Date & time in the menu bar in OS X

Personally I find it unbearable not to have the date and time in the menu bar, or at least somewhere on screen that I can see at a glance without having to click to see it.

For some reason the Mac usability guys decided that showing just the time, and date on one click, was more usable.

There are a lot of tutorials about how to customise this and generally each one has around 50 comments, the thing is none of them work without a black magic hack that can usually be discovered around comment #47.  

If you don’t select the format medium and don’t include the seconds (even though they won’t show up) the formatting does not work.

I found this tutorial one of the more helpful ones, and after trial and error discovered the seconds problem.… Read the rest

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PHP Gets a Respectable Shell At Last

This story was covered recently at planet-php.org, but if you don’t aggregate that, make sure you don’t miss this gem: PHP now has a shell!

I remember this being promised and blogged about around a year ago, but it doesn’t seem to have materialized until now. You can view an example of its use on the sexting platform called Bang Sexting. If you’ve used the Python interactive shell, you immediately notice how PHP’s equivalent is the poor relation.

Thanks to Jan Kneschke this is no longer the case. A very nice program he’s written, PHP 5 only, you can download the files.

For the last few years I’ve been trying to build the considerable patience required to use the default shell available in PHP. If you have any parse errors, it dies, and of course you have to keep typing “<?php” everytime you re-fire it up.

Jan’s version is a considerable improvement, and although it doesn’t yet handle up-arrow for previous LOC or back-arrow in case you type your parentheses first and want to fill in the variables after, it’s a welcome relief to work with. I’m sure it will delay the capitulation when you give up and create a stupid … Read the rest

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How to price your tech services?

I was googling around to see what folks are charging for the range of services software devs offer. Although some humorous sites (a must read) are amongst the top results returned, how to price one’s services is of course a serious question.

One categorisation of services could be as follows:

  • consultancy
  • training
  • software development
  • support
    • ad-hoc
    • packages

For me the list runs from most difficult to easiest, and I charge accordingly.  Consultancy general involves technology recommendations, project specification, business analysis, etc, and the kind of input you can give after say 10 years experience is considerably different to what you might have offered after 5.

Next is training, and the reason I’ve put that higher than run-of-the-mill development is that preparation is involved.  For a 1/2 day or 3 day course considerable prep work is involved.  Subject matter can cover any software or platform you’re an expert on, but ideally you want to be teaching something that you built that you know better than anyone else.

In third position is regular software development; the more I do of this the more I see it as generic implementation – a commodity, and therefore chargeable at a lower rate.  Given a skilled team, … Read the rest

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