Saturday, February 13th, 2010
I have been doing some iPhone development lately. Nothing too amazing, just some test apps to get a feel for the system. Now, some people will tell you that Cocoa Touch is an API sent from God and frankly it is pretty good (especially given what passes for UI on ...
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Monday, August 3rd, 2009
I love MacOSX, and one of the best features is the almost ubiquitous built-in dictionary. So it is surprising that I after 3 years I have only just now discovered how to switch the dictionary from the default American English to British spellings. For some reason this is not part ...
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Thursday, June 4th, 2009
The Secret of Monkey Island consumed a lot of my time back in the day, it is one of the best (and funniest) games ever produced. I have wondered for a while now why some of the old adventure games haven't been dusted off and republished for the new consoles ...
Posted in Computer, Culture | No Comments »
Saturday, May 9th, 2009
My previous blog entry on TXTing provoked this response from my friend Lloyd:...[I] figured out that longest word typed with only the upper letters in the QWERTY keyboard is not only TYPEWRITER but also includes several 3 other words: PERPETUITY, PROPRIETOR and REPERTOIRE. The longest in the middle line is: ...
Posted in Computer, Culture, my projects | No Comments »
Sunday, March 15th, 2009
The standard C++ iostreams library is very good (well, some would say sort-of good) at reading and writing a file's contents, but it does so in such a way as to completely ignore file names. I am sure there was a good reason for this omission, but whatever it was ...
Posted in Computer | 1 Comment »
Sunday, February 15th, 2009
A former colleage of mine (Hi Nigel!) frequently wore the greatest geek tee-shirt I have ever seen to work. Ineptly reproduced here, it summarizes the realities of software development - when deciding what to implement technical considerations are often overruled by more prosaic influences.
Take this comment by another old colleage. ...
Posted in Computer | 3 Comments »
Monday, February 9th, 2009
Living on a spherical planet can sometimes be a real pain in the neck. It makes what should be a simple concept, Time, inordinately complex. Timezones, daylight savings, leap years (and worse: leap seconds) all conspire to destroy any simple abstraction. So boost provides a complex one.
First up is the ...
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Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
Although I like to think of myself of a jack-of-all-programming-trades, I must admit that I am mainly a C++ man. I have dabbled in the seductive dark side of Java and C#, but still prefer the mad poetry that C++ code can generate. A few years ago, C++ was showing ...
Posted in Computer | 3 Comments »
Monday, January 5th, 2009
My first-generation MacBook laptop had only one problem - its first generation 60 gig hard disk. Actually it used to have two problems, but I installed more memory in it ages ago. 60 gigs doesn't go far in today's world of movies and huge software packages, so I felt it ...
Posted in Computer | 13 Comments »
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008
So Google is going where angels fear to tread, and has released a browser of their own: Chrome. This is a very interesting move; I can think of a few reasons why Google might think a custom browser might be a good idea:
although everyone thinks of Google as a ...
Posted in Computer | 2 Comments »