Angus Thinks…

They spotted water on Mars!

Colonising now seems a step closer …

MarsPhoenix Twitter

(via Boing Boing)

Handy new tool I came across today which allows you to test regular expressions and see what they select.

Reggy

A cool new online presentation tool:

http://280slides.com/Editor/

The slide show application is really nice in that it feels very much like a desktop application when in use, even down the way buttons and key presses behave. The object rotation is particularly clever.

Another thing that makes this one clever though is the underlying framework, which is said to compile cocoa like code into dynamic web pages. It will apparently even be opensourced at some stage!

Because I can never remember where this list is kept:

UK Film Distributors’ Association Film Release Schedule

The build system for SQLEditor has lots of steps, from building each of the component frameworks, compiling the application, assembling the bundle, creating a disk image and then uploading everything to the server. (Plus things like version histories and read me files).To reduce errors I have several aggregate targets and a collection of scripts, but I was puzzled how to produce those little note entries that OCUnit generates when it’s running unit tests. There were several notes I wanted to make but I couldn’t figure it out.

However it occurred to me one day to inspect the souce of RunTargetTests and the answer was of course right there in the source.

<filename>:<line>: note: <message>

gives you a note.

<filename>:<line>: <message>

gives you a warning.

where

<filename>

is the name of the file you want the message to appear from

<line>

is the line number in that file

<message>

is the message you want to display

In the note form the word ‘note’ is a constant. Don’t replace it with anything.

As an alternative you put in use an empty filename and 0 for the line if you’re not interested in these details.

Example

@echo ":0: note: disk image creation complete"

Will display the message “disk image creation complete” as a note in the build window.

George Lucas in Love

A parody on the origins of the star wars story…

Wired has an interesting article about Engineers without borders, a group that is trying to develop cheap technology solutions for developing parts of the world. The latest idea is a low cost wind turbine to generate electricity for lighting.
Best of all the design is intended to be produced by local manufacturers in the destination country, so it encourages local industry too.

Wired: Engineers Without Borders Bring Tech to Villages Without Power

Found an odd problem with Flash CS3 today. I was working away and I realised that I wasn’t getting anything in the output window from calls to trace().

Just a completely empty output panel.

The answer is simple, make sure Filter Level is set to verbose in the menu on the output panel. If you have it set to None then you won’t get any output.

I’m not quite sure if this is something that I changed or if it is the default, but it isn’t exactly obvious.

I happened to come across this:

Chocolate Russian Roulette [cybercandy uk]

You get a tray with 12 pieces of chocolate. 11 of them are praline filled milk chocolate bullets, the 12 contains a real chilli pepper.

Johan Basberg (who designed the beautiful SQLEditor icon) has a handy list of recommended mac applications at

http://dittverk.no/mac/files/tag-editor.php

And SQLEditor is on this list

Work started on the new acid test almost as soon as the IE developer team posted notification that IE8 passes Acid2

Well, if you read the article and comments, it’s not perfectly correct. But it’s kind of funny as a quote.

CSSInfo

The ACM is offering free downloads of selected classic works of computer science to anyone who signs up.

http://www.acm.org/classics 

(via  Lambda The Ultimate and Dusty Decks)

Since it wasn’t obvious to me where this document was, here is a link to a Microsoft page describing Windows XP services with descriptions.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/guidance/serversecurity/tcg/tcgch07n.mspx

There is also a similar document for Windows 2000

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb742605.aspx

Interesting blog post talking about how Adobe plans to improve Photoshop, which is obviously an application with a large number of very committed users.

John Nack is talking about task orientated user interfaces, which in theory is what Microsoft was trying to get to with clippy. Unfortunately since everyone seems to dispise clippy; Brushy the talking airbrush (signature quote: “Hey, pardner, looks you’re tryin’ to retouch a photo!”) is definitely NOT going to happen. (It’s just a joke in one of the comments).

John Nack on Adobe Photoshop: Photoshop, as seen through Johnny Cash

This looks really cool: IT World: Nissan adds a robot helper to its concept car

It’s a concept electric car which has a small robot on the dashboard that offers directions and tries to keep the driver cheerful.

At the moment I believe that both SQLEditor and HTMLValidator are compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 and should work without functional difficulty.

A minor issue that I found is that the toolbar icons don’t look very good against the 10.5 window style. These have already been redrawn and the new icons will appear in the 1.4 release.

This assumes that there weren’t any major changes between the version that I used to test and the release version of 10.5 which will be released on October 26th.

Overall it looks good though.

OneMonthApp is using SQLEditor!

OneMonthApp is a project where they are building a complete web application in a month. It’s going to be a simple and easy to use cash flow application, apparently. And they’re going to make it free, which is great too.
I’ve signed up to be notified when it’s done, which the counter is promising for sometime in the next couple of days. (They started in September, so less than a month)
Stephen over at OneMonthApp very kindly included SQLEditor in a list of 20 tools for web application development that they’re using for the project.
Maybe I need an “I use SQLEditor” badge icon or something?

Got a package this morning delivered by DHL and an interesting thing happened.

I recognised the delivery person and the delivery person recognised me. Which was nice.

I think they must work a particular route, because the same woman tends to deliver most of my (DHL) packages.

I get tired of filling in captcha fields on forms.

Wouldn’t it be handy if there was a facility in web browsers to fill them in automatically.

This says it all really.

(Though saying that there are still some smart shows on tv. I just wanted to link to that page)