Unfuddle – Best hosted SVN management website

I’ve used my fair share of hosted SVN management websites but none have had a better ratio of features vs ease of use.

Sure there may be other websites that have more features but I can guarantee you they wont be any easier to use. For some time now I’ve been using Springloops to host my SVN repository. Springloops is a great service and has a very easy to use and very appealing website and even has integration with Basecamp a leader in project/task management. But Springloops is missing one major feature which makes Unfuddle better, a ticket/defect system.

Being a programmer I find that I cannot live without a ticket/defect system. It becomes invaluable when you can create new tickets for defects found, for features you wish to implement. Plus Unfuddle’s ticket system seems to be very comprehensive having ticket allocation, ticket commenting, association with other tickets etc as can be seen in the screenshot below.

Example of a ticket on Unfuddle

Unfuddle also includes other features like Milestones, unlimited number of repositories per project, a free 200Mb account, multiple users per project, messages and notebooks for each project.

For me though one of the best things about Unfuddle was their customer service. They have an easy Feedback box nearly on every page and every feedback sent will have a reply sent back from the Unfuddle team. The customer service is fantastic and makes the user experience of Unfuddle that much better knowing that whatever the questions, whatever the problem there will always be an answer.

Thanks for the great service thus far Unfuddle.

Thanks,

Marat

Using canalphones over ordinary earphones

Image via Wikipedia

So around 3 or so months ago I purchased a set of Vsonic R02Pro2 canalphones. I had been using my Yuin PK3 earphones for a while before that with my 80Gb iPod and was very happy with the great sound they produced. But the problem came when I started work in the city and had to travel via train everyday.

I had noticed that I had to turn up the volume on my iPod to nearly 80% to receive a fairly descent sound due to the loud noise caused by the train and the people in it. And even then I could still hear everything around me. There was only one thing to do… purchase a set of canalphones.

Now I know some of you may think, “why not noise canceling earphones/headphones?”. Well I’ll tell you why or better yet I’ll point you to a great blog post from Marcus of Headphonic.

Did you know that Noise Isolating products work a lot better than Noise Cancelling products do?
For example: The Etymotic ER-6i offers up to 35dB of reduction of ambient noise levels, whereas the best Active models offer up to 20dB. Furthermore, noise Isolation blocks all kinds of sounds across a wide frequency range, whereas Active headphones only cancel out regular recurring background sound, like engine noise. ~ Extract from the blog

Decided to try Firefox 3.5 Beta

Image via Wikipedia

So today I decided to install the new Beta of Firefox 3.5, Beta 99.

The new Firefox 3.5 Beta 99 has dramatic speed improvements of around 250% according to Betanews. For me in the first couple of minutes I noticed the speed increase in loading Facebook. Facebook is a very JavaScript intensive website and with the new Firefox 3.5, Mozilla has upgraded Firefox’s TraceMonkey engine which is Firefox’s JavaScript engine.

More and more websites are utilising JavaScript to create a better user experience especially Web 2.0 websites like Facebook, MySpace and pretty much all Google products

This is why it has become critically important for browsers to create/tweak their JavaScript rendering engines to load these scripts as fast as possible.

In the current browser war, Google Chrome 3.* and Safari 4 are the leaders of speed as can be seen in the diagram below.

Courtesy Betanews.com

For me personally there’s no going past Firefox. There’s just no competition. Yes it’s a bit slower than Chrome and Safari but the add-ons that Firefox provides makes life that much easier. I mean really any feature you can find on any browser will be made into an add-on for Firefox in a couple of days to a week max. You just can’t beat that.

The add-ons help make everyday tasks that much easier to manager and make Firefox that much better.

I’ll be running the new Beta at work to see how the new Firefox is coming along. If you’re a fan of Firefox and don’t mind running a Beta I suggest you try out the new Beta here.

Thanks,

Marat

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The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

Image by Beer Coaster via Flickr

For those of you who don’t know or have never heard of The Onion News you should quickly head to their website and check them out.

The Onion is an American “fake news” organization. It features satirical articles reporting on international, national, and local news as well as an entertainment newspaper and website known as The A.V. Club. It claims a national print circulation of 690,000^[2] and says 61 percent of its web site readers are between 18 and 44 years old.^[2]

The Onion’s articles comment on current events, both real and imagined. It parodies traditional newspaper features, such as editorials, man-on-the-street interviews, and stock quotes, as well as traditional newspaper layout and AP-style editorial voice. Much of its humor depends on presenting everyday events as newsworthy items, and by playing on commonly used phrases, as in the headline “Drugs Win Drug War.” ~ The Onion Wikipedia

I personally don’t read many of their news articles but absolutely adore their videos. Their production quality is outstanding making them look sometimes even better than real news networks.

The stories they come up with and report on are as original as you can get. Below I’ve included some videos from their YouTube Channel that had me in tears.

Family Guy – Have they lost their touch?

Image via Wikipedia

After watching yesterdays episode (Season 7, episode 11 – Not All Dogs Go to Heaven) I was again for the third week running incredibly disappointed by the quality of the episode the makers of Family Guy are churning out.

