The next MiniBar meetup in London is on 20th April at the Truman Brewery, Corbet Place. I’ve been to it twice now and it’s a great time to meet up with web developers, Internet professionals, investors and general hangers-on, and geek out to loud music. April’s event looks set to be particularly popular because the featured presentation will be by Canonical — that’s Mark Shuttleworth’s company (of Ubuntu/space tourist fame). I am, of course, planning to be there.
Attendance is free, but you need to register for it if you want to go. Seems it’s filling up pretty quickly this time round, so you need to sign up sooner rather than later, as it’s limited to 150 people.
The latest version of Comment Timeout is now available for immediate download. This fixes several bugs:
1. The plugin no longer raises a warning when installed on a server where allow_call_time_pass_reference is turned off in your php.ini file.
2. It is now possible to disallow hyperlinks in comments entirely, by setting the maximum number of hyperlinks to zero.
3. Hyperlinks that contain line breaks are now counted correctly.
One important note: If you are upgrading from an earlier version, and had set it to allow unlimited hyperlinks in your comments, it will now reject all comments containing any hyperlinks at all. To fix this, go to the options page and uncheck the box that says “Reject all comments containing more than 0 hyperlinks” — or alternatively, you can change the zero to some larger number of your choice.
A couple of weeks ago I was treated to two new monitors — 20 inch wide screen flat Dell offerings, each with a resolution of 1680×1050 pixels. These replaced a couple of excruciatingly old CRT behemoths that were occupying three quarters of my desk.
The new monitors can rotate on their stands, so you can have them in either a portrait or a landscape orientation. After a little bit of experimentation, I’ve plumped for having both of them upright.
This arrangement really comes into its own for coding: you can see ninety lines of code on one screenful without compromising clarity. This is quite helpful when you encounter a gargantuan 1,600-line function with loops and if statements a dozen levels deep, written by someone who has never read Martin Fowler’s excellent book on Refactoring.
The only thing is that having them vertical slows down the graphics card a bit for some reason — but since I’m not playing video games or watching DVDs at work, that doesn’t really matter. It’s also a bit odd when the machine boots up because the Windows splash screen appears on its side.
Some people like to have three or more monitors, but I’m not one of them. While two monitors are definitely much better than one, I find that a monitor arrangement that is too wide can be a bit uncomfortable when you’re constantly having to move your head through an angle of about 45° to get from one end of the screen to another. With my previous setup of two 21 inch CRT monitors, my applications all tended to congregate on the left hand screen, and when I had the new monitors in landscape orientation it felt even more awkward. However, with them both upright, it’s probably the best monitor arrangement I’ve ever had, since it provides an optimum ratio of screen real estate to required head movement to make the most of it.
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Posted at 10:11 in Miscellany 
Feel free to take a look round the site — if I
say anything that 
