All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. .

WordPress Founder Has A Dig At Competitors

Blogging, Software

Recently Matt Mullenweg was interviewed by Adriaan Pienaar about all things WordPress. Adriaan asks a good question about Movable Type:

And the second part of the question is, considering Movable Type (probably your main competitor for WordPress.org) has been commercial for so long now, is the fact that WP is Open-Source a competitive advantage?

and Matt responds, whilst slipping in a quick left jab:

Movable Type has been available cheaply or for free for a long time, and they recently announced that they’re going to open source it, but I think people will still continue to choose WordPress because it’s not about price, it’s about quality.

You’ve just got to love it.

Robina Squash Club Winners

Sport

Tonight we had the finals for the latest competition at the Robina Squash Club and the our team won!

The two teams that made the final are very evenly matched, which makes for some great squash. After everything was done and dusted, our team managed to sneak ahead by one game and looking at the points, only 19 differentiated our teams! Robina Squash Club even had some modest prizes for the winning team; a $25 gift voucher to use at the major department stores, so that was a pleasant surprise.

The next competition is going to start next week, so I’ll have to revise my list of points to improve on this competition and see how well I go at implementing them. I’m going to see if I can have a hit with one of the guys from one grade above me for a few weeks to give me a little tuition, which should really help improve my game.

If you’re in the Gold Coast area and love to play squash, get in contact:

Robina Squash Club
University Drive
Robina QLD, 4226
0427 627 229

Destructive Smacktards

General

Last week on the way home from work I noticed that someone had parked their car on the side of the motorway. It was parked in a bit of a precarious position to be honest, on the side of a steep slanting piece of grass but I suppose you don’t get a choice when your car breaks down on the whole.

Every time this has happened in the past, at some point a or a bunch of destructive smacktards cannot help himself but to cause a whole bunch of costly damage to the vehicle. I’ve been keeping an eye on the car over the last week to see how long it lasted and it seems that after sitting for four days during the week, the smacktard couldn’t resist the lure of the weekend to completely trash the vehicle.

After said smacktards were finished with it:

  • all of the windscreens in the car have been broken
  • the majority of the front and back lights on the car have been smashed
  • quite a few of the panels on the car have large dints in them

It’s all a bit sad that someone can’t leave their car parked in an unmonitored area for a few days while organising to have it fixed without it being destroyed. I think that the smacktards need to find a more rewarding pass time that doesn’t involve destroying other peoples property.

Ruby .NET Runtime Released

Programming

Microsoft have recently released another dynamic language runtime built on top of the .NET Common Language Runtime, this time for Ruby.

Ruby.NET is implemented using a new .NET library that Microsoft are calling the Dynamic Language Runtime. The DLR provides a set of features specifically targeted at dynamic languages like Ruby and Python, such as a shared dynamic type system and support to generate fast dynamic code.

At this stage the Ruby.NET runtime is in a pre-alpha state, so the majority of the Ruby language unit tests are passing however it wouldn’t be possible to deploy a Ruby on Rails application yet.

This space should be quite interesting to watch, now that Microsoft and Sun both have an alternative runtime available for Ruby. The fact that there are now choices for the runtime is definitely a good thing for the Ruby language since it has taken quite a bit of criticism over the execution speed of the language.

Fast forward a year and I think it’s likely that JRuby will probably win the race. I don’t necessarily think that it will be a superior implementation of the Ruby runtime; however since it runs through the Java Virtual Machine it is at a distinct advantage as the majority of Ruby On Rails applications are deployed in a Unix/Linux environment.