Angus Thinks... » General

Helpful forums?

Angus Hardie — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:32:19 +0000

Spotted recently in a technical forum (which shall remain nameless):

Your answers are useless. Thank you anyway. I found answers on my questions from another source.

Although I still don’t know what the final answer was, alas…

Real buyers getting tired of speculators

Angus Hardie — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:32:18 +0000

Real cocoa buyers, who are probably chocolate manufacturers, are getting tired of excessive speculation in the cocoa market; they’ve threatened to move from London to unspecified US cocoa futures exchanges if something isn’t done to improve things:

Telegraph Article
(Third section, after Gold movements and Shipping rates)

I suppose speculation is good if it balances demand and evens out prices, but bad if the end customers feel that they are being cheated.

More

Another article: Mystery trader buys all Europe’s cocoa.

No wonder people are annoyed.

Pay to play?

Angus Hardie — Sat, 22 May 2010 23:13:20 +0000

back in my day, we didn’t pay to win a video game … we simply played them well

Marketing crazy

Election Day 2010 – Remember to Vote!

Angus Hardie — Wed, 05 May 2010 23:28:24 +0000

It’s the day of the UK general election.

It’s your democratic duty to vote!

If you don’t vote, you can’t complain about the government we get.

So please vote

Warburtons Ad

Angus Hardie — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 03:29:19 +0000

Warburtons Bread Advert

It made me laugh, anyway.

(On their own site too)

safari supports pdf in img tag

Angus Hardie — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 04:21:23 +0000

I didn’t know this before but it definitely seems to work.

SVG is more compatible for web pages, though this could be useful for embedded webkit apps.

From High DPI Websites

Idea: EU prize for learning all of the European languages

Angus Hardie — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 06:25:12 +0000

In the nature of the European cooperation, I propose that the European Union should give out prizes to people who can speak significant numbers of european languages.
Perhaps 1 million euros for a person speaking all of the EU significant languages.

Then smaller prizes for people who speak some fraction (5 or 10 different languages perhaps)
I don’t know how many people could manage the million euro level (perhaps only a few hundred people, maybe even none?) but it would be a good thing to encourage us all to speak each other’s languages.

It would also offer a clear and obvious reward to study languages. (Like winning the lottery, just more predictably achievable)

iPhone multi-tasking

Angus Hardie — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 17:36:09 +0000

A thought occurs to me (although I don’t do iPhone development).

One possible approach to multi-tasking on the iphone might be to allow a background thread that complied with some sandbox requirements to execute with access to certain apis only. (Sound output being an obvious one, internet access being another, possibly hardware interaction) You wouldn’t be able to do user interface tasks (except some kind of notification system) and definitely no way to switch apps without user intervention.

Apple probably has something totally different on the way which is much cooler but this is my best idea so far

Wanted: Cookie categories in web browsers

Angus Hardie — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 09:05:48 +0000

Given that I delete my browser cookies fairly regularly, it would be useful to be able to divide them into categories.Then I could delete marketing and tracking cookies without affecting more important login cookies.

Some categories I would like:

1) Always delete at end of session (for security critical things)

2) Use standard rules

3) Delete at interval

4) Don’t delete unless I tell you

This is sort of confusing the idea of being able to delete cookies by category with overriding the default rules on expiry, but it mostly gives the idea.

I think what I really want is a function called Delete unwanted cookies which would magically determine which cookies I want to retain and which I want to delete.

Portal for Mac!

Angus Hardie — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:58:31 +0000

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