• Facebook serves 570 billion page views per month (according to Google Ad Planner).
• There are more photos on Facebook than all other photo sites combined (including sites like Flickr).
• More than 3 billion photos are uploaded every month.
• Facebook’s systems serve 1.2 million photos per second. This doesn’t include the images served by Facebook’s CDN.
• More than 25 billion pieces of content (status updates, comments, etc) are shared every month.
• Facebook has more than 30,000 servers (and this number is from last year!)

Those numbers are just staggering. Astronomical. Mind-boggling. Etc.

A lot of people doing web stuff (usually the non-technical ones anyway) think they have to match these, or something similar, “just incase”. The simple answer is this:

Your website will never, ever, do 1% of 1% of 1% of these numbers. The exception to this is if you go work for Facebook, Google, Microsoft or maybe Apple. But the chances of that are statistically small.

The real trick and talent of designing and architecting software is working out what you will actually need, and designing to that, not going for some fictional “what if” number.

For example, I’ve been working on a site (with others) which has the potential to have quite spikey traffic. We have had frequent discussions about “what happens if we need to scale up etc”.

So far, we’ve been Fry’ed, as well as Palmoa’ed (is that a term?), as well as various newsletters being sent out (to the order of half a million people, usually). Our single AWS small instance didn’t even break sweat, let alone fall over.

So the question I think every architect should be asking when they design a system is this:

Does this really need to be this big? This complex? Is there a better way to do this, where we can scale out, not start big?

Sometimes, the answer is yes – you DO need to be this big, but mostly, the answer is no. Is 500K users/day a feature for first release? Or is 10K users/day good enough for first release (and put 500K/day in the second release backlog)?

Only design for huge if the data supports huge, and preferably NOT data from overly enthusiastic founders/managers/sales people.

But in this case, they are bat-shit crazy.

If I want to read The Times (and I’m going to ignore the fact I find their reporting and views awful), I can wander down to the newsagent and get it for 90p. For this 90p, someone has gone and written the stories, edited and sub’ed it, laid it out, printed it, and the moved it around London on a truck (I think the printing press is close to me, but hey – doesn’t really matter, it’s still 90p in Yorkshire). Often they have thrown in a free DVD or something similar.

Now, lets say I want to read it online, which is my preferred way to do it. Someone still has to write the articles, edit and sub edit them, and in a limited way, lay them out. But there is no printing, or moving it around. And for this, I’m charged £1 per day. Sure, I can read back articles, but those really don’t cost The Times anything (it’s not zero – disk space isn’t really free – but there are so many zeros between the 0. and the first digit that it might as well be).

So, they have managed to take out half of the costs, but put the price up 10%. Impressive. Totally flawed, but impressive none the less.

There is no point in screaming “but information wants to be free” (which is actually a mis-used quote). The issue is more that I can go somewhere else (usually the Guardian) and get the same article for free. The Times has very little unique content, the same as most newspapers. It’s not even presented in a better way, tho if the front page is anything to go by, it’s fairly ad-free – and for £1/day, it better be ad-free.

Also in the mix, there is no offline option. Thats the great thing about the print edition – I can read it anywhere I have light. For The Times, it’s only at a computer (online), or on an iPad (which I can’t determine to be offline without paying £10.99, but I’m going to assume it is). Their digital editions, as a replacement for the paper ones, are totally full of fail.

So, here’s what I think they should do (and this applies to the NBR in New Zealand, too, who have done something similar):

If you are charging for content, let me sub for a month. Let me setup an account with you, and then read it where ever and when ever I like. Even if I have to register a mobile device with your website to use it, thats fine (tho a little big-brother). But I pay once – £10 a month isn’t bad – and can read it online, on my iPhone, on an iPad, on a laptop, whatever. The apps are free (maybe you get the headlines for free, like the current homepage), but the content isn’t. To get details, you need to have a login. The infrastructure is there already – use it.

If you must charge per day, let me pay £5, keep it in credit, and use it over time. For £5 I can buy a week, or have £5 different days of use. I have to log into an account to use it anyway!

It needs to be a lot cheaper than the print version, given it’s at least perceived that it’s cheaper to do the digital edition. £10/month is a good price point. I’d pay that without thinking for the Guardian. Start with, at most, 50% of your print subscription price.

