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Friday, 15 December 2006

Skipping .svn Directories

find and grep are the programmers friend. But when using Subversion find will also decend into .svn directories. Generally we don’t want this to happen. The following find command will skip .svn directories. For more type ‘man find’ at your favorite prompt.

find . \( -type d -and -name .svn -and -prune \) -or -type f -print

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Wednesday, 13 December 2006

Firebug

Firebug 1.0 beta is out. If you’re a web developer you need Firebug. It makes a lot of things easy that used to be a pain. It is marv.

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Saturday, 9 December 2006

Project Postmortems

Coding Horror has an excellent summary of software project postmortem resources.

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Saturday, 9 December 2006

EVD Again

In response to my comments on the CER EVD article there’s a new post on the CER IT blog and a corresponding one on Gareth’s personal site in which he defends the original post. Good for him. He also misinterprets what I wrote. In the spirit of a blogging conversation I respond below.

First, let me define what I mean when I say success in relation to disc formats: a disc format is a success if content providers are making lots of content and consumers are buying lots of discs. For example, CD, DVD, PS2, XBox etc. By…

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Tuesday, 5 December 2006

Old EVD News

The IT News blog from the China Economic Review has an entry about EVD. The entry is (at best) poorly researched. I’d expect a little more quality control from CER.

First, the entry is more or a less a carbon copy of the article on Xinhua. The only added analysis being the rather wide eyed “What will be amazing is if this takes off...”

Second, if the author had spent a few minutes with Google he could have found out that this is old news. Here, for example, is a link to an article from 2002 describing…

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Thursday, 2 November 2006

Casio fx-580

One of the first things I purchased when starting university was a Casio fx-580 calculator. At the time this was an amazing machine because it did complex numbers - something engineers spend a lot of time pondering. I still have it on my desk and use it every day. Over the years, though, the screen had started to fade. That is, at least, until five minutes ago when it was cleaned for the first time in twenty years. And underneath? A shiny - non-faded - screen. Here’s to another twenty years of muck. They don’t make ‘em…

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Thursday, 2 November 2006

What is Design?

A voyage from idea to realisation across an ocean of compromise.

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Monday, 16 October 2006

A Tale of Two TV Logos

You’re given the task of designing a logo for City TV - the annonying TV channel played in Shanghai taxis. (There shall be no quiet places.)

Do you:

a) Flex your creative muscle and design a new logo. (How hard can it be right?)
b) Bastardise a cultural icon.

Before you answer remember you’re in China.

Mmmm. Text shadow effect.

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Monday, 16 October 2006

Monday, 16 October 2006

Restart Mac OS X From The Command Line

osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to restart'

From Mac Geekery

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