Computing

My first iPhone app, a week in

July 4, 2010

Earlier this week, I blogged about how an iPhone app I’d written was now live. A week in, and things are moving on quite quickly. Midweek, The Stage Jobs & Auditions was selected as a “staff favourite” on the UK App Store, which meant that it got a slot on the App Store main page […]

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My first iPhone app

June 29, 2010

UPDATE, 2 July: the app has been added to Apple’s ‘Staff Favourites’ list, and is currently no. 2 in the Business charts for free apps! Over the weekend, my first iPhone app went live on the App Store. A free download, it’s a simple little app that allows users to browse The Stage’s jobs and […]

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UPDATED: Love Never Dies, in more than 140 characters

March 9, 2010

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest West End show, Love Never Dies, receives its formal press night tonight, which means that the papers tomorrow will be full of reviews. Over at my place of work we’ll have a special podcast in which I talk about the show with Matt, our reviewer, as well as looking at the […]

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Brevity is the soul of wit, and the bane of the feature writer

August 16, 2009

I wonder - does nobody buy Sunday papers any more because their contents are drivel, or can those papers only afford to commission drivel because nobody buys them? Thankfully, the Independent on Sunday puts ‘editor-at-large’ Janet Street Porter’s column online, so we can read it for the cost of what it’s worth — approximately nothing. […]

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That’s how you should apologise

July 23, 2009

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this […]

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WordPress Wednesday: Custom Post Limits

July 22, 2009

As I’ve been using WordPress more and more for blogging, I’ve started to get increasingly impressed, especially with the recent 2.7 and 2.8 versions. At work, I’m currently looking for a multi-user platform that can do more than just common-or-garden blogs, and WordPress (or sibling WordPress MU) is a good candidate. Anyway, there are so […]

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Pussy problems, part 2

July 9, 2009

As well as writing up the problems with Stuart Jeffries’ factually incorrect G2 article yesterday, I wrote to the letters page of the Guardian to complain. They have chosen not to publish that letter, but instead have included some discussion of the matter in their regular Corrections & Clarifications column: A G2 article called the […]

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Stuart Jeffries’ pussy problems

July 8, 2009

Stuart Jeffries’ book about television nostalgia, Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy, is a great read. And so it’s really disappointing when he gets it so, so wrong. After the sad passing of Mollie Sugden, best known for her role as Mrs. Slocombe in 1970s TV sitcom Are You Being Served?, a number of people paid tribute on […]

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Expirations

September 30, 2008

So I’ve been thinking lately that I should scrap this blog. I so rarely use it any more - instead using my work blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and UncleTomCobleyAndAll.com. Most of the traffic is to a few old posts, whether it’s to the simply_helpful plugin whose functions are now built-in to Rails 2.x, or long-forgotten […]

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A curious case of spam traffic

September 15, 2007

Very odd — my web stats are showing a huge number of referrals coming via searches from http://url.com/ over the last day or so. What’s strange is that in each case, the search terms and other query parameters are identical — all that differs is the referring subdomain (e.g., my.url.com, company.url.com, no.url.com) and the claimed […]

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How not to write news stories, part 1: Don’t lie in your first sentence!

September 5, 2007

From IT site The Register: Facebook users may no longer be able to hide after the website announced it is launching a service that enables anyone to view member profiles. Except they haven’t. And it’s easy to see they haven’t. If you’re a Facebook user, there’s a huge block of text, plus an illustration, to […]

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Mint statistics and a ’406 Not Acceptable’ error

September 1, 2007

This blog is hosted on a Site5 server, and earlier today suffered a major outage when the shared host it sits on had a severe hardware problem. Thankfully, that problem was rectified with the technical team’s usual good speed. Everybody’s home directories had to be restored from an earlier backup, but this blog is so […]

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On ticker symbols as branding

August 25, 2007

Via John Gruber, it emerges that Sun Microsystems is going to change its stock ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA. Now, the four-letter stock symbol is predominantly a Wall Street thing, although many (if not all?) London stocks have a similar alphanumeric code that can be used in US-based portfolio checkers (the London stocks ending […]

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The value of a Facebook friend

August 22, 2007

Some words of wisdom from Tinu Abayomi-Paul on how to measure the value of a Facebook friend: …Facebook Friends aren’t All necessarily friends, not in the American sense of the word. They’re people you know. But Facebook calls them friends and I like to treat them that way until such a time that they prove […]

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Friends Reunited and Facebook

August 20, 2007

This comment piece on PC Pro’s website by Barry Collins gets some of the points about social networking spot on. In particular, it understands that Friends Reunited — which, for a while, was one of the biggest sites in the UK — now looks like more of a dinosaur: Friends Reunited — once the multimillion […]

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Sitting, like Buddha, in the middle

February 22, 2007

In my personal blogging, I seem to have hit a low point recently. After weeks where I’ve been busy at work, but doing nothing that was really worth talking about, I’m now in a position where I’m doing interesting stuff, but even busier, so I have even less time to talk about it even if […]

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Eager loading objects in a Rails has_many :through association

January 4, 2007

I’m still working on the Rails application that was the source for this tutorial — which loads of developers who I really respect keep linking to, so I must have done something right there! Anyway, I’m going to blog this bit of code in the hope that it will help me remember it. As stated […]

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How to list your audiobooks in iTunes’ Audiobooks pseudo-category

September 27, 2006

Update: With iTunes 8, moving tracks into the Audiobooks category is now trivial: Go into the track’s file information (Ctrl-I or Apple-I) and change the dropdown item on the Options tab. However, if you want to rip audiobook CDs and convert tracks to chapters, the following may still be use. One of the reasons I […]

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Why I hate iTunes 7

September 22, 2006

Okay, “hate” is too strong a word — that’s the sensationalist subeditor in me, I guess. But there was something bugging me about the latest update, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I knew that it wasn’t the new, drab, grey look — it wouldn’t have been my choice, admittedly; also, it’s […]

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New Rails feature: simply_helpful

September 4, 2006

UPDATE: Thanks to everybody who’s linking to this blog post, especially the mighty DHH himself. It’s worth pointing out that simplyhelpful development is proceeding apace. Some of the bugs mentioned have been fixed; there are additional helpers that aren’t covered here; and, as a plugin that’s very, very new, simplyhelpful may well change at short […]

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Rails: ActiveRecord goes :through

January 6, 2006

Sad geek that I am, I’ve fallen a little bit in love with Ruby on Rails, the application development framework that’s ideal for building database-based web applications. While Rails is relatively new – version 1.0 was released just last month – there are exciting things just waiting round the corner. I’m in the process of […]

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