I’d love to know how the NBR is going, tho I’m not sure they can or will say (Chris?). They have a mix of paid-for and free content, and from what I can find, no mobile device apps (didn’t we talk about this 18 months ago?). Is it working for them? I’d love to know.

The Financial Times and WSJ are always put up as models, but there are two reasons why those work: fairly unique content, and expense accounts. The content they have can’t be found anywhere else (or at least in a very few places), and people make money off the information they provide, so their companies can pay for it and claim it off the top line. It’s a no-brainer to pay £300 for 6 months of the FT if you are making even £150 a day off the information it contains. I suspect that this is why the NBR is working too.

There were a few other places selling music up there, but all of it was on CD, which I find quite useless. What do I do with the small bit of plastic once I’ve ripped it? I don’t really want to give it away (that would be, technically, illegal), but I don’t want to destroy it or store it either.

I think we need another mechanism for this.

How about a custom iTunes voucher? The merchant can generate as many of these as they like (either by buying them, or a charge-on-use model), and are charged a slightly discounted rate (or maybe even full price?). They can then put these codes onto cards or something similar, and sell them for whatever it was they were going to sell them for. Apple takes their usual 30% cut of the voucher price, and 70% goes back to whoever put the tracks up on iTunes (most likely the artist via some aggregator).

eg: Ginger Ninjas have their stuff up on iTunes. Because they are the artist, they get to make codes (maybe setup via the aggregator) at Apple’s cost – nothing goes back to the “artist” in this case. Lets say this is $2 (maybe the aggregator takes a cut here, I’m not sure how it works at the moment). They then put this code on a card or something, and sell them at the gig, like they would with CD’s. Maybe for $10. $8 profit in the hand. $2 upfront to “press” the tracks. If they dont sell them, they don’t get charged, as it’s zero cost to Apple.

I guess there is some risk to the purchaser (if the code doesn’t work for some reason), but with some customer service, this can be worked around.

The voucher would only be valid for purchasing that one album. Not my choice of X tracks, just that one. I know this can be done – Apple gave away cards with the iTunes Live gigs, and the only tracks you could buy were from the iTunes Live sessions. But why not allow artists to sell them too? That way it’s secure as one use codes are already done in iTunes. The artists don’t need to setup their own downloads site, and customers can get music without the annoying plastic nonsense. Plus the artist doesn’t have to pay to have CD’s pressed, artwork printed etc. Win all around.

Some of the best music we have found recently has been from opening acts – Ane Brun (opened for Peter Gabriel) and For a Minor Reflection (Sigur Ros) really come to mind – or were only for sale at the gig (Underworld, live, on my birthday!). But the CD media is in need of an update.

Might be a market there….. Anyone know if this is being done already?

I finally got my hands on an iPad for a little while, after fighting a few other people off them at the Regent St Apple Store. Now, I realise I’m not a normal user. Not in the slightest. We don’t have a couch. I don’t commute. We usually watch media together, not separately. We don’t have the center-of-the-living-room TV. We are not abnormal, but we are not normal, either. But by the same token, iTunes is the center of our media world. We buy all our content thru it, it has all our music, we take that content places on iPhones.

But the iPad is just not for me. Yet. Here’s why.

Everyone else has done the hardware etc to death, so I’m not going to bother, but here’s the bits I liked:

• Good lord, the screen is nice. It’s sharp, clear, and fairly large. I have very high hopes for the next iPhone.
• It’s quick. It’s very, very, very quick. Ditto next iPhone.

The average:

• It’s not light. I’m sure it was the regular version, not the 3G version, but it’s not an insubstantial device.
• It’s big. Way too big to put in a pocket, and almost too big for me to carry around without a A4 folder type thing. I considered my A5 or A6 moleskin to be a bit big, and this is bigger.
• The home screen is bloody awful. Nothing new there tho. Hopefully, OS4 will fix that. Putting more space between the icons feels like a lack of thought. “oh, that’ll do… close enough”

The ugly:

• There isn’t really anything I hated about it, but nothing jumped out and said “wow, you really should just get one of these”.

