The new Nine Inch Nails album is now being steamed in it’s entirety. Thankfully somebody saw fit to rip the stream and upload it to usenet :)

I’ve been getting ready for the deployment of wow4kids.com and one of the final features to be into place was restricting access to the administrative back-end. I enabled admin routing in CakePHP and put all the back-end code into admin_* functions in my controller which are accessible via /admin/controller/action. I wanted to enable some form of access control but without utilising a full user management system which would have been overkill.

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Here a quick snap of my new workspace: You can see my MacBook and the second display with the site I’m current working on along with my lunch and ubiquitous coffee mug…

Over the past week and a half I’ve been fine-tuning my Mac experience: getting used to the system in general, in particular the keyboard, and building up my arsenal of applications. I’m not a Unix wizard, but I do make a lot of use of the command-line so I’m enjoying the underlying BSD-goodness of OS X and multiple terminal sessions are a necessity: one to tunnel select local ports to my home slackware box via ssh, one to perform local operations and one to host a screen session on our development box.

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I’m composing this from the MacBook my new job has has provided me with. Coming from PC-land it’s a culture shock, a very sleek, stylised culture shock, but a culture shock none-the-less. I’ve got a 2GHz Intel Core Duo processor along with 1.5 GB of RAM at my disposal, so everything is very smooth and shiny but I’m having to adjust to an operating system I’ve never used before so I feel almost crippled when it comes to doing things I don’t normally even have to think about.

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A trailer clip for Nine Inch Nails upcoming album Year Zero was released today and I’m sitting here, taking some time out from coding, listening to the tracks from it which were recently “leaked”. The tracks are: “Survivalism"(the forthcoming single,) “My Violent Heart” and “Me, I’m Not". It’s these last 2 which were discovered on USB drives in toilet cubicles at a couple of recent gigs. The files are all 320 kbit/s CBR MP3s and I’ve had the 3 of them on repeat.

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I’ve been working on a form in my app and was faced with a decision regarding one of the fields: I need the user to select an object from a (possibly large) number of existing objects. I reckoned I had 3 options: a simple drop-down list, which could prove to be impractical; a pop-up window; or, behind door number 3, I could investigate the use of Ajax, which would have the added effect of adding some web 2.

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Yesterday, the project I’m working on turned into a full-time gig. I start Monday as a full-time developer and can finally sign-off after nearly 6 years on state benefits. It works if you work it!

I’d finished reading the last interesting book in my stack on Saturday morning so I wandered down to Waterstone’s to pick up something to tide me over until I got my act together and ordered some of the items on my Amazon wish list. On Tuesday afternoon I waved bye-bye to a few shekels and seeing as I’d still a good bit to go on the book I bought at the weekend I opted for the free delivery.

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Last week I found myself with the need to communicate with some people via AIM. I’d never bothered with that particular protocol before but being a Linux enthusiast I detected the opportunity for a bit of geekery… All my IM needs are taken care of by jabberd running on substance. I can communicate directly with the people I know who use Google Talk and I’ve the MSN transport running to keep in touch with a few folks using that network, so, instead of taking the easy route and switching to a multi-protocol client, I opted to install the AIM transport.

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