February 2012
9 posts
On privacy, hashing, and your customers →
Try not to be a dick; check that you’re not being a dick; be less of a dick.
Jeff Atwood leaving Stack Exchange →
Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful, but I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.
I doubt there’s a single developer out there today whose job - life - hasn’t been improved by Stack Exchange.
Inside Stripe →
Stripe’s aim, the cofounders agree, is to make accepting payments online as simple as embedding a YouTube video.
I’d argue Stripe don’t want to be the next PayPal. They want to be better.
I can’t wait till these guys launch in the UK.
Github's Zach Holman on The Apple Voice →
Most startups don’t have the luxury of meeting every one of their customers. They can’t explain the case for their product in-person.
Instead, we market our product with words. We craft those words with our voice.
Honeywell goes after Nest Learning Thermostat for... →
U.S. Patent No. 7,634,504 - this patent was filed in 2006 (issued 2009) and covers displaying grammatically complete sentences while programming a thermostat.
It is utterly incomprehensible that such a patent could ever be issued.
Race to drill into Antarctic lake →
Is this not how horror films start?
Apollo 11 Launch at 500 Frames per Second →
Apple developer documentation viewer for iOS →
Giving this a try. Seems quick and stable thus far. Downloads a copy of whichever docsets you choose, so it also works offline. It’s currently restricted to publicly available docsets, so no beta docs. Open-source and BSD-2 licensed.
Egypt football violence leaves many dead in Port... →
74 dead and the first adjective out of your mouth is ‘unfortunate’?
January 2012
21 posts
Terms of Endearment →
Interesting that the Barnsley man’s greeting of choice - ‘cock’ - has been omitted from the BBC’s list.
Number of people going to university almost back... →
It’s not a right if you’re stupid.
iPlayer on Sky →
The BBC and Sky today announced a landmark partnership deal that will bring the BBC’s popular video-on-demand service BBC iPlayer to up to five million Sky homes in 2012.
Just as long as the BBC aren’t paying Sky for the privilege.
Improved line-height in Xcode 4 →
I have just one problem with Menlo, and that is its default line-height. Too cramped for my tastes. As there’s no way to change the line-height used in Xcode, I’ve just switched to a variant called Meslo - it’s essentially identical to Menlo, but with three variants of line-height.
EDIT: It also includes a tweak to fix a cannot-unsee issue with Menlo’s asterisks. Sample...
Labour to force vote on RBS bonus →
There are twenty ‘Opposition Days’ per session of Parliament, and Labour plan to use one of them to call on the government to break a contract Labour themselves negotiated.
Wiping iCloud bookmarks →
Saved for future reference.
http://j.mp/xGO1AN →
Since they’re so persnickety about licensing agreements, let’s amend all of our terms of use to require all movie moguls to use a special “Hollywood Edition” of our products.
All joking aside, this serves to illustrate just how ridiculous certain aspects of ‘typical Hollywood’ would appear to be in any other arena.
RBS Chief's bonus criticised →
“How dare you summarily change what I am entitled to?”
— Unions, three months ago
“I demand you summarily change what this man is entitled to!”
— Unions, today
“Bonuses should be in shares and reward good performance.”
— Everyone, two years ago
“This bonus, paid entirely in shares and rewarding turning a £1.6bn loss in this quarter...
Jubilee cooking contest 'illegal' →
The anti-monarchy group Republic is warning schools they may break the law if they take part in a cooking contest to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
Of all the things to complain about, apparently kids can only take part if they’re simultaneously taught about republics.
Apple Outsider » Hollywood Still Hates You →
This is the sole reason piracy is up and profits are down: because doing it right totally sucks.
What I've learnt: Steve Wiener
- British Airways... →
Even when we open up a new cinema we leave one management spot empty and, at the end of the training, whoever excelled the most among the people we hired as hourly employees gets promoted into management.
Interesting idea.
Watching Apple win the world →
Make the best damn product out there, charge a profitable price, and win the world.
Apple's announcements further iPad revolution in... →
If Henry Ford had been an educational publisher, his customers would have asked for electronic textbooks instead of faster horses.
The John Lewis Economy: good for business? -... →
The bottom line is that this ensures we have highly-motivated, brilliant staff who are committed to driving our business forward and reaping the mutual rewards.
Do Great Things →
Don’t lose the fire you started with. If you’re going to devote the best years of your life to your work, have enough love for yourself and the world around you to work on something that matters to you deeply. Something that’s beating out of your chest and compels you to throw yourself at it completely. No one knows whether you and your teammates will realize your audacious visions, but in...