Family Guy, a cartoon that for so many years was one of the funniest, most random and most enjoyable to watch looks like it has run out of ideas. The characters don’t seem like themselves anymore. In the latest episode Peter tells the audience something along the lines of “this is going to be a Meg episode, here’s the clicker, no one will blame you”. I mean seriously? A colleague told me something last week that I believe is 100% true, Family Guy these past couple of episodes seems to be written by someone who is bagging Family Guy.

Even reading the posts TV.com’s Family Guy forum you can see that Family Guy isn’t what it use to be.

- episode sucks so far
- So far it’s not going too well. only laughed at doggy Brian. Let’s wait and see if something exciting happens
- yes it was pretty good but really, they gotta get rid of that “Cool Hwip” joke, they’ve recycled it like 5 times and it wasn’t even a great joke to begin with.
- I thought this episode was great. It was the first episode in a long time that i actually laughed at for an elongated period of time.

Even though the episode was pretty bad, people still thought it was the best this season. How bad do the other episodes have to be for this to be the best of the season?

As mentioned above, Family Guy is reusing old jokes, but over using them and ruining their original charm.

I don’t totally agree with most of the people, I think some of the first episodes this season were pretty good, but the last three (The Juice Is Loose, FOX-y Lady & Not All Dogs Go to Heaven) are just not up to par with their older episodes.

For Family Guy’s sake, I hope their pick up their game or I suspect they are going to lose a lot of dedicated fans, myself included.
Thanks,

Marat

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Packing day

Today is the day I start packing for my month of training up in Sydney. I know there are still three days left and all but since I’m going to be living there for a whole month I need to make sure I pack everything I would ever need… I guess.

Packing is never an easy job, you have to think about every situation you may be in. Since this isn’t a holiday and I’m going to be living there I can’t just wear the same t-shirt and shorts for 3 days at a time like you would on a holiday.

The business clothing is easy to pack. Three pairs of business pants, one jacket, seven shirts and some cuff links, two or three pairs of shoes and we’re done. The casual clothing gets a bit harder. I need casual bumming around clothing for the hotel, smart casual for the weekends, clubbing and nice dinner clothing for the nights and then there’s gym clothing which is basically a bonds t-shirt, a pair of shorts and some Asics cross-trainers

Then I think there is the matter of how much to pack. How man t-shirts, shorts, pants, shoes. And lets not forget the toiletries. Aww man I’m going to have a pain in the ass time getting ready for this trip.

Thanks,

Marat

Work in just four days

Well it’s nearly here. Four more days and I start work at IBM.

I received the job in May 2008 and have been waiting for this the whole year. On Tuesday 13th January I will be leaving Melbourne for Sydney. IBM is sending me to Sydney for four weeks of training after which I will be placed into one of three sections (Web Portals, Enterprise Integration, Enterprise Application Development).

I’m excited to be starting work at IBM, but I must admit I’m very excited about traveling to Sydney and living there by myself for the next four weeks. It should be a great experience and one that I will remember for the rest of my life.

I’ll try to update my blog while I’m up there to share my thoughts and daily activities.

Wish me luck.

Thanks,

Marat

Two new small changes to the new Facebook

Image via Wikipedia

As the new Facebook has been launched (not pushed out to everyone yet) only a couple of weeks ago, many suggestions are hitting Facebook and many things are getting added and updated daily.

Today I have found two new features that have been implented. The first is the addition of the Current City information for your profile. Facebook has always had Hometown, which I think confused people because people didn’t know if that was where you were born or where you live now. So now we have Current City and Hometown as can be seen in the screenshot below.

New addition, Current City

The second addition to the Facebook’s profile page has been the Settings link which now sits beside the All Posts, Posts by <your name> and Posts by Others links. This new Settings link has the same features as the old Import link (which allows you to import things like your shared Google Reader posts, YouTube videos and Flickr photos) which use be on the old Facebook but now has some extra added features like allowing you to chose whether you want friends to comment on your stories and friends to post on your wall.

New settings link

Check out the new Facebook if you haven’t already and keep an eye out for the new features being added daily.

Thanks,

Marat

Something Good – Utah Saints

A great song and a fantastic music video. Enjoy

Thanks,

Marat

Facebook’s small Mini-Feed feature

Image via Wikipedia

On Facebook each profile has a Mini-Feed which displays usefull information about that particular person, including their latests wall posts, added applications, shared blog posts from Google Reader and favourite YouTube videos.

You can view the entire Mini-Feed by clicking the See All link in the top right hand corner of the Mini-Feed, but from there you cannot filter the Mini-Feed by Google Reader, YouTube or WordPress from the right hand View menu.

However a simple way to do this is to click the the icons for each Mini-Feed post (the highlighted icons in the picture on the right). Clicking these icons will take you to the same page as clicking the See All link but this time will filter the Mini-Feed posts by that particular post category, whether that may be WordPress blogs, Google Reader’s shared blog posts or even favourite YouTube videos.

This allows anyone visiting your Facebook profile page to view all Mini-Feed posts related to that category.

Thanks,

Marat