May 23
May 14
So Steam has now been released for the Mac. Whilst this is a massive step forwards for the Mac as a platform – finally giving Apple a credible position regarding gaming (after the 2007 deal with Electronic Arts, which didn’t even promise Mac native games but merely wrappers around Windows titles
Apr 29
Having tried m0n0wall and pfSense without much success (I basically need a filtering bridge: with m0n0wall bridging WAN to OPT and with LAN disconnected, everything is fine until I enable traffic shaping, at which point the throughput reduces to almost nothing; with pfSense, I gave up on the third attempt at configuration because it had corrupted its own CompactFlash filesystem), I’ve decided to install Linux on my ