Siri, Apple and human technology
I was reading Paul Thurrot’s iPhone 5 review yesterday and got to this section: Voice control. Everyone who’s tried Siri knows it’s pathetic, but it’s nice to see iOS 6 finally adding app launching...
View ArticleCode poetry
Code should read like a well formated poem or essay. Be OCD with the look. Code that looks like art is stable code.
View ArticleUITouch class
In iOS, a touch goes through various phases (UITouchPhaseBegan, UITouchPhaseMoved, UITouchPhaseEnded etc). The same instance of UITouch is used through all phases. This does two things: more...
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HiDPI cynics
For those people who say HiDPI is pointless I say I’m not happy until I can’t tell the difference between a computer screen and a mirror. Holodeck technology, here we come
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Spaghetti as a match stick
Don’t you hate it when you run out of long match sticks? Spaghetti is perfect for lighting those hard to reach candles and it’s far cheaper and usually more available than long matches
View ArticleWhat type of glue to use and when
People who know me will know that I have a tendency to try to fix anything and everything. Here’s my advice for what kind of glue to use in different situations: Broken porcelain or plastic with a...
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Star Trek London. Photos with childhood heroes.
Yes! I got pictures with Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew and Scott Bakula. Yes, I have watched every episode of every series of Star Trek
View ArticleMicrosoft Surface ClearType vs Retina display
Microsoft are trying to claim that their “ClearType” display (basically a normal display with ClearType software font rendering that they’ve been using for a decade) will have more clarity than an...
View ArticleSpinlocks in iOS
I’ve been spending the last couple of days optimising Audjustable’s battery usage. The largest difference came from I reducing the number of unnecessary signally of pthread conditional variables....
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Nexus 4 First Impressions
My Nexus 4 arrived this morning! First impressions: Hardware is top notch. Much more detailed and solid than the Nexus 7. LG have done a great job because unlike the Samsung Galaxy S3 it doesn’t...
View ArticleI love UIKit
I’ve used many GUI toolkits over the years. Win32 (User32), MFC, WTL, AFC, SWF, SWING, SWT and QT. I’ve written quite large and extensive applications using MFC, SWF, QT and UIKit. I think UIKit is...
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Android Gmail client is awful
By default emails are not zoomed out so for a majority of HTML emails you can only see the top 1/4 of the email. The ability to zoom emails was not added until last month but it’s not on by default....
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Apple A6 chip is fast
Although hardware is only one half of the equation, it’s good to see that Apple’s in-house chip design team is keeping their side on top....
View ArticleHybrid tablets/notebooks don’t make sense
I must admit I’ve never really appreciated Microsoft’s obsession with hybrid laptops. Back in the tablet PC days I only owned slates and friends who owned hybrids only used the hybrid as a tablet...
View ArticleDiscovered my old P++ compiler
P++ is a language based on PL/0 but borrows heavily from C, Haskell and other languages. I wrote the compiler and interpreter for P++ at University back in 2000 as part of my second year programming...
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Bloom.fm
Finally Bloom.fm is on the app store and officially launched. For the last 15 months I’ve been leading a team of designers and programmers to develop this app. I was given full control of the...
View ArticleRenumbering GPT partitions in Linux
Parted doesn’t provide an easy way to renumber your partitions after you delete one and fdisk doesn’t support GPT. Fortunately gdisk can do this relatively easily: sudo gdisk /dev/sdc p (print/show) s...
View ArticleMounting Linux software raid using a consistent device name
It’s recommended these days to use the UUID of a mdadm based raid partition in your fstab. This is fine for a single server but if you have dozens of identical servers, it’s a pain to have to maintain...
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