Married man!

Last month Helen and I got married at Llandudno Registry Office, so I can now officially select “Married” as my marital status on any forms I fill out! We had a low key do afterwards at the Imperial Hotel with family and friends and thankfully everything went to plan, even the weather held off so we could have a few photos outside. It was the perfect day.

You can see some photos of our day on the blog of our wedding photographer and I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of the photos this weekend to bring back some happy memories.

• Ludum Dare. Competition to create a game in a weekend. Wouldn’t mind joining in when it’s next on if I have time. (0) #

• Lakes and Oceans. Shows what a feat of engineering drilling for oil really is. (0) #

• PHP: a fractal of bad design. Well worth a read, reminds me why I love Java so much. (0) #

• roboguice. Brings Google Guice (dependency injection) to Android. (0) #

• Robolectric: Unit Test your Android Application. I shall have to try this out very soon. (0) #

• Football Manager Handheld for Android. This app was one of the reasons I replaced my iPod Nano with a Touch late last year. Good to see its being released on Android now. (0) #

Edimax EW-7811Un on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

I’ve recently re-purposed my old desktop PC to be a server running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. As it’s an old box it’s not exactly quiet so I placed it under the stairs which posed a problem connection wise. In the end I decided to connect it up via wireless rather than run an Ethernet cable to it, so after doing a bit of research I went for the Edimax EW-7811Un nano USB adaptor from Amazon.

According to the Edimax web site Linux drivers were available for it and there were a few posts on the Ubuntu forums & wiki saying that people had got it working:

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1590873
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1744371
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HardwareSupportComponentsWirelessNetworkCardsEdimax

The USB adaptor uses the RealTek rtl8192cu chip according to this Debian wiki page and the filename of the Edimax driver package.

I tried the Edimax drivers first but I was getting pretty random results so I switched to RealTek’s  own drivers which seemed a lot more stable, and they seem to update them quite often too.

• Unity – Game Engine. Noticed this logo on both Android & iOS games recently. Looks like an interesting 3d engine that supports multiple platforms and they also offer a free version of the engine! (0) #

• Facebook shares some secrets on making MySQL scale. Some interesting Facebook usage stats and details of their MySQL infrastructure. What we know as MySQL probably bears very little resemblance to what Facebook use. (0) #