Valve have announced Portal for Mac.
Played it for the first time a couple of weeks ago and have been wondering how best to play it at home.
From April I’ll be able to play it (and lots of other Valve games) on my Mac.
Fun 
Portal for Mac!
March 11th, 2010Big changes to Mac Developer Program
March 5th, 2010Apple have rearranged their Mac developer program so that it now costs only $99 and seems to have only one paid variant rather than the three previously available. (Student, Select, Premier). The online only variant is still available and still free of charge.
It appears that this is possibly influenced by the amazing success of the iPhone developer program, which is also $99.
Anything that makes it easier and cheaper for developers to develop applications is probably a good thing. Although obviously you only need this developer program if you need access to pre-releases of Mac OS X and the other benefits it provides. It isn’t now and never has been a required purchase.
They’re still upgrading the sites as I write this, so I haven’t seen all of the details yet, but definitely looking good.
[edited to correct information about the free online program]
Rails Migrations and Schemas
February 26th, 2010- A schema.rb file is typically a ruby script containing a call to the ActiveRecord::Schema.define method.
- A rails migration is a ruby class which inherits from ActiveRecord::Migration and contains a method called up
The useful fact that I realized only after doing some ultimately unnecessary work today is that because the schema file contains a method call, it’s actually easier to extract the information from it than with a migration (which needs SQLEditor to figure out a class name and then call the up method)
Hopefully this new work will appear soon in SQLEditor
Tea and Coffee and newspaper articles
February 22nd, 2010So another one of these articles, shock horror, some public body has spent thousands of pounds buying hot drinks for their staff.
Clearly, the whole lot of them should be hanged …
except, if you look at the figures quoted, the outrage breaks down:
From the article,
440 staff and a total bill of 70,000 over 3 years.
Assuming a 48 week working year for everyone for 3 years, this means that the amount spent per week per person is
(70000/(48*3)) = 486 per week
486/440 = 1.11 per person.
Yes, just over 1 pound per person, per week!
Outrage, I say, outrage!
Ignoring for a moment, the fact that visitors apparently got hot drinks too for the money; given the large amounts of money and the vitally important decisions that a group like the GHA makes, making the right decisions is important. If spending a few pounds a week on hot drinks makes a key decision even slightly better, then it’s worth it.
The same is true of biscuits, snacks and even meals. Anything that improves the performance of the organisation at such a low cost is worth doing.
So as far as I’m concerned, this is money well spent.
Best Mobile Broadband?
February 16th, 2010Happened to be in a major supermarket’s electronics section the other day and was told that the “3″ network offers the best mobile broadband.
Although oddly all of the O2 retail hardware boxes were sold out, plenty of “3″ boxes to be found.
Unfortunately no reasons were offered by the employee as to this blanket statement.
SQLEditor 1.6 final
January 6th, 2010So, if you’ve seen SQLEditor recently, you’ll hopefully have seen that there is a new version out: version 1.6. This got released just at the beginning of December 2009
1.6 is something that I’ve been working on now for a long time, it is essentially (the unreleased) version 1.5 with improvements and updates. In particular it contains a SQL parser that was written using ANTLR and a new JNI based system for using JDBC drivers with support for Java 6 JDBC drivers.
It’s also the first release version of SQLEditor that is compatible with Snow Leopard. SQLEditor 1.4.7 and earlier had an unusual architecture. When I originally started writing SQLEditor, it was a Java application with a Swing user interface. After some development it seemed clear that java swing was proving limited in some ways. I rewrote the user interface layer in Cocoa, leaving the model layer in Java and using Cocoa Java to connect the two parts together. The application development continued and new versions were released. Eventually though, Apple decided that Cocoa Java was not the future and decided to deprecate it.
Work began immediately on rewriting the crucial components of SQLEditor, although there were some issues.
The first was the model code. Every object in an SQLEditor document is represented by an object and all of the code for these objects was written in Java. All of the object code was rewritten and tested against the earlier versions to check that it still worked. It was very important that files from previous versions continued to work (and as far as I know all of them so far do). New code was written to read and write the SQLEditor document xml format.
The second major issue was that the database interface used JDBC drivers, which are written in Java. Native code would use ODBC drivers. Although similar this might mean that users wouldn’t be able to use existing arrangements to access databases.