So here’s my argument for not getting one (odd that it’s an argument against, not a justification for, but anyway)

I have a fairly small set of functions I need a computer for. Currently, I have 3 computers. I have a 15″ Macbook Pro (i5, 8GB, 500GB disk) which I use for day to day stuff. I have a Mac Mini which is used as a headless server for VM’s and music (2.0ghz C2D, 8GB, 320GB) and an aging iPhone 3G, which will be replaced with a 4G or whatever they call it when it comes out sans-contract.

What’s noticeable in it’s absence is a Netbook – hackintosh or otherwise. I’ve looked at them, but never felt compelled to get one.

What I use computers for – because lets face it, all of these (Macbook Pro, Mini, iPhone, iPad) are real computers.

I spend most of my day – ie, the bits I get paid for – in VMWare or something similar, usually in 2-4 Windows 2008 Server VM’s over 2 machines. I have 8GB in both my machines, and I use it all up often. An iPad is never going to replace this, not until it can run a 4GB (ram), dual-core VM at top speed, and unlike Mr Gemmell, I’m not likely to use it as a document lookup device.

I spend a lot of my down time watching or listening to media (well, some of it anyway). All of our media comes from a few sources: iTunes, iPlayer (downloaded), or our shared iTunes library on the Mac Mini. An iPad could come into play here, however a 8″ screen, compared to a 20″ monitor, isn’t going to cut it for 2 (or more) people to watch. It would be good if I was traveling a lot, but I’m not anymore. The Macbook Pro serves for both the tethered (at home) use, and is portable enough to be taken on holiday, on a plane, on work trips etc. Where the Macbook doesn’t work, the iPhone covers that space well enough, even for 2 people watching a movie on a plane.

The rest of my time, I spend reading blogs, doing email, twitter etc. This is where the iPad could really come into it’s own, except I have the iPhone for that if I’m not at my desk, and the Macbook if I am (or if I can be bothered to take it with me). I dont have an issue reading blogs/twitter/email on the small screen, thanks to Twitter iPhone, Reeder and Byline, and the Guardian app. I can type very well on the iPhone, too (and I imagine I could on the iPad, too, tho I didn’t try). If I didn’t have the iPhone, I could definitely see an iPad fitting in there, but really, I use the iPhone for this 2-3 times a week, usually on the weekend, tho it gets a lot of use for other things – uses which the iPad wouldn’t fit for (again with the “it doesn’t fit into my pocket”). I tend not to sit on the couch and surf, not least because we dont have a couch.

(ok, there is also “other” time in my life, but I’m only talking about time I spend using a computing device)

Could I use it when we are on holiday? Of course, but the iPhone also covers this well enough, and despite what Leonie says, I do like to disconnect – even if not compleatly – when I’m on holiday, so a device which is designed to be connected all the time is not going to be a good fit.

Could I use it for my commute? Well, 7 months ago I could have, but my commute it from the bedroom via the coffee machine and shower, to the lounge. So no.

So while it’s a lovely piece of hardware, it’s not for me. Pretty much all of the use cases Apple presents, and I can think of, I dont do, or if I do, I have other hardware which covers it. If I had a long commute – which I had, from East London to West London, 1 hour each way, each day, before I left the BBC – then I defiantly could. If I didn’t have an iPhone (or I was replacing it) and only had a desktop machine, I could see getting one being a good thing. If I travelled a lot for work, I could see myself getting one. If I went to a lot of meetings, I could see myself getting one.

But I dont have or do any of those. Not any more.

I could argue that if I was writing apps for it, I’d get one, and if/when I do, I most likely will. There is a good chance this will happen before Christmas, too. But until then, my uses for portable technology are covered, and covered very, very well.

Some day, in the future, I may get one. Or 2. But until then, I think I’ll stick with the gear I have, and save the £600 for a contract-free iPhone 4G.

What is it?

On The Telly is a iPhone application which allows for offline viewing of BBC iPlayer content on the iPhone. iPlayer serves a h.264 stream to the iPhone, however this only works streaming over WiFi, so it’s not a lot of use if you are on a train or the tube. iPlayer does support offline viewing on other devices, but they must support DRM. As you can’t get the h.264 files off the iPhone, this is sort of redundant.

For those in the US, substitute “iPlayer” for “Hulu” – same idea, different country.

