Skip to content

{ Author Archives }

Moving towards a typographic user interface

There’s a lot of noise about the iOS7 UI, unsurprisingly. Some nuts are screaming about betrayal, and kill the fanboys; also, unsurprisingly. For me, some things I like, some I don’t – some of the icons look too stripped back, the font grates on me; but that’s because similar ultra light fonts have already been […]

How To Swear Proper

Or: authentic British usage of swearwords This is really simple; just use “fuck”/“fucking” as punctuation as well as emphasis. Disclaimer: my native dialect is West London, which to my ears has the most unpleasant of the London accents. However, I went to a public school, and most of the time I sound close to RP […]

Learn lisp

I’m a big proponent of the #pragprog adage that you should learn a new programming language every year, but I have sadly lacking at putting it into practice, despite having an early advantage (BASIC, Fortran, Algol 60, APL, Pascal, Forth, COBOL, , IBM assembler, 6502 assembler, etc). Then in the early 90s I had started […]

Letterpress.app Word List

Here is a little utility to assist solving Letterpress games.  It comes largely (almost entirely) from an article on Stack Overflow.  It uses /usr/share/dict/words for the word list, and requires a initial stage to convert this into an anagram dictionary for efficiency.  Even so, it still takes a minute to run on my recent iMac.

Tagged ,

DODOcase Durables – iPhone 5 Wallet

DODOcase are responsible for the lovely Moleskine-like iPad cases and the texturally delicious BOOKback, and when they produced a new line of cases for iPhone/iPad/MacBook Air, I ordered one for my new iPhone 5 immediately. The case consists of a khaki (they call it “sage”) waxed cotton sleeve lined with orange cotton material (some of […]

Tagged

Device Sizes

There’s been blog chatter over this since Tim Bray posted his blog entry, and this is something I have had strong opinions about since the Newton, and even earlier (remember Steve Ciarcia’s lunchbox CP/M computer in Byte? It seems highly unlikely that anyone does).

Student Recipe Book

This page is a set of links to my “student” recipe book. These are Pages documents shared on iWork.com, and can be viewed, downloaded in various formats and printed. The basic idea is to create a collection of student friendly recipes that are nutritious, cheap to make and simple to prepare.

Tagged

How To Buy Things

Which applies to everything, although this is an approach that I discovered (as did many other people) when dealing with very expensive software. The Wrong Way This is how most people buy things. Find a list of “features” (features are attributes of a product, and could be anything; true, false, or utterly fictional); then find […]

Hiring – how to ignore the guidelines and get it right

I’ve been a hiring manager for twenty years (low ’80s to low ’00s), but I haven’t done any hiring in the last (almost) decade, and I’m disappointed how things have changed in the software industry over that period. I was hiring for technical support and programmer positions, ranging from IBM assembler and mainframe MVS experience […]

SOE Status: iPhone app for monitoring SOE game servers

SOE Status is in the App Store now (http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/soestatus/id463597867?mt=8). Link is to the UK store, US store link is: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/soestatus/id463597867?mt=8 This takes the data from the new SOE status page at http://www.soe.com/status/ and displays it on your phone; you can select data for a single game and refresh that display if you wish. It runs […]

Tagged