server is an HP Pavilion desktop tower. It’s probably safe to say that it has one of the noisiest cooling fans fitted to its CPU that money can buy. if that wasn’t enough, the server is silent - as long is its not under any load. But as soon as you put it under any kind of load, the fan will start to rev, and then eventually, turn up to full speed, and sometimes I can’t hear my TV over the noise it makes. This isn’t so with the Macbook Pro, its as quiet as a mouse at all times!
• Powerful Enough For Most Requirements - With it’s Core 2 Duo at 2.4 GHz and 2 GB of RAM, the Macbook Pro is already more powerful than my current server, with its P4 D, the faux dual core processor and 1 GB of RAM. The only thing the Macbook Pro lacks is a large direct storage solution. The most effective way to overcome it is to use external drives, which can be costly. Especially if you’ve chosen to use eSATA, which requires you to buy an express card for eSATA connectivity. however, its storage is adequate for small scale use, and firewire drives are inexpensive.
• Has Built In Power Backup - My current server has the option to reboot upon a power failure. This is great, only the system still goes down as soon as the power fails, and data corruption could occur when it happens. Without shelling out for an expensive UPS system, this can’t be prevented. However, notebooks already implement this kind of functionality because it has a battery. As soon as power is lost, the notebook switches to its battery supply. Power failures are no longer a problem. The system can be scripted to shutdown cleanly when it detects power failure which can prevent the data corruption.

To oversee all of this, I’ve given OS X 10.5 Server a go. At first glance, it seems like a very powerful server OS. Not just because of what it can do, but because of how well the tools to control everything are integrated with the OS. A lot of the functionality that OS X 10.5 Server gives you can be achieved using Open Source alternatives (come to think of it, most of the software it uses is Open Source). The Server Admin tool is very robust and acts as a central go-to for everything you need to configure. Much easier than having to delve into the command line and configuration files.

And there you have it. Why shell out for a dedicated server system, or a noisy desktop tower when you can have a decent server up and running using an notebook?

However, this is a classic case of people overreacting or just being plain stupid. The e-mail people have receive goes a little something like this:

“Thank you for expressing interest in the iPhone Developer Program. We have received your enrollment request. As this time, the iPhone Developer Program is available to a limited number of developers and we plan to expand during the beta period. We will contact you again regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time.”

Now read that and explain to me why people are thinking this is an outright rejection… There are multiple parts of this text that indicate otherwise:

1. “We have received your enrollment request.” - Notice how they say that, and not “We have rejected your enrollment request.”
2. “At this time, the iPhone Developer Program is available to a limited number of developers and we plan to expand during the beta period.” - Remembering that the iPhone SDK and the Developer Program are still in beta stage, it should be obvious that not all applications will be accepted immediately. While the iPhone SDK is available in beta form to all those who sign up for, or already have a free Apple Developer Connection account, that doesn’t mean that the program is equally as open. Apple have been inundated with enrollment requests, and the letter clearly states that at this moment in time, they’re only accepting a small amount of developers, with intentions to increase the numbers throughout the beta period.
3. “We will contact you again regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time.” - Notice again how they do not say they are rejecting the request, but rather the opposite. They’re telling you that they will have another look at the request when they decide to open the developer program a little wider.

I also applied for the iPhone Developer Program, and the response I received this morning was a little bit more of a let down than those who received the one above. The response I got was:

“Thank you for expressing interest in the iPhone Developer Program. We have received your enrollment request. At this time, the iPhone Developer Program is only available in the US and will expand to other countries during the beta period. We will contact you again regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time.”

My first response wasn’t to cry out that Apple had rejected me! In fact, it was pretty much just a “Humph, looks like I’m going to have to wait”.

So to all those whiners that think they’ve been rejected, suck it up. At least when the program opens up a little, you’ll probably get in there before Apple expand it outside of the US.