OK, so having played around with SearchMash for a while I decided to set it as my search engine for Safari.

Not an easy task indeed, but here is the answer, just follow the following simple steps:

• open a Terminal
• run "vim /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari" (without the quotes)
• hit the ":" key to enter command mode
• paste in

A talk on the introduction to Maven that I proposed has been accepted for the preliminary agenda for Developer! Developer! Developer!'s Scotland conference this year!

If you would like to hear it, or think it would be useful to others then please vote for it :)

Sure I'm nervous - but somehow we have to spread the good news around the country.

It's funny that these quizzes are usually nonsense - but this one totally matches me, freaked me out a little!

You are: Charlie Pace

You almost have two different personalities. You are a good person but have some issues you've been struggling with. You aren't one of the bravest people in the world but you defend what is closest to you. You are willing to fight for

OK, so the iPhone is not really new news as it has been out in the 'States for 4 months now but that did not stop UK Apple fanatics from being excited about the UK iPhone launch.

The queue at the official Scottish launch in Edinburgh was only around 30 people at 6:02 when the store opened, and some of them were just there to buy normal mobile phones.

The long awaited Zelda title for the game boy DS has finally arrived. With the combination of a new method of game play and a renowned game genre it already looks set to be a classic.

Link's latest adventure continues where the "Wind Waker" (for GameCube) left off. Link's pirate friends are merrily sailing the high seas and Zelda has once again renounced her title and

Sudoku is now a global phenomenon. The logical 9x9 numerical puzzle was initially developed by an American before gaining popularity in Japan. Now the whole world has taken notice. And so has Retang.com...

eSudoku is the fastest open source logical sudoku solver available. It uses logical algorithms to calculate the sudoku answers. It also helps users learn sudoku as it explains

Amazon's new music store has stirred up the DRM arguments again. Sigh …

In the absence of DRM software music can be copied as many times as you wish. Obviously, this should be done within the terms of your contract. This normally means that you can copy it onto CD’s/mini disk/MP3/(or even tape!) for your own use and your own computers.

DRM at its essence is simply a

So, today Apple had their fancy press release and yes, as everyone suspected, it was regarding the iPhone. Are we all psyched? Hardly.

All week they kept us on tender hooks about what was going to be announced. The Apple store in London was going to be kept open late. The store windows had been draped in black. The staff were being given advanced training about an

Hello from San Francisco!

The JavaOne conference went very well indeed. Sonatype managed to meet with all those we had planned and as a bonus we all got a day pass into the pavillion. There was a lot of crazyness there including Java powered robots and submarines but the rest was rather as expected. I got given a cool tshirt from one of the stands that reads

Thats right, there is a new guide out there to help all those interested in Maven (or already using it) to get the most out of their build lifecycle. It is indeed the definitive guide and will be regularly updated so it stays that way. This book is produced by my colleges at Sonatype and is a free gift to the Maven community - no registration, no catches. From

Wow, this is very cool! I was invited (with a group of singers from the National Youth Choir of Scotland) to sing Belshazzar's Feast in Edinburgh's Usher Hall with the Royal Choral Union.

This is a huge privilege and I am very excited about singing again, it has been so long since my work has let up enough to squeeze in any rehearsals.

When I got the information

No more late nights. No more broken builds. No more missed deadlines. Meet Sonatype.

Sonatype is an exciting new company that I have helped put together along with Maven founder Jason Van Zyl and many other core Maven committers. This is a very exciting day for all of us - it is time to announce that we are here, and we are here to help. From the introduction on

As many of you will have noticed I have over the last while been moving my open source efforts to Apache and Codehaus centering around the Maven build system.

It struck me over my time coding in this environment that although many great development tools are available there can be a large overhead setting up the individual components and getting the development lifecycle

Sunday marked the National Yout Choir of Scotland's 10th anniversary Gala concert. I was invited to sing as a member of the alumni of which there ae now quite a few.

After many long rehearsals over in Glasgow (though I swear we were told they would be in Edinburgh) the concert went very well indeed. The crowd were very responsive, though a tad keen and insisted on

Just recently I have found the WebWork MVC framework and am finding it a huge aid with my web development.

It makes everything so much simpler, seperating logic completely from presentation, keeping authentication etc well above the level of the main logic and yet giving you access to the core model classes directly from the WebWork custom tags.

To help folk check it out I

OK, so after planning this theme for ages I finally decided to get into it...

So far it is no where near complete - it has many "defaulting" parts and a few features need to be tweaked, but here it is:

Stay posted for new news, hopefully I will get this up on get-e soon. 

Well, after many months using this Ubuntu thing and a chat with one of the core developers I realised how great their commitment is to providing a "works out of the box" solution.

Just now I found that suspend without any hacking etc (well, a config change, as it is nvidia) on my shiny laptop! cool :) 

OK, so maybe more code related but hey. Rectang.com just opened it's new open source project framework based on the Trac system.

The framework provides SVN for version control, Wiki for project documentation and a ticketing system that integrates with the wiki and the svn commit messages. If you are remotely interested you can check out the projects using it at dev.rectang.com

OK, so in my frustration at IRC bots not combining the functionalities I needed I decided to code my own. The bot extends the PircBot framework providing handy tools to make a nice modular framework that enables quick and easy development of command modules.

Blah blah I guess - still, check out the Project page that I started on dev.rectang.com/projects/rcbot. If you want

OK, so since moving to ubuntu it has annoyed me that flash sites had fonts missing (if the author forgot to embed them!) when using the firefox plugin.

After browsing I found that installing gsfonts and gsfonts-x11 fixed this problem.

YAY :) 

OK, so as every other enlightenment user on the planet I decided that I wanted a theme that looked just like I wanted.

Unfortunately I could never get inspiration. Until now.

Enter "Flat-Curve" (please email me for suggestions for a better name). A simple theme that promotes flat colour and reduces complexity to produce a compelling and easy to use theme.

I have just

OK, so it looked like I might not have such a hectic month coming up - so what was the best plan? take up a new hobby of course!

On Sunday we popped down to Alien Rock to get a beginners lesson on how to climb.

By the end of the lesson (by which point we did not have strength to continue) we had scaled a few full height walls, thrown ourselves off from

Happy new year!

What a year it should be, hope you all have your resolutions ready... 

So I finally got it sorted, I am now Andrew Jonathan Elcock Williams.

That makes Michelle and I Mr & Mrs Williams - wow, sounds cool!

Online you can catch me at handyande.co.uk, which I had my eye on for a while anyway ;)

!!! finally !!!

Took the advice of some friends and released 0.1_rc1 as 1.0, hope I did the right thing.

1.0 is stable and is fairly complete for a first release, so please go play and drop me suggestions for the next version :)

Wow, what a lecture!

Professer Sir Tim Berners Lee (the creator of the internet) was talking at the university about the symantic web, which was very interesting indeed.

Afterwards my boss (who was amoungst the attendees) invited me to the reception afterwards to meet the big-wigs ;)

I was introduced to Tim and we chatted for a while about Geo-Data Services (which I work on)

OK, so Michelle was away this weekend seeing her parents so I decided to make the most of it and put my all into some XSM development - look what happened:

So now I can really see a 0.1 release coming along... Just 1 small feature to add and 2 bugs to fix and I should be able to release it. Was thinking about releasing a beta today, but then realised I

Erm, OK maybe this is a bit belated, but things have been hectic here!

We spent our honeymoon on Rhodes (Greek island off the coast of Turkey) near a small town called Kolympia. The sun was beating down, the cocktails were making themselves and the food was delicious. Needless to say we had a fantastic time.

The room we had was great - a deluxe junior suite with a

Oops, not posted anything in a while, well XSM is the software of the moment! recent additions include:

• FTP backend
• UTF-8 default encoding fixes most translation issues
• last login is stored to help folk see how long they have been idle for on a site

There is also a new selection of pages on the XSM site including screenshots of XSM managed sites and some artwork for

OK, so back from the wedding now and can honestly say that not only have I never been happier in my entire life, but also that I never realised a single day could encompas so many of the happiest moments of my life!!!

The day was fantastic, perfect, special, sunny, cheerful... yes I have run out of ways to describe it, this is the only problem I am encountering

OK, so I honestly thought I had seen the end of the crash ramifications, but oh no!

I went to the opticians about a funny blur in my eye, well - it turns out (they think) that this is a result of my accident. Apparently a small piece of tissue has broken off from inside my eye and is now floating around indside! Still - apparently my vision is still perfect

OK, so it has been a really long time now, but I finally got round to taking a picture of the damage, so I thought I would write it up.

When cycling home along the cycle paths a few weeks back some idiot-without-helmet-cycling-as-fast-as-he-can fool darted out in front of me on his bike not looking and not realising that he as on a footpath! Anyhow, after quite a