Free navigation!
The word is finally out, all Nokia devices with GPS now come with free driving and walking navigation! Do check it out but please be kind so my web services are not hammered in the first day 
Next best language?
I know the question has been asked before, but for a Java developer who is getting a bit tired of Java land, what is the next best language (or non-Java framework) to pick up? Here's a small social experiment to see what the community thinks: #nextbestlanguage
Nestoria Interview
Ed Freyfogle from Nestoria posted an interview with me on the Nestoria UK blog. We met up at the first ScaleCamp UK a few weeks ago. Thanks Ed!
Watching InfoQ presentations offline
For some time, InfoQ has published lots of great presentations from conferences and other talks. They post the video with slides and sometimes a transcript as well. Since I've been traveling a lot lately and seem to spend endless hours in airports, trains, cars, etc. I found that I saved up all my watching for outside of work. However because all of the presentations are streamed through a Flash player you must be online to watch them.
At the request of InfoQ, I have removed the bulk of this post. Without InfoQ, sponsors and of course the great presenters, none of this would be available. I would certainly not want anything to do with that stopping! Grab the mp3's that InfoQ have already started to make available, go to the conferences, and be a happy engineer!
EPEL repository
For some completely bizarre reason operations decided to go with CentOS for all future servers and releases. So as a good little soldier, I built up my new VM with CentOS 5. Why can't it just be easy from there on out?
yum install erlang
No go. Turns out there are a whole bunch of RPMs not in the official repository. In comes EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux). EPEL is a "volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages ".
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
yum install erlang
Check.
yum install rabbitmq-server
Check. Happy days.