The source code for this is below. It’s really only of use to you if you want to see how it works (which is the point) as Apple prevents it being in the appstore (good old clause 3.3.1), and BBC does not license it’s content for non-personal use. But it was fun to write, and might serve as guidance for someone else building either a MonoTouch application, or even a “normal” iPhone application if they are coming from a .NET background.

Side rant: On Clause 3.3.1, I’d challenge anyone to tell the difference between this and an Objective-C-coded application except that the file size of the app is around 2meg, and if done in Objective-C it would be around 1meg, as a MonoTouch application has to include some of the Mono framework, which can’t be excluded by the compiler. Other than that, this is a non-cross platform, native iPhone app. If you know Objective-C, you’ll be able to follow allow in the code, because it’s mostly syntacticly different, not functionally. The objects created and used – UIButton, UITableViewController et al – are the same as an Objective-C app would use (not even mappings or intermediate layers – the same classes and code).

Of course, if Apple keep clause 3.3.1 in as they have it now, at least I’ll not lose any skills I’ve learned doing this.

Anyone who says it’s about multitasking is full of shit, and has not seen the APIs for multitasking. It’s about Adobe, pure and simple.

Anyway, back to the app!

The application consists of a number of tabs:

• The download tab. This contains the shows which have been downloaded.
• The queue tab. This has shows which have been queued for downloading
• The Features tab. This shows the featured and highlighted shows on iPlayer
• News and other category tabs. These show the shows in each category.

BBC limit iPlayer to disallow downloads from outside the UK, or over 3G. The app will most likely crash if you try, or say content is not available. Dont ask why you can’t download a specific show if you are on 3G (in the UK) or anywhere outside of the UK.

Feedback so far has been positive, but none of it has been from the BBC. Oh, well. It was fun to write.

Here is the source code. It needs various things in order to run:

• MonoTouch 2.x. You can use the trial version, but only in the iPhone simulator.
• MonoDevelop and Mono
• Apple XCode / iPhone SDK.
• A Mac and an iPhone development license from apple, especially if you want to put it on a device. Duh. Just the Mac if you want to run in the simulator.

I think the application has good examples of:

• Background processing, keeping work off the main (UI) thread
• Database access (sqlite) on the iPhone
• Using WebClient to download content
• Image manipulation on the iPhone
• What can be done in around 20 hours work using MonoTouch. This was not a complex app to write, thanks to Paul’s work on how to download the shows, in Ruby, and tools like Linq to XML and MonoTouch.

Overall, I found MonoTouch and MonoDevelop lovely to use – except I’d love to have ReSharper available for MonoDevelop. Using .NET without ReSharper is always a little painful, even if I’m using Visual Studio!

I’ve seen, in a number of applications, the use of the SegmentedControl in the header / title of a TableViewController. Something like this, from the Guardian app:

I thought this would be hard – some kind of cloned, custom TableViewController or something. But no, the solution (well, my solution, which may not be the official one) really shows just how well thought out Cocoa and CocoaTouch is:

In your ViewDidLoad method:

this.NavigationItem.TitleView = MakeSegmentedControl();

And the MakeSegmentedControl method looks like this:


public UISegmentedControl MakeSegmentedControl()
{
UISegmentedControl seg = new UISegmentedControl(new RectangleF(0, 0, 200, 25));

seg.InsertSegment("Highlights", 0, false);
seg.InsertSegment("Popular", 1, false);
seg.SelectedSegment = 0;

seg.ControlStyle = UISegmentedControlStyle.Bar;

seg.ValueChanged += delegate(object sender, EventArgs e) {
if (seg.SelectedSegment == 0)
{
(TableView.Source as DataSource).LoadPrograms(IplayerConst.HighlightsFeedUrl);
} else {
(TableView.Source as DataSource).LoadPrograms(IplayerConst.MostPopularFeedUrl);
}
return seg;
}


Why, you ask?

Very simple. The application development model, having had a brief play with the CTP version, make XCode and Cocoa look like it just walked in from 1995. The iPhone has 120K apps or so (depending on what they have removed this week), with a development model that most of the developers using it had to learn, from scratch, and for those used to a modern language, is backward, antiquated and alien. Thats one hell of a learning curve for most developers. And by modern I mean Ruby, Python, Java, C# et al – basiclaly something invented in and for a date starting with 20.

