Who doesn’t use instant messenger of some form these days? Those of us from the days when there were as many chat programs as people probably have half a dozen accounts or more, or at least did at one point (who didn’t have ICQ, MSN, AIM, and Yahoo?). Thank goodness for unifying applications like Pidgin/Adium, Trillian, and others.

Now that some of us old chatters have grown up and created businesses (or at least business names) of our own, we may need to add our Google Apps accounts to the mix. This is a little trickier than just adding a Gmail, or other established provider, account, but thankfully, it’s not that difficult. I found, though, that start-to-finish instructions for getting set up on Pidgin were lacking, so we’ll cover them here. These instructions will work for Pidgin, and should work for Adium (the Mac port of Pidgin), though one may find the settings in slightly different places, due to convention differences across the platforms. The basic information should also work for other clients, such as Tillian, though, obviously, you’re on your own for finding were to enter everything.

I’m terrible about coming up with projects to do to learn a new language. As such, I generally pick them up as jobs require them. This makes it difficult to find a good reason to pick up a new language for me. So, when I made the decision earlier this week to learn Python, I decided to go a slightly different route - Gedit plugin development!

We’ve all been there – the peon, low-level, replaceable employee at the bottom of the corporate food chain. Unfortunately, since we can’t all be wildly successful business owners, or get promoted to management almost immediately, we sometimes have to do what we can in our little peon positions. It’s heartening, then, to find James Shore’s Change Diary, via Jeff Atwood’s blog, from when James was working as a developer shortly after the DotCom bust.

It’s a long read, and I haven’t quite gotten all the way through it, but even what I’ve read so far has made it well worth the read. There’s success, there’s failure, but most of all, there’s proof that even one peon can make a difference in a company. It’s a lesson that employees and managers alike would do well to learn, I think.

Those who know me know that I’m a Linux fan (and a fan of Open Source software in general), so it’s probably no surprise that I run a version of Linux on at least my personal computers. In fact, being a PHP developer lends itself very well to using Linux on my work computers, too. Previously, I used Ubuntu, a popular Debian-based version. I still would recommend Ubuntu to those looking to get their feet wet with Linux, but my own path and workflow needs took me away from it with their recent change to a user interface they call “Unity”. I found the Mac-like Unity interface to be too hostile to my dual monitor setup, and at the time, Gnome 3 on it wasn’t very stable, and I didn’t really care for the other desktop UIs that are available. Since I actually liked Gnome 3, I decided to try a distribution that has it integrated. I was already somewhat familiar with the Red Hat family of operating systems from dabbling with it back before Red Hat proper became an enterprise solution, so Fedora (often referred to as Red Hat’s testing ground) seemed like an obvious choice.

Why the new home?

SilverStripe is great, but, like the rest of the platform, there’s not much to it. This isn’t bad in and of itself, I just don’t have time to essentially build and maintain the workings of a blog. So, I’ve decided to basically outsource that aspect, so that I can focus on the content of my blog, and the core of my website (which, admittedly, has been sorely neglected).