I’ve not been quite so active blogging this year due to a number of factors. A case in point: it wasn’t until December that I wrote about my holiday in July and a friends wedding in August!

This meant that the most popular articles were actually written in previous years:

1. Sophia Smith
2. Eight Best Computer Books
3. Installing Oracle 10g on CentOS4
4. Minolta Dual Scan II
5. iPhone Dev: Saving State

While I appreciate people visiting, I am continually surprised by the appeal of some of these. Oracle 10g and CentOS 4 are, in software terms, ancient! And the Dual Scan II is more than a decade old — I bought it with my iBook G3 in 2001!

I’m 75% of the way to becoming a dad for the first time. What better way of displaying that progress — for a programmer at least — than as a Mac application? (Not currently available in the App Store.)

Today the Daily Mail is complaining about a joke that was broadcast on the News Quiz in October last year. (Is it still considered news six months after the event?)

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading the article, so, to summarise:

1. Broadcasting a joke that implies, but doesn’t use, a swear word is bad
2. But printing the same joke in a newspaper is okay
3. Broadcasting scantily clad women dancing is bad
4. But printing pictures of the same is okay
5. Putting quotes around a word to indicate disdain is good writing
6. A single complaint represents The Silent Majority
7. Mob rule would be a good thing
8. Potentially causing offence is grounds for severe sanctions
9. (But see bullets two and four for exceptions)
10. Knee-jerk liberals — whatever they are — are a wide-spread problem
11. Knee-jerk tabloids are okay
12. Personal responsibility is good
13. (Unless we have to exercise it ourselves)
14. Your opinion is wrong
15. Mine is right
16. Banning stuff that we don’t like represents freedom
17. Stating things as fact makes them true
18. Black is white
19. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia

I may have veered off target a little at the end but I think that’s pretty close to the core of the article. Did I miss anything?

It was nothing like as dramatic as my iBook dying one evening, but there was no getting around the fact that my nearly five year old MacBook was no longer up to the tasks that I was trying to throw at it. Developing applications, even for resource limited devices such as the iPhone, needs a pretty substantial piece of Mac software called Xcode. My photography pushed me towards getting Aperture to manage all my pictures. It’s great, but it did have a tendency to grind to a halt when it was least convenient.

The back-story to this post is that I’m the secretary of the company that owns the freehold to my flat. In the UK, Companies House keeps records of all the companies in the UK. One of the documents they keep on file is called the Memorandum and Articles of Association. This ream of legalese describes what a company is allowed to do and how it should go about doing it.

I first saw this on Seth Godin’s blog and thought it was a good idea in principle:

This might be a useful exercise. Doesn’t matter whether it was a hit or not, it just matters that you shipped it. Shipping something that scares you (and a lot of what follows did) is the entire point.

It is, however, quite hard for people who don’t live life in public in the same way that Seth does. I’ve spent a lot of the year doing pre-sales work either with clients that don’t like being named or for deals that we lost (and therefore not something a lot of people would want publicised). And now, in my new job, one reading of my contract means that I can’t even send out press releases.

I didn’t think that I had blogged very much this year, but now that I look back over it seems that I’ve done quite well. There have only been a few PhotoFriday challenges that I’ve missed and I’ve managed a fair few travel and even the odd technical blog.

None of this years blogs have done especially well in terms of page impressions but here are a few that I liked for various reasons.

One common refrain after the BNP made an appearance on Question Time last year was that if only more people went out and voted then right-wing extremists would not get elected. Of course that’s not the whole story but there’s some truth in that. Since we will have a General Election this time next week this becomes a very important point.

This got me thinking about my experience with the British electoral system. As far as I can remember, I’ve voted in every election that I have been eligible except for those when I have not been at home. In fact I was in California in this last election when Griffin was elected to the European parliament.

People are impressed by the Academy Awards ceremony, all the glitz and glamour, the celebrities and the recognition for their work. However there are much easier ways to pick up your own Oscar statue.

I got a lot done and with the ninety minutes I saved by not commuting I went to the gym, but there are problems with working from home…