Obj-C only makes sense if you know Obj-C, C or C++. If you only know one of the above languages, it’s has the potential to confuse the shit out of you – and leak memory all over your nice new carpet.

Contrast that with WP7. It uses .NET and Silverlight/WPF. There are a lot of people who have to adapt to a small change in the API – those who know Silverlight already – and a massive, orc-ish horde who just need to learn a bit of Silverlight over the top of their up-to-8-years of .NET. VS.NET still owns XCode for ease of use and productivity, especially VS.NET 2010. C# and the .NET managed environment kicks Obj-C and Cocoa all over the park* for getting things done. I came to this realisation when I used CocoaTouch and found that I could, using the .NET (mono) libraries, in about 4 lines of code, what took around 50 in Cocoa. (connect to URL, parse a model out of the resulting XML).

Aside from initial market share (WP7: zero. iPhone: lots) and rabid fanboi’s (‘cos, ya know, it’s not cool to like Microsoft anymore), I don’t see where the iPhone has a development advantage over WP7. And these days, it is all about the apps. WP7 will ship with the same basic features as the iphone, in a very similar package. It’s the apps that make a difference.

Throw in what happens when you can use a single technology (Silverlight, .NET, c#) to write you mobile app (WP7), back end (Azure or self-hosted), desktop and web (Silverlight or WPF). Right now, with the iPhone, I have to use Obj-C/Cocoa for Mac and iPhone, something else for Windows, and something else for backend/web (Rails? Flash? whatever else). With WP7, I can stay within the same universe, or I can move out of it as I like. If I’m a single person or small team, I know which way I’d be going.

We’ll see, I guess. I think Microsoft has one bit covered – the development story – now lets see if they can solve the other story: make consumers want it. Thats the hard bit.

Note to Microsoft: subsidise phones via MSDN. Get the devices into developers hands cheaply, and not tied to the useless US carriers. Not just at PDC or TechEd, but for anyone with an MSDN subscription, ActionPack, MS Partner status etc.

Side note: I wonder if there is a “market” for a Silverlight-style markup for CocoaTouch. Same idea – build the object tree as XML, parse it down to code/objects at compile or runtime. But using UILabel et all. Could be the best of both worlds. Same business logic, replace the views and some of the controllers, and have an app which works over both platforms. Actually, maybe thats what a XIB is….

*unless you have been using Obj-C for a long, long time. This is obviously not going to apply to the likes of Mr Gemmell and co, or anyone else with a few years of experience invested in iPhone apps.

So, whats new (well, that I know about – there may be more since I left)?

Note to the usual BBC-bashers out there: This is my opinion on a lot of things, and also a snapshot of how it was when I left in October. Things may have changed. I may not have remembered them quite right. People may have made decisions which you dont agree with. Get over it. And if you think I speak for the BBC, BBC Worldwide or anyone but myself, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you…..

The criteria of the homepage rewrite was a lift and shift, which means that functionality that the end user sees and uses should not change much, if at all, but it needs to run on a totally new platform, be somewhat future-proofed, and be updated for changes in technology.

The basic idea of a movable, customisable set of boxes with the various news items, launching you deep into other BBC properties, hasn’t changed. There are a number of smaller UX changes – eg the size of the header is different, the media box has changed completely and can now do video amongst other things – but the basics haven’t changed.

If you loved the old homepage, you’ll most likely love this one. If you hated it before, I doubt you’ll like it now, either. That’s just how things are. If you really want to change it, I suggest you apply for a job at BBC FM&T.

What has changed is mostly behind the scenes. On the front end the Glow Javascript library, which the BBC open sourced a few months ago, has been used for most of the page layout and manipulation. As this is the standard UI library within the BBC, this means that pool of people who can maintain the homepage is larger, at least within the BBC. A lot of the older markup and styles have been updated to reflect changes in the state-of-the-art since the original homepage was written.

On the backend is where most of the changes are. The BBC has invested in a new platform, internally called Forge, and the homepage is the first major project I know of to launch on the new platform. Forge is a complete re-work of the BBC platform – the existing one evolved over time since web 1.0, and was having trouble handling the large load of events like 7/7, or the projected load of the 2012 Olympics. Most of the code was a mix of Server Side Includes (SSI) and Perl, with some Java thrown in for good measure. The existing homepage had issues around how long it took to make a new widget, which was addressed in the new homepage.