4 tags
Index name length error in Rails migrations using...
When trying to process a rename_column database migration, I ran into the following error after running rake db:migrate:
Index name 'temp_index_altered_long_class_name_on_even_longer_class_name_id' on table 'altered_long_class_name' is too long; the limit is 64 characters
This is an issue with index name length when using sqlite. A simple fix is to remove the index prior to renaming the...
Buffy the Vampire Slayer! →
Today’s rebellious youth, rather, are reduced to struggling desperately to keep hell from entirely engulfing the earth. Such, I suppose, is the fate of a generation that has been robbed of its fundamental right to dream of a better world. The very notion of being able to take part in a relatively democratically organized group of comrades, engaged in a struggle to save humanity from its...
“Saffron: Everybody plays each other. That’s all anybody ever does. We play...”
– Our Mrs Reynolds
Unions criticise Ed Balls's pay freeze comments →
“I think from the trade unions’ point of view, what we’re going to be asking is if Labour doesn’t want to be the opposition, then where is the opposition going to come from to this government?”
That depends whether you consider the only form of opposition to be disagreeing with everything the governing party says, regardless of the facts.
Why Best Buy is Going out of Business...Gradually... →
For brick-and-mortar retailers, however, the shift was jarring. Moving online required new thinking, new management structures, and new strategies. It would also require integrated front and back-end information systems. Customers would expect inventory to be transparent between the web and the stores, and that specials and “exclusives” would be consistent across all channels. Whatever...
December 2011
2 posts
A Christmas Message From America’s Rich →
In other words, Chase knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.
Does a citizen of Greece do that deal? Forget that: does a human being do that deal?
3 tags
appledoc build script
/usr/local/cellar/appledoc/2.0.4/bin/appledoc --project-name $PROJECT_NAME --project-company "Company Name" --company-id com.company --output $SOURCE_ROOT/docs --logformat Xcode .
Add it as a Build Phase to have documentation generated each time you build. I’ve got this set up on a separate ‘Documentation’ target so it doesn’t run every single time. That way, each build...
November 2011
1 post
On Strikes
In response to those inane Facebook status posts:
Remember when some people overreached, borrowed and spent more than they could ever afford to pay back in search of an unsustainable way of life they felt they were somehow entitled to, thus giving bankers the ability to inadvertently blow up the financial system and plunge the world into recession?
How about accepting the possibility that...
August 2011
1 post
Rob Delaney: Bought some US stocks →
Did you see the recession coming? Did it announce itself and tell you the date it would arrive? No, it did not. Nor will recovery. So quit whining. Pessimism is for losers.
May 2011
2 posts
April 2011
4 posts
4 tags
Github API, UAGithubEngine and IssuesHub
The roadmap:
Finish IssuesHub 1.1 (bug fixes, UI and UX improvements).
Implement new Issues functionality (milestones, assignees etc) in UAGithubEngine, upon which IssuesHub is built.
Add said functionality to IssuesHub for 1.2.
Well Quite. →
Warren Moon: “I thought we were past all this stuff about African-American quarterbacks, but I guess we’re not.”
“I never trust anyone who’s more excited about success than about doing the...”
– http://xkcd.com/874
March 2011
2 posts
““Yeah, I figured so,” said Jack. “But I could ask to be a genius? I could become...”
Not A Waste →
We should endeavor to improve the lives of as many people as possible in a lasting and significant way, making the most of our own skills in the process.
This philosophy is the reason I have faith in other people: because I know at least some of them live their lives and make decisions in this way. I know that some people care about more than “living life on their own terms”.
February 2011
3 posts
“The era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over...”
– Steve Jobs, Macworld Expo, 1997. Although it could just as easily have been said yesterday.
“We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose....”
– Steve Jobs, Macworld Expo, 1997
January 2011
3 posts
4 tags
Fixing the Mac App Store
If you’re a Mac developer and had been using the previously-available build of OS X 10.6.6, you may be having a few problems related to the Mac App Store after installing the final build.
Personally, no amount of restarting, relaunching, deleting preference files or cursing managed to get me anything other than the following console message upon clicking ‘Sign In’ (either in...
December 2010
5 posts
“It’s a game. It’s not an exercise in consistent perfection. The unexpected is...”
– Ask Vic: Believe in the unexpected (via Instapaper)
Simplify →
But the biggest problem is the complexity of IT. If you look at any IT in business, it is so complex it hinders the ability to be agile and efficient. Throughout the history of IT we all have said that we will make it simpler by adding more things to it, but that makes it more and more complex.
(via Instapaper)