Software

For the last few years, I’ve always wanted to budget properly and see where my money was going. But like all habits that are good for you, looking after your finances takes time, care and attention. I started off by researching the market for budgeting software. A lot of the prepackged software out there was very US-centric, including Quicken, Microsoft Money and Mint.com. I eventually settled on and bought a license for You Need a Budget, because: it had a budgeting methodology, very good Euro support and was cross platform with Adobe Air. YNAB lasted me well for a few years, with its pretty graphs and ease of expense entry. I even liked their much pared-down companion iOS app at the time. ...

I recently read an article that posed the question “Does your dock reflect your priorities?” - which is an interesting question. Further breaking that idea down leads to: What apps do I need the most? What apps should be next (or be higher priority)? iPhone dock Phone app: pretty self explanatory Safari: Still the best mobile browser I think (though if Google ever gets going on a proper Chrome browser for Android that may change) Tweetbot: I like Twitter the most of the social networks and tweetbot is the Swiss army knife if twitter clients Music (aka. iPod app) : I use my iPhone in my car and sometimes at work to listen to music iPad dock Safari: Safari on iPad is not as good as the iPhone version - it can be more full featured I think! Mail app: E-mail on the iPad is one of the most popular uses, it’s got just the right amount of screen real-estate to do it justice Photography folder: I don’t know why I mistook myself as being interested in photography, but here’s a folder I almost never use (bar camera app) Music: I like it uses the screen real-estate better then the iPhone version and it’s much nicer to browse music on Tweetbot: Tweetbot for iPad is the best Twitter client for iPad hands down (on the iPhone it’s more contested) and sync with Tweetmarker makes it much easier moving between iPhone and iPad versions. Final thoughts I guess I’ve learned I make pretty bad use of the dock on both devices. Evernote or Lastpass should probably be in the dock on either device - probably with a feed reader as a close run after that (Reeder or Mr. Reader). These apps feature on either home screen as you can see from the screenshots above. Food for thought I guess! ...

I spend a lot of my day in heavy development tools such as Eclipse1, but often for editing simple XML I just want a quick tool to make fast changes. If I use the CLI (or Linux) it’ll be Vim, if I’m on Mac it’ll be Textmate but on Windows it’s Notepad++. I haven’t found an editor on Windows as clean as Notepad++ (if you use a tool professionally, you get to know it’s quirks pretty fast) for editing text of any kind. ...

I haven’t been posting much lately because I have been working hard to improve the experience of visiting this website. You may ask what does that mean? - well it is simple. I love going to websites that are uncluttered, provide useful information and are to the point. It’s also small things like having a really fast page load time. So here’s a flavour of some of what I have been working on lately… ...

One topic that rarely gets coverage that I’ve seen is how women get along in male dominated environments, such as Computer Science. For me it has never mattered someone’s gender - I love using, tweaking and learning about computers and if you share that interest - the more, the better! It has been shown very young children are conditioned from a very young age by gender rules - shown by Prof. Robert Winston in Child of Our Time programme. So I’ve often wondered in a very skewed ratio of males to females (as generally there are more females than males in society) would affect a Woman’s choice of even considering Computer Science, since so few actually do. So I set about asking our class representative, Lauren Butler, her thoughts on Computers, doing Computer Science and being an authority figure in a male dominated class-room, my questions and her answers follow: ...

What are Desktop Environments? Wikipedia defines it as: In graphical computing, a desktop environment (DE) commonly refers to a style of graphical user interface …… A desktop environment typically consists of icons, windows, toolbars, folders, wallpapers, and desktop widgets. (See WIMP.) I would add a file manager and browser to this list also! Let’s look at the two most popular consumer Operating Systems (in three variants) and their Desktop Environments: OS Name Widgets Window Manager File Manager Browser Windows XP Luna Stack Window Manager Windows File Explorer Internet Explorer 6 Windows Vista Aero Desktop Window Manager Windows File Explorer Internet Explorer 7 Mac OS X Cocoa Quartz Compositor Finder Safari 2.X Now take Linux; really a Kernel, but packaged means an Operating System. Which way you package it makes all the difference! You still use the same drivers, the boot process is still the same, but when your machine finishes its boot and launches all that graphics stuff anything can appear: anything. It’s abstraction to have no real graphics in a kernel other than that which are drivers to control hardware. This is very strange to people who think in the Windows way (nb. I used to be one of these). At the end of Windows XP booting I have never seen anything but Luna; and most people don’t know its called that. So it is very strange for people my age and slightly older who grew up over DOS and Windows 3.1/95 line to have this fundamental shift in logic. ...

Last year was me celebrating four years of using the best operating system out there: Linux and the best distro Ubuntu. Ubuntu was my first foray in to Linux; and I haven’t left it since; although I have tried all the other major distros. I started with the first version of Ubuntu; Warthy Warthog: Warthy had a text only installer and it took me quite a while to not only get used to the idea of this strange operating system; but the fear of leaving Windows-land where all that power usage knowledge would mean nothing. It meant nothing in terms of the registry and other superficial stuff; but the more I used Ubuntu and Linux the more I liked it. In fact in 2005 I ditched my XP installation altogether. I noticed there wasn’t an Irish Ubuntu users group; so I mailed one of the few people (around 5 I guess) that were around Mark Shuttleworth to set it up and get a website going. It was an ill-advised effort since I was too busy with examinations really to take it on; so I gave it up soon after. But it is still going today, people are still involved. ...

Recently I downloaded the Kubuntu packages of the new KDE 4.2 beta 2. For those of you who don’t know; KDE is the K Desktop Environment; which includes a window manager (KWin), common desktop applications, its own menu (Kickoff), browser (Konqueror), file manager (dolphin) etc. Basically it is the most popular desktop environment on Linux next to Gnome. *KDE 4.2 Beta 2 with Kickoff Menu visible **What is so special about KDE? ** The philosophy of KDE is the advanced configuration it allows through its Graphical User Interface (GUI), this is versus Gnome which chooses sane defaults and leaves configuration in hard to reach places and out-of-sight. This isn’t to say KDE doesn’t choose sane defaults; it does and is very user-friendly. KDE has always been the more Windows-like of the major desktop environments and this hasn’t really changed in KDE 4.X series. KDE is available in popular distributions of Linux such as Kubuntu, Mandriva, OpenSuse. The special part about 4.X series is that for the first time for any Linux desktop environment; it is fully cross-platform, easily installs and works on Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X. KDE 4.2 Panel; with KOrganizer calendar open ...

Open Source star of the blogging world…

I just purchased an Amarok hoodie andt-shirt; and I couldn’t be happier supporting one of my favourite open source projects! What makes it so good? Have you ever heard of Amarok? Chances are if your an OS X or Windows user; you haven’t. All this is about to change! The amarok team are busy porting it from it’s UNIX underpinnings to Windows and OS X. Whats to like about Amarok then? also is cool phonetically: am a rock! ...