Eventually code was written to bridge between SQLEditor native code and the JDBC drivers using the Java Native Interface (JNI).
The other crucial problem was the SQL parser. This is used if you paste SQL code into SQLEditor or if you import a file. The SQL parser was written using JavaCC, a parser generator that is written in and produces Java code. Several parser generators were looked at to replace JavaCC and eventually ANTLR was chosen.
A new SQL parser was written and tested during 2009 in ANTLR and is included in SQLEditor 1.6. The new parser is completely rewritten compared to the one that existed in SQLEditor 1.4.7 and no code is shared between them.
A major step in developing the new parser was to port all of the SQL test cases from Java (in 1.4.7) to objective C (in 1.6). These automated unit tests are run against the parser to ensure that the new parser behaves correctly compared to both the 1.4.7 parser and the assorted SQL standards.
It is still something of a work in progress though, there are things it doesn’t support and it’s still being actively worked on. One particular thing that makes this somewhat harder than it might otherwise be is that it must accept SQL in several different dialects, not just a single standard.
SQLEditor 1.6 also included user interface improvements and various performance fixes.
Overall it’s an improved program, although I do wish that it had been released sooner.
Thanks to everyone using SQLEditor for your patience and also for trying the beta versions.
From a recent product manual
December 1st, 2009We recommend using 1920×1080, 60Hz(Except for 19/22LU40**, 19LU50**, 19/22/26/32/37/42LH20**, 32/37/42LG21**, 32/37/42LG33**, 19/22/26LG31**, 42/50PQ35**, 42PQ65**), 1360×768, 60Hz(Only 19/22LU40**, 19LU50**, 19/22/26/32/37/42LH20**, 32/37/42LG21**, 32/37/42LG33**, 26LG31**, 50PQ35**), 1024×768, 60Hz(Only 42PQ35**, 42PQ65**) , 1440×900, 60Hz(Only 19LG31**) , 1680×1050, 60Hz(Only 22LG31**)for the PC mode, this should provide the best picture quality.
So which was recommended again?
In fairness, the manual is trying to cover about 20 different models, and it actually does a fairly good job in most ways. Except that there are a few passages like the one above …
Newspapers and the Web
November 17th, 2009Newspapers are in trouble, everyone seems to think this. Most newspapers have seen circulation declines of their paper editions and the web doesn’t pay that well for advertising.
What to do? Lots of obvious ideas like charging monthly fees or having per article charges.
Subscriptions overlook the fact that many people don’t subscribe to newspapers, they buy them each day. Sometimes they buy different ones on different days or go a week without buying one at all.
Per article charges are far too expensive, sometimes as much as 1 cent per word for say a 250 word article costing $2.50. If the article is critical to your business it may be affordable (The FT and the Wall Street journal seem to be doing well in this line) but if it’s about a political crisis or the actions of the local council?
So my first idea on this:
Sell the web based newspaper as an digital artifact, not just a bundle of content or a website subscription.
Allow access to single editions of the newspaper on the internet.
Give away a code inside each paper copy of the newspaper which would be good for reading the articles in that edition online forever. Once you’ve got the code (say in the morning), you can enter it into the newspaper website and your account is then authorized to read the articles from that day’s edition on any device you own.
Maybe you could also buy the codes online without having to buy the paper edition, plus if you got a subscription the content would be authorized automatically. Don’t want a particular day? Don’t need to pay.
Sell blocks of days prepaid in advance for a marginal discount. Because it’s buying a bundle of days rather than a monthly access subscription you should be able to get a slightly higher price, especially since it’s more flexible.
Plus you could make more money by allowing people to buy codes to access previous days, even after the event. Want to read the newspapers from the last major election, buy it now for 2.50. (You could charge more for old editions obviously)
Whether this is the idea to save the newspaper industry or not, I think it will take a lot of clever thinking to solve the problems.
Drawing all of the states
November 17th, 2009This is a brilliant video of Senator Al Franken of Minnesota drawing a map of the United States entirely freehand and including all of the states.
(via NGM)
Good reasons to read Ars Technica
September 27th, 2009Fortunately, we were able to re-solder the USB connector back to the PCB and continue testing.
How many websites would bother doing this, and more to the point how many websites have reviewers who could do this?
