Someone asked this on Quora:

As detailed the previous post, I’ve been playing with Google Sketchup for visualising small changes we want to make to the house.

We’re thinking about knocking a few walls down in our lounge and I wanted to visualise how it would look. Since it’s gonna cost us about £6,000 for the work and materials, I figured I should try more than just imagination.

I was very impressed by this unique CAPTCHA used for registration at www.xero.com.

If you use project management tools like TargetProcess, you’ll know that sometimes it’s hard to get an instant feel for “where you’re at” without studying the burn-down chart or summary reports.

Whilst procrastinating furiously instead of attacking my huge workload, I decided to get FubuMVC reboot working on Mono/OSX and then write a blog post about it. The result is that you can get it running, although I had to do some hacks that aren’t going to work in production.

Some of you might have noticed that I’ve removed the adverts from yUML. I hate how they added so much “noise” to a site.

Wow, these icons are free and pretty:

http://wefunction.com/2008/07/function-free-icon-set/

Create ASP.NET MVC Admin Area For Your App In 10 LOC

Like most people, I’m looking forward to the addition of Areas in ASP.NET MVC 2. The main reason is so I can neatly put my admin area in a group like this example:

Wow, I’ve not blogged for over 40 days. Is Twitter stealing my blogging thunder?

My friends often tell me I make a great coffee. I’m a big coffee fan, so I’ve put quite a bit of research into getting it right. Here’s my tips:

I’ve had a bit of a rest from yUML recently, but by no means has the project stalled. Whilst I’ve been focusing on earning cash to pay bills, it’s been great to see a small ecosystem grow around yUML, and soon I’ll be looking to spend time on the project again for phase 2.

I’m sad to say that I’ve been guilty of downloading and reading illegal eBooks from torrent sites. I know for a fact that many software developers do this. At each place I’ve consulted, I’ve met developers with literally an entire Borders collection on their hard drives (excuse the pun).

I got a Boss ME-50 guitar pedal yesterday, and only just noticed this bold statement:

yUML was a little web app that I created a few months ago. I tweeted about it on Twitter, and the results were both amazing and confusing.

I was trawling through HTTP status codes today on WikiPedia and found the 418 - I’m a Tea Pot status code. How amusing :)

Scott C Reynolds blogged about how he’s been playing with MonoDevelop on OSX. I thought I’d download it, and was pleased to see this…

I’m a big fan of BaseCamp – an online project management tool. BaseCamp also gives you WriteBoards, which are roughly analogous to shared, online MS Word Documents.

http://yuml.me is less than a month old, and traffic has settled around 1000 visits a day. Users out there have generated well over 31,000 UML diagrams so far, wow!

I really need to give yUML it’s own blog or news page or something :)

Until then, a few things that are new with yUML.

There’s something beautifully creative about sketches. I’ve blogged about it before:

• Elite Game Artwork Scans

View Diagrams on GitHub

I messed about with putting yUML diagrams on a GitHub gist, I think they work well with the GitHub style.

I thought it would be fun to have a scruffy hand drawn look for yUML diagrams, which I’m really fond of.

Thought it might be nice to add a touch of polish to yUML. We’ve now got:

• Soft Shadows

yUML is a tool that lets you create UML diagrams using only <img> tags. Here’s an example:

I’m a song-writer, and as any song-writer knows, it’s easy to play the same old chords over and over. To get around this problem, I wrote a Ruby program that generates random songs for me. Well, random chord sequences to be precise. I play the chord sequences on the guitar, and incorporate ones I like into my songs.

I’ve been playing with spaces over the last few days, mainly because I often find myself drowning in app windows.

I’ve joined the other billion people on the planet who’s been photographed by the Google Van, and promptly published on Google Maps (street view). This time I was minding my own business on my way to Zolv. Nice shorts!

I’ve investigating applications with documents, discussions and calendars for a medium sized marketing support intranet.

Is it me, or has the world gone totally mad for top 10, 20, 30 lists? I was just looking at Digg/Software and every other entry was a 10 ways to do this, or 20 ways to do that, or 30 best thingymagigs.