Monday, July 28, 2008

Some people....

Some people(1) will do anything to justify getting their picture(2) out there...

(1) Ok, me...
(2) Or image that resembles the side of their head.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Well, That Worked

And it reminds me how really really neat the iPhone app store is.

Posted with LifeCast

Trying Out Lifecast

Interesting idea, it seems to be a little multichannel diary which you can wire to multiple blogs (or not) which strikes me as simple and .... Well let's see if it posts this first shall we.

Geolocate this post

Posted with LifeCast

Saturday, July 26, 2008

10 points for redefining "Hello World" in Java

Some code we never go back to. Like Java's Hello World... it has a main method which takes arguments and it always looks a little daunting. At Cavdar.net someone had a bright idea and uses a static initialiser block to print "Hello World", and then promptly exits to stop the JVM looking for the main method and giving an error. I, for one, welcome our new "Hello World" overlords...

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Context sensitive trackpad on the iPhone?

I was thinking, wouldn't it be neat if you could have an app on the iPhone which talks to your Mac and acts like an intelligent trackpad for the Mac?

You could experiment with context sensitive trackpads which change according to the application running on the Mac.

A pope can dream.



Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Trying out blogging by mail.

I've been thinking about it, and the lack of a iPhone app to post to
Blogger has lead me to giving mail based blogging a go.

Well, at least that's the theory.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Ah Momus brilliance....

And there in my feeds this morning, Momus lists the tracks he's doing in a Berlin set. And to top it off, a wonderful bit of Momus on a webcam, performing "The Cheques in the Post"....



Brilliant stuff...

Monday, July 14, 2008

How overegged were the iPhone queue stories?

Some Guy With A Website demonstrates.

Thrift, the other interconnection protocol....

How did I manage to miss Thrift. Released a year ago by Facebook, it's very similar to Google's Protocol Buffers, so this comparison by Stuart Sierra puts meat on those bones.

There's only one way to resolve this... PROTOCOL FIIIIIIIGHT.

Actually, Thrift looks nice with more languages supported too and now Thrift is in incubation as an Apache project.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Foxtrot does....

Foxtrot does Penny Arcade, PvP, xkcd and Joy Of Tech in one.

So close yet....

So our local constabulary are sending out local crime maps by email to people who are interested. This is good.

They are sending out .Doc files embedded as a link in a .rtf file. You can't open this on a Mac or on Linux and I suspect you'd need Office on Windows for it to work. This is not good.

But, it's a start.

Google undoes a dumb....

Google Mail had what someone must have thought was a neat behavior. Exchange mail with people and pow, they are added to your contacts. Of course, in real life, that doesn't work. You get a contact list full of crapola addresses, which devalues your contact list which is dumb. So the good news is that is in a future release, Google is getting rid of the dumb. Now, there's "Suggested Contacts" and the ability to pick and choose who becomes your contacts.

And there's another thing to think about.... Is this the start of more controllable contact management for Google's services, making it social networking without the ninjas and spammers? One can hope.

Friday, July 11, 2008

If you don't read my other blog...

Then you won't know why I've been sighing.

A Coder Sighs....

Well, I had been working away on Pocket Lendery for the iPhone, and it was coming along nicely but what with me getting a proper job and all, it had slipped a bit.

And then the iPhone App Store opened and there was Circulator from the fine chaps at Coding Monkeys. Circulator looks like a fine app and just reminds me of some things I forgot from my spec.

Still, there's plenty of code in the Pocket Lendery code base, and I'll keep on working on it till it scratches my own itch. I will then release it as an open sourced project (unless you are reading this, are an iPhone coder or want to be, and want to help on the project in which case, mail me)...

I can't think of a better way to keep the Coding Monkeys on their toes than having an open source project snapping at their heels.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Google Browser Sync open sourced....

Google Browser Sync, or at least the client part, has been open sourced. I think the idea of porting the server to Google App Engine has potential, but lets see how the community builds around it first.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Google Protocol Buffers

Google squirt a lot of data internally between a lot of different services written in different languages. The data format between these services has been tricky to manage. The default response is "use XML" but XML makes the data bigger and more costly to parse. Google's solution is Google Protocol Buffers. Create a .proto file to describe the data contained by a message you want to pass. Run a compiler and you get the Java, Python or C++ code you need to read and write messages with that protocol. Now go wire up your services. All under an Apache 2.0 License. Worth checking out; and it'll be interesting to see how long before that range of languages supported expands.

Friday, July 04, 2008

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Things that suck - unselectable dialog text...

I think anyone who makes a dialog window pop up with text along the lines of "Something hasn't worked, see http://example.org/blah/blah/blah for more details" and then makes the URL non clickable and also makes the text unselectable so the user can't copy and paste, needs to have control-C/control-V disabled on their computers and see how they like it.

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Thing I want in monitors....

Where a monitor has umpteen inputs, and you can switch between the inputs using but a single button to cycle through them, I want a menu which lets me select wether or not I cycle through each input. So on my monitor here which has DVI-1,DVI-2,DisplayPort,HDMI,Component,Svideo,Composite,VGA... I could turn off everything but DVI-1 and HDMI, so rather than 3 and 5 button presses to change input, it would we 1 button press. Come on Mr Monitor maker; I'm really looking at you Mr Dell, make it real eh?