February 2012
1 post
It's all too much...
I have two websites to finish - stardiscenterprise (almost there) and counsellingmeltonmowbray (in progress) - one massive website (slightly broken) of nearly 3,000 files to administer and help transfer to a CMS, one half-complete single-page app (best viewed in an iPad or iPad size) to get into the App Store, one website backend/data interface to sort out and make, one Processing workshop to...
May 2011
2 posts
Looks like PhoneGap and HTML5 is the way for us to go with a phone app for Greenview - a project to show the energy use (raw live data and movie test here) of university buildings… see version 1. HighCharts was a dream, after an initial restless night or two.
October 2010
2 posts
.turquoise { color: #139383 }
This morning, I awoke with a hex colour on my mind - #139383 - for no reason I can discover.
August 2010
2 posts
Usability lab fail (real conversation)
Tester 1: Do you know where usability lab is?
Tester 2: Haha! That's funny! I mean, isn't it supposed to be easily navigable?
Tester 1: Absolutely! Usability fail!
5 tags
“every boat is copied from another boat… it is the sea herself who fashions...”
– Alain, 1908 (Quoted in Wild and Domesticated Religions: How the Machinery of Religion Evolved, Lecture by Daniel Dennett, Santa Fe Institute, 16 March 2010
May 2010
2 posts
2 tags
“artists are experts in uncertainty”
– Tom Morris, National Theatre (BBC Radio 4, November 2009)
3 tags
December 2009
1 post
2 tags
Dream of an earth pig
It is a nondescript street. An animal approaches me steadily, until it is so close I recognise it as a giant anteater (or very large aardvark) with lush brown fur. It seems happy and romps around me like a puppy. I think to myself ‘what an amazing sense of smell!’
November 2009
1 post
2 tags
Emotion Markup Language (EmotionML) 1.0: "The most... →
August 2009
2 posts
2 tags
6 tags
My threads of attention today
Ruby: making a little Sinatra app that tracks morning, afternoon and evening.
Ruby: looking at StaticMatic to dynamically create static web pages.
Ruby: preparing to install Passenger so I can use Rack.
Ruby: dithering abut whether to sign up with Heroku (free Ruby webapp hosting).
Apache2: working out the best way to install Apache2.2 on OS X Tiger.
Apache2: revisiting Macports as a free, easy and tweakable solution.
Legends: reading about Tristan and Iseult because I mention Iseult in a song.
Legends: reading about Lorelei because I mention her in a song.
Django: learning more about 'flatpages' and templates.
Django: getting ready to upgrade our server to install mod_wsgi.
Django: editing Greg Turner's guide to starting with Django for my business website.
Java: installing Java 6 on OS X - researching the options for OS X Tiger (10.4.11).
Songs: practicing and printing out words to 6 songs.
Email: trying to pin in-box to around 30 messages, but it sticks at 42, despite the daily trickle.
Personal: arranging an EMDR session to help with my lack of focus...
July 2009
2 posts
4 tags
retro terminal games
Emacs has some nice little games. Open a terminal and type: emacs
hit: esc and the ‘X’ key
then type in any of the following and hit return:
gomoku
snake
tetris
pong
doctor
(the latter is an implementation of Eliza).
There are more - find your Emacs and list the games: ls /usr/share/emacs/[emacs_v-number_here]/lisp/play
3 tags
February 2009
6 posts
3 tags
“we are in the midst of a generational shift in cognitive styles that poses...”
– Katherine Hayles, quoted by (colleague and friend) Simon Mills in a comment-critique of Susan Greenfield’s assertion that social media are infantilising the human mind.
4 tags
Sharing my web3D pain
Okay. Despite the current renaissance of VRML as web 3D I’ve tried every single option on the VRML/X3D plugin and browser detector page and none of them work on my Intel iMac running 10.4.11, depite tweaks, symlinks to newer dylibs than the old ones the stupid things are calling, and other hacks. Despite the claims on their websites, they either crash, fail to launch, or display the 2 simple...