The Forge platform uses a lot of up-to-date techniques and technologies. At the front end lies PHP, which is used to render the pages to the end user. I can only summise why PHP was chosen (as I wasn’t at all part of the decision), but I imagine it was for a number of reasons: it’s known to be able to be scaled (facebook/yahoo anyone?), and there are a lot of people out there with PHP and front end skills. Finding people with the right skills easily and (fairly) cheaply is always going to be more of a problem than throwing some more hardware at a problem, within reason. I have my own feelings about PHP (especially after using it for 9 months), but I think, in this case, it’s a good decision.

Forge uses a SOA-based architecture, and the base platform provides a number of different services to all applications, such as databases (mysql), key-value stores (couchdb, abstracted away to look like a dumb store), memcached, image manipulation, monitoring, geo-ip, inter-layer caching and a rather brilliant internal feed engine, which allows for feeds to be pulled from various internal and external sources, cached and managed for availability, and then served to the requesting page in a very short amount of time.

Other services – REST-based and usually delivering JSON or XML – can be written as needed and hosted on the Forge platform, using Java (preferred) or Perl (for legacy apps, usually).

Forge is also a development environment, designed to allow easy development both inside and outside of the BBC firewall. For example, during the snowpocalypse last year, working at home was as easy as just plugging in the laptop and turning off the proxies. From there, we had full access to all source code, continuous dev/test/stage environments, wikis, bug tracking systems, IRC etc. We even had one team member working from New Zealand using the same system. This aspect alone makes forge one of the best overall development environments I’ve used. Work anywhere with a ‘net connection. Really. Bravo to BBC’s Forge people on the design and implementation.

If you look at the homepage, the architecture is fairly simple (tho the implementation isn’t)

• The first step is to work out if we know who you are. If we dont, you get a default page, which is served out of cache if possible, which puts almost zero load on the platform for 80% of users.
• If we know who you are, PHP generates the page, based on a document definition stored for you in the key-value store. Updates to the definition can be applied here, for example adding a new widget (Olympics? Wimbledon?) to all users layouts.
• The feed engine provides all the content – news items, weather, TV listings etc – to the PHP code. The default homepage had, last time I checked, around 75 feeds on it. This come from various sources, from databases, web services, RSS and ATOM feeds, and other sources, some of which could never handle the load of the homepage. The feed engine abstracts that away, meaning that the homepage only deals with one format, and the source sites don’t get slammed.
• Most steps in this process – each widget, each sub item with in a widget, each feed, each document – are cached, reducing the load on the platform as much as possible.

One thing that new site does which the old one couldn’t do well, is having separate layouts for different geographical locations. At the moment*, it’s “UK” and “everyone else”. UK gets the normal page and everyone else gets a more world-focused page (eg, no London news unless you ask for it, world news above UK news), and also ads and promotional stuff via BBC.com, BBC Worldwide’s online business unit (which I used to work for), which is how the homepage pays for itself outside of the UK (which is paid for by the license fee). This allows BBC.com to sell campaign’s for the “rest of the world”, and have them integrate into the site seamlessly, where as before these additions looked somewhat out of place, as well as being quite hard to implement.

So, all up, it’s a massive change to a well-used page, but not one that most users will notice – which is the point. What people will notice is, over time, a richer availability of content and interaction, which couldn’t be done in either a timely manner or a scalable manner on the old system. Nice work to the team who developed this – both those who are still at the BBC, or have since left. Must be time for a beer on Jo….

* You did read the bit up the top regarding “at the moment” being “when I left”, didn’t you?

