This week…

I’m getting good at this! Not at writing – I still suck at that – but at posting a weekly update:

• My pull requests get ignored on Github it seems. Actually that’s not true – I recently contributed a makensis formula for mxcl/homebrew. I do have my leepa/cradle which allows cradle for Node.js to actually talk using POST on views – that hasn’t been pulled. This allows one to query multiple keys out of a view at once without any API changes to library itself. It hasn’t been pulled back – but then I haven’t heard from the author at all.
• I had forked visionmedia/express – but that has since undergone a major rewrite to use express/connect. It didn’t take long to migrate code from the old version to the new one. The author has also dropped the handy wrapper for the Node.js HTTP client – I have kept it around though. It has a couple of useful fixes – the main one being that it doesn’t cause an unhandled exception in the case it can’t talk to the server though. You can check it out on Gist if you’re bored enough.
• Vodafone irritated me by sending me a text about my mobile data usage. I have already blogged about it though – so just read down the blog for details. The ‘tldr’ version – they have done a stirling job of talking through the problem with me.
• I got my new stack of business cards! Had to get two sets made up, on for the “IT consultancy” and one for “Mobile Application Developer”. Yes, I am looking for more mobile development work. So now I can use these at networking events and see what happens.
• I rooted my wife’s HTC Magic (32B) and installed the latest stable (so Eclair) Cyanogen Mod. It was very easy to do and took around 30 minutes end to end to sort it. It’s a shame that HTC haven’t released the more recent OS’s for the phone as Christy really needed multiple Google account support to be able to actually buy stuff in Google Market. Job done though! Makes rooting my N1 all the more tempting, but I’ll wait until the Froyo version is at least stable.
• I was impressed with Apple’s response to the antenna problems. That was an awkward PR problem and they dealt with it well. The free rubber bumper solution was by far the best one. Especially so because the number of affected users is a very small subset of iPhone 4 owners. Will that make me pick up one… dunno. We’ll see. I am still advising clients to develop directly for the 3G. I still see a lot of iPhone 2G phones around and to maximise one’s app distribution, the 3G is the best one to target. You have the faster network, but the same CPU/RAM limitations of the original phone.
• I upgraded my local CouchDB install to the newly released 1.0.0. It’s… fast. Really really fast. I tip my hat to all the contributors.
• This blog is now on a UK server! Got a 1GB Linode instance. They are ace, this is ace. Do check them out. It’s been a long time since I had a server in the same country as myself – it’s nice to be back.

Right – time to get back to my weekend.