I wrote about TextMate a couple of days ago. Giles Turnbull is also a new convert.
My (new) mate, TextMate
December 24th, 2005
Follow that car!
December 24th, 2005
According to The Independent, the UK police are going to be using number-plate (license-plate)-reading software with CCTV & traffic cameras around the country (of which there are many) to allow them to track the movements of all vehicles in the country, in the interests of crime prevention. They talk about big crimes like vehicle theft, though it could also be used to detect things like road-tax evasion. If they can get their act together with the insurance companies and use it to reduce the number of uninsured drivers on the roads, that would be a major benefit, though that may require a little too much competence on the part of the organisations concerned.
Anyway, no doubt conspiracy theorists civil liberties campaigners will be up in arms about this one, but I have other things on my mind, like the interesting algorithms you could come up with to detect license-plate duplication.
I’m anticipating a renaissance of James Bond’s rotating number plates, or, even better, highwaymen on horseback…
Protopage
December 23rd, 2005
Protopage is really very impressive. With this, and Writely, and GMail, and Google Maps and so forth, the in-browser experience is becoming amazingly rich. There will be a viable Open Source desktop environment after all. And it will be called Firefox.
Interesting question… At present, more than half of the machines sold are laptops, because people are getting more and more mobile and they really want their data with them everywhere. Will we ever see a reversal of this trend, as less and less of our data is stored on our own machines and it becomes accessible from anywhere? Will we see a ‘desktop PC’ renaissance?
Ring In the New Year
December 22nd, 2005
Today was my last day consulting for my old company Newnham Research. Over the last six months I’ve been doing some work for them, some for Exbiblio, some for Cambridge Research Systems, and one or two others. It’s been fascinating, but exhausting!
In January, however, I’m going back to Ndiyo, the non-profit that my friend Martin and I started just over three years ago. Ndiyo exists to promote a model of network computing which is more environmentally friendly, more reliable and maintainable, more affordable and generally more sustainable for the world than the traditional PC network. We find that the vision really captures people’s hearts and minds, and our trials show that it can really work in the real world, too.
I’m looking forward to getting back into it again.
What is it with the Wikipedia?
December 21st, 2005
A good post by Bill Thompson on what has been a rather interesting last few weeks for Wikipedia.
Inspiration
December 19th, 2005
Follow-up to the spoof corporate stock photos: Dave Hill pointed me to the nice ‘demotivational calendars’ at Despair Inc:
Click for more…
(I only feel able to post such things about engineers because I count myself as one of them 🙂 )
Stock Images
December 18th, 2005
A UK design firm has released a set of spoof corporate stock images, in categories such as ‘Team building’ and ‘Success’. Here’s one you can use when your company does a circular on ‘equal opportunities’:
Mac Editors
December 16th, 2005
There are some very good text editors for the Mac.
SubEthaEdit is nothing short of wonderful for its collaboration features – if you haven’t tried this, you should find a friend with a Mac and do so – and it’s not at all bad as a general-purpose editor.
TextWrangler has a somewhat nostalgic Mac-classic feel to it, but has a wonderfully useful feature of being able to browse, open and save files on a remote machine via SFTP/FTP. You simply pres shift-cmd-O and shift-cmd-S instead of cmd-O and cmd-S. If, like me, you spend a lot of time editing config files and web pages on remote servers, this is very nice.
But the one I’ve recently converted to is TextMate. I’d seen people starting to rave about this app, but hadn’t quite worked out why. The more time I spent with it, though, the more I liked it, to the extent that I forked out the 39 EU to buy a license within a few days, not something I’d often do for a program that didn’t even have documentation. The Bundle system, which groups together the functionality associated with particular types of file, is very nice, and I find I’m starting to miss the various shortcuts, completion mechanisms and auto-expansions when I’m entering text into anything else.
It doesn’t have TextWrangler’s convenient access to remote files, but I’ve long been a fan of the Transmit FTP utility, and if you specify TextMate as the editor then everything’s pretty seamless.
And then this week, not only did documentation arrive, but people are starting to produce screencasts, showing how to get the most out of it. More info here.
Xinha
December 15th, 2005
OK, so this is a quick test using Xinha Here, a rather neat Firefox add-on which gives you WYSIWYG html editing in any text-edit box. Quite sweet if you end up creating HTML posts, for example for your blog, and you do it through the browser. I like it.
I’m using Firefox more and more now, but it still hasn’t quite replaced Safari as my main browser on the Mac. There are just too many convenient drag-and-droppy-type things you can do with Safari. It may only be a matter of time, though. Here are the current stats:
Fun and beauty
December 14th, 2005
Jim Bumgardner, better known as KrazyDad, does some wonderful stuff. He does things with Flickr, he does things with Flash, and it’s all great fun.
This is his Mona Lisa, for example, made entirely from Flickr photos with the tags ‘mona’ or ‘lisa’. Click on the image to see some more. And make sure you know about possibly the most important button in Flickr which is the little thing labelled ‘All Sizes’ just above a photo. You really want it for these! You can get some of them as posters, too.
Go to his site and browse around. It’s worth it.
The Zen of CSS Design.
December 13th, 2005
I’ve just been reading a thoroughly enjoyable book on web site design. It comes from the creator of the CSS Zen Garden, a wonderful site which I first mentioned here nearly three years ago.
The idea of the Garden was to promote standards-based web design and, in particular, to show people what could be done with CSS in an age when most people were using tables for all their layout and embedding <font> tags in their HTML. And so the site became a showcase for a single web page – a single page of HTML, that is – but rendered in hundreds of different ways simply by changing the CSS and the associated graphics. The HTML remains unchanged. Have a quick look at
this,
this, and
this, for example. The designs are generally carefully tailored to this particular page, and wouldn’t always work for a whole site, but it’s still a great resource and inspiration for any web designer.
And now David Shea, who created the site, and Molly E. Holzschlag have written The Zen of CSS Design, which looks at 36 of the designs and talks through, in very readable language, what we can learn about design, and what we can learn about CSS, from each of them. This is not a book for CSS beginners, but if you know the basics it comes very highly recommended.
I now want to go and redesign all my web sites. Oh, for some time….
Bacula on Mac OS X
December 10th, 2005
I’ve been experimenting with the Open Source backup system ‘Bacula‘, which is gaining popularity as an alternative to the venerable Amanda.
I wanted to use my Linux machine to backup our two Macs, so I needed a version of the Bacula agent bacula-fd which was built for Mac OS X. That turned out to be pretty easy to do, but since I’ve had an amazing number of visitors to the post where I made a copy of ‘wget’ available, I thought I’d put this up here too in case anyone else is looking for it.
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