2 tags
write 14 songs in the 28 days of February →
I’m trying to do this. I’ve written 2 so far…
3 tags
“people think more creatively when they are calm, unhurried and free from...”
– Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slow
2 tags
A dream of bright blue birds
last night in my dreams I was talking with friends when two strikingly bright blue birds landed nearby, the size of large geese. One was very interested in me, came close and changed into a huge parrot. I stroked it’s feathers and patted it’s head.
3 tags
A snippet from Kevin Kelly's 'Out of Control':
Marvin Minsky: We're going to make machines intelligent. We are going to make them conscious!
Doug Englebart: You're going to do all that for the machines? What are you going to do for the people?
January 2009
2 posts
3 tags
5 tags
Webstraction 2: from Unix history and Assembly...
I was reading chapter 2 of Origins and History of Unix, 1969-1995 (complete with Lou and Andy-esque image of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie). That chapter mentions the original announcement of Unix from 1974: The UNIX Time-Sharing System, to which we owe much of the current operating system conventions now taken for granted (files, folders/directories, users, etc.). I had a terminal open (in OS...
December 2008
2 posts
4 tags
two natural encounters
9th December 2008: driving home at night, icy road, middle of the country, a white rabbit ran across the road - that’s right: white. I slowed down in good time.
Next day, standing under a tree in the back garden, I heard rustling. A wren hopped about, settling on a branch not 3 feet from my face and examined me, seemingly unafraid.
3 tags
JUDAS: a new acronym
Jumps Up & Down And Screams (like they do on the telly). Invented on 14 December 2008.
November 2008
5 posts
4 tags
noob comedy?
tech: you have to do it as root
noob: sorry for another dumb question...but how do i do it as root?
[silence]
noob: anyone?
tech: No offense but uh, RTFM? (Protip: man sudo, man su)
noob: Don't know what RTFM means but sudo works.
4 tags
4 tags
shark
I wish I had the purity of a shark
Then, I could devour
According to the dictates of instincts
Free from moral reason
2 tags
2 tags
“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.”
– Rollo May (on Dermot Brannick’s Walking)
October 2008
5 posts
5 tags
Why do designers fail to adopt Perl? →
I had my first article published on Andy Lester’s Perl Buzz blog. It was driven by a year of trying to digest gallons of nasty-tasting PHP/HTML soup, getting not very far despite more than a few years fiddling around with Perl, Python and Ruby, my friend Ben’s Perl evangelism, and watching web designers ‘default’ to mangled PHP without thinking. It might almost have been...
4 tags
2 tags
The short films of Philip Bloom →
I’ve been watching these all day…
3 tags
“We see things not as they are, but as we are.”
– The Talmud (quoted by Alan Kay)
4 tags
Validifier →
For anyone who regularly has to re-code the invalid ‘embed’ rubbish spewed out by YouTube and almost every other put-this-[FLASHVIDEOTHING]-on-your-page website out there!
September 2008
2 posts
2 tags
“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredibly...”
– Albert Einstein
4 tags
CSSI? →
Using Server-Side Includes to add variables to CSS files. Yay! I made this!
August 2008
4 posts
3 tags
Webstraction 1: TextMate and HTML::Template
This is the first of a series of webstractions. A webstraction is a wander through stuff you weren’t originally looking for when you’re searching for something you really want. Webstratactions can be productive, but they’re also huge time-munchers.
Okay. So I’m installing this spam-proof contact form my friend Ben has written. It uses Perl’s HTML::Template. I open it...
6 tags
3 tags
“The humans are organised in the rigid, hierarchical manner often observed in...”
– Rama Revealed, Arthur C. Clarke
2 tags
Getting things done. Again.
How many times have I tried to sort out my life with (various versions of) GTD? Today I found this Getting Things Done mind map from an article on Gina Trapani’s Lifehacker RSS feed. I tried to print it out, but it comes out either the size of a football pitch or in microbe-friendly font sizes. So I downloaded it as a PDF. All free.