• I don’t work well on a morning. Once I worked this out, it’s a lot easier to plan around it – I can do things like put a load of washing on, run an errand or 2, or just sit and think about the problem a bit. But there isn’t a hell of a lot of point getting hug up about not coding before lunch time. On a similar note, Twitter is a total time suck. I’m about this close (|-|) to using the parental controls on the router to block it.
• I can’t, and shouldn’t, work as much as one of the owners of the company. It’s not my company. Comparing myself to them/him is just stupid, as I dont have the (potential) financial reward. Kicking myself for not working to 2am is unproductive and depressing. So I stopped.
• I need to be managed around the coffee machine. And the pantry. Sad but true. Solution: I have a can of half-caff and the can of normal espresso beans. Not perfect, but better. 5 espresso’s is normal for a day, but at least with Monmouth half-caff (self-mixed from their swiss decaf and organic espresso), thats only 3 shots of normal, which I can handle. Iced tea and water is a great replacement too.
• It is quite possible to not leave the house for 2-3 days. I often have to make an effort to get out. That said, if I include home + tube + office, it wasn’t hard to not step outside of those bounds for weeks at a time, so thats not really a big deal. Having the gym here reopen with new gear is also helping there – even if it is just a walk to the end of the block and a workout.
• Some things are better once accepted. Mental load and all that. Once I accepted I needed some new hardware (yay! new Macbook Pro!) and bought it, development has been much, much nicer. I agonised over spending around $2000 USD for months. I could have been using a machine which is actually suitable for the job since January! Once I accepted that around 2meg is the most we can get in this area unless BT rewires the island, it was …. ok.
• If I listen to talk radio (in my case, TWIT/MacBreak/This week in */Guardian podcasts, not actual public talk radio), I don’t get any work done. Issue solved: subscribe to Tiesto, John 00 Fleming, Armin, Above and Beyond and co, all as podcasts. Most others cleared out. Result: 5 days of so of new (psy)trance, and a load more work done.
• Oh, and the Tiesto remix of The Editors – Papillon kicks serious arse. I need – NEED – an RPM bike for this track. If I play it any more – or any louder – I’m sure the neighbours will complain :)
• Setting up a company in a country you dont know isn’t as easy as it should be. This is the second company we have had in the UK. We are still setting up a few things. It’s a little painful, and it shouldn’t be.
• Turning down work is hard, especially when it’s for friends. I’m at or slightly over capacity at the moment, and I’ve turned down 2 lots of work already. While it’s not a big problem during winter, it’s going to become one in summer (which appears to be rapidly approaching!). If it’s not sorted out, the result is an unhappy (but understanding) spouse. Sorting that out tho.

Other than that – so far, so good. I have a nice “office” setup, and while it isn’t ultra tidy or perfect, it’s comfortable and definitely workable. Would I like faster internet and an office in a room on it’s own? Sure. Why not. But then I’d most likely lose the ability to turn 90deg to the left and see the dogs playing in the park. Not at all bad.

06/03/2010: Mac is gone, RAM still available.

Macbook, 13 inch, White late-2006 model. 2ghz Core2Duo; 4GB RAM (3.5GB usable); 250GB hard drive. All the rest of the bells and whistles of a Macbook (802.11N, Bluetooth, DVD writer etc etc). Full specs here (it’s the second/middle row). Comes with the remote, power supply, VGA cable etc etc.

RAM has been maxed out. Hard drive is brand new, and comes with Snow Leopard + updates installed. Case, including keyboard, and internal fans have been replaced recently (by Apple, under warranty).  Everything works. No major scratches or damage. I guess it’s slightly “off white” due to being used, but as I don’t have a new one to compare to, it’s hard to tell.

Works perfectly, and has served me very well. Replaced as I need a machine with more RAM – otherwise I’d keep it (I get paid to work with Windows, so I run large VM’s). Great if you want to get into iPhone development or want a small, portable laptop. Will run Windows, but might not be pleased to do so :)

£400. If you are not in the UK (or more specifically, London), add shipping on top of that :) I’m happy to pack it, but given the value, I guess it’ll need to be couriered.

Also for sale: 4GB of DDR3 1066mhz (PC3-8500, SO-DIMM) RAM. Fits in, and came from, a Mac Mini (2ghz, early 2009 release). It’s Apple RAM, tho it’s not branded as such. It will fit, from what I can tell, into any of:

• Macbook (the new white ones only)
• Macbook Pro (new new alu ones – 13″ to 17″)
• Mac Mini (2009 onwards)
• iMac (2009 onwards)

I also imagine it’ll work in any other machine – eg a Dell or Lenovo – which supports DDR3 1066mhz RAM – aka PC3-8500. That covers most new(er) Core2Duo and i5 and i7 machines.

£50 (Amazon retails the same for £100). Again, postage on top of this if I have to post it somewhere. It’s small and light tho.