February 2012
2 posts
“The learning curve for Git is steep — perhaps the steepest of any VCS...”
– Git Cherry Picking: Move small code patches across branches | TechnoSophos
December 2011
1 post
“It was the only reaction I got! And I thought “Who cares about the fucking...”
– Sofie Gråbøl Q&A in the Guardian
September 2011
4 posts
Finally. →
Express your barely-sated impatience at Apple’s slovenly attitude towards innovation with this simple Safari extension. Adds choice epithets to headings on www.apple.com.
Facebook fright →
He missed a trick by not calling it The Likes Of Others
What is greatness?
My recent motorbike trip around Great Britain took me past
some truly breathtaking landscapes, which reminded me of
this excerpt from Kazou Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day:
We call this land of ours Great Britain, and there may
be those who believe this is a somewhat immodest practice.
Yet I would venture that the landscape of our country alone
would justify the use of this...
August 2011
1 post
How dangerous is firing a gun into the air?
Here’s some pretty lazy journalism from the BBC, who ask “How dangerous is firing a gun into the air?”, concluding “it is a potentially fatal activity, which regularly results in the deaths of bystanders”. They back up the claim by citing numerous examples — none of which appear to be about people firing their guns in the air!
For example, the article mentions...
July 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Setting up .gitignore for a new Python project
The quick way…
BASE_URL=https://raw.github.com/github/gitignore/master
for X in Global/OSX.gitignore \
Global/TextMate.gitignore \
Python.gitignore; do
echo "## $BASE_URL/$X ##"
curl -s $BASE_URL/$X
echo
done >> .gitignore
June 2011
5 posts
github/gitignore - GitHub →
“A collection of useful .gitignore templates” - nifty!
4 tags
Uninstalling Code Pilot 2
I’ve been trying out Code Pilot 2 - if you develop in Xcode I’d encourage you to check it out. It’s a clever piece of kit, but it wasn’t for me (old dog, new tricks) and I couldn’t find out how to uninstall it. There’s no info in Code Pilot’s preferences pane in Xcode, in the installer or on the website. Anyway, it looks as though all you need to do is...
“It is not known precisely how the exact value for the magic number was...”
– Fast inverse square root - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, via @jsn00k. I love stuff like this. The second comment in the implementation from Quake III Arena probably sums it up for most of us; I have no idea how this works, I’m just glad it does.
“At the present moment Bond is particularly anxious for expertise on the weapons...”
– Letters of Note: May I suggest that Mr. Bond be armed with a revolver?
Was the name Wendy created for Peter Pan? →
A well-worn myth put to rest.
April 2011
1 post
“When people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the...”
– Austin Kleon (via marco)
March 2011
2 posts
“Dates in Excel spreadsheets: In reality, there are no such things. What you have...”
– The xlrd Module
Urbanape: Show Me the Way →
urbanape:
So, earlier today, I said this:
I arrived at that conclusion by enabling the Personal Hotspot on my iPhone 4, connecting my iPad to it, launching Maps, and hitting the Location arrow to find my location.
Only my laboratory was my home office, with my desk six feet from my Airport Extreme…
February 2011
4 posts
4 tags
Big Swing Face
The Buddy Rich Big Band playing Big Swing Face is one of my favourite pieces of music of all time; an ensemble of some of the greatest musicians of all time at the top of their game. I challenge you to listen to this and not start tapping your foot - I think you’ll find it’s impossible. The trumpet glissando at 4:00 is simply sublime.
“He had a fixed policy. He told potential employers up front, “I’ll find out what...”
– The Case of the Vanishing Blonde | Culture | Vanity Fair (via LMG)
January 2011
6 posts
December 2010
11 posts
Google Ngram Viewer: email →
Here’s an interesting Google Ngram graph that tells you nothing about electronic mail but something quite interesting about optical character recognition, the process used to convert printed text to its digital equivalent.
On spot-checking some of the actual texts (using the links at the bottom of the page), it transpires that the apparent surge in popularity of the word “email”...
1 tag
Shelf Theme →
Like the new theme? It’s Shelf by that clever chap Mr Hicks. Why not grab yourself a copy? If he sells enough copies I reckon the Little Hickses can have that coal they’ve been dreaming of for Christmas. Go on, have a heart!
November 2010
1 post
October 2010
3 posts
Twitter / @Breakthrough: askjeeves are hosting a... →
One tweet, so many questions.
you need someone to host a facebook chat?
and, er, what exactly is a facebook chat?
do I go to Facebook for this? Or AskJeeves?
AskJeeves is still going??
will AskJeeves know the answer to any of these questions?
I’m confused…
August 2010
4 posts
“When has a new product been successful when no one knows or understands what...”
– Daring Fireball Linked List: Google Shitcans Wave
Is anyone else thinking the answer is “iPad”, or is it just me? (Don’t get my wrong, I love my iPad - I just still have absolutely no idea why I need it.)
Google Wave: I remain resolutely unjazzed →
I can’t say I’m sad to see the back of Google Wave, I always found it an unintuitive solution in search of a problem. And given that it’s championed by people who use nonsense buzzword lingo like “equally jazzed internally”, maybe it’s not a surprise that it’s dead.
July 2010
5 posts
Mind Heist →
My only disappointment when I saw Inception was that the superb music from the trailer wasn’t used in the film. Well here it is - Mind Heist by Zack Hemsey. Enjoy!
Flickr: The Polite Notices Pool →
Great photo pool showcasing the (British?) obsession with asserting that a notice is polite by putting the words “POLITE NOTICE” at the top. Rather than, say, wording it politely.