SQLEditor 1.6
September 23rd, 2009The SQLEditor 1.6 public beta has been available now for about 3 weeks and I’m getting more hopeful about a final candidate release.
SQLEditor 1.6 is required for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard support, but because major sections needed rewriting to get this compatibility, there are also improvements to the core of the application.
There is a brand new SQL parser which is based on ANTLR and a new, more extendible, export system. Plus there are lots of other improvements in both user interface and functionality.
Best of all, it’s going to be a free upgrade for existing SQLEditor customers.
The beta is currently at version 1.6b7 but 1.6b8 will probably be out very soon.
I hope that you like it.
Download
SQLEditor 1.6b7
(DMG file | 4.2MB)
Criticism
September 12th, 2009I just saw this comment while reading an article about David Letterman:
This article is poorly done. It uses sweeping generalizations, it is factually incorrect in several areas, and shows a general misunderstanding of television. …
I enjoyed reading the article anyway, but should I have done?
The Brothers Bloom?
June 3rd, 2009I’m puzzled that this doesn’t seem to have a uk release date (or even a distributor as far as I can see)
The trailer looks great:
SQLEditor 1.4.4 Released
April 30th, 2009SQLEditor 1.4.4 was just released on Tuesday, the main feature improvement is the support for compound foreign keys. I posted a bit about this before and the final version is pretty much the same as I described.
Unfortunately there were a couple of bugs that slipped through relating to clicking objects. 
These are going to be fixed in a point release that should appear soon.
The new version is available from the automatic update system or download here:
| 3.9MB dmg File Change Log Product Notes Expires 21st January 2009 |
Wired UK first impressions
April 23rd, 2009I picked up a copy of Wired UK yesterday and I started reading it this morning while I was eating my breakfast.
So far I’m impressed, it feels solid, there’s plenty of interesting looking stuff and I liked the infographics (which I spent some time interpreting). The pictorial on the 3d printer that uses regular paper was really clever too.
I hope to offer more thoughts on this once I’ve read more, but my first instinct is to subscribe for the year.
Which is good; because I was really hoping that it would be good, and it is.
SQLEditor: Compound Foreign Keys
April 9th, 2009The newest version of SQLEditor (1.4.4b1) now has support for compound foreign keys. This is something that people have been asking about for a while now, so I’m pleased that it got included.
There are some things that may need to be improved, but I’m fairly happy with the first revision of this.
Diagram showing compound foreign key
The compound foreign key object is a new table level object that you can add from the Object menu just like a field or index. Then you drag from the foreign key to the target table. Finally you use the inspector to create pairs of columns to link together.
When importing from a database SQLEditor will try to create field-to-field links on foreign keys with only 1 pair of columns unless you tell it otherwise. (There is a new preference to do this)
Support is fairly complete, SQL parsing, database import, database export and SQL export are all available so it should work fairly well. I think the only thing it doesn’t do is auto-create indexes, so you may need to do this by hand on referenced columns (for those databases that need this)
There is naturally a new inspector palette to go with the table object.
Compound foreign key inspector
This allows you to add pairs of columns using the + button at the bottom. Choose your columns using the little popup menus.
The whole thing is completely new, so please send in your thoughts to the usual address.
(or enable the “Check for beta versions” preference and then use the check for updates feature)
DRM?
March 30th, 2009DRM is stealing stories from the eyes of children.
Spotted recently while reading a forum
(which sadly doesn’t allow direct linking as far as I can see)
March 22nd, 2009
Recently seen in a Reddit thread:
Recovery in Detroit
March 18th, 2009Interesting early signs of improvement in Detroit. People are buying and renovating the unoccupied and abandoned houses:
Mitch and Gina have already been approached by some Germans who want to build a giant two-story-tall beehive.
Everything on YouTube unavailable
February 23rd, 2009I ran into a problem in the last few days with YouTube. I would visit the site, but every video I tried to watch displayed the message “we’re sorry the video is no longer available”.
Other people seem to have noticed something like this too.
The answer, as found in the last message in the thread, is to update to the newest version of Flash player, which appears to fix the problem.
However it makes me ponder something: what changed in the latest version of Flash and why does YouTube not recommend this upgrade to users? (Ideally with a large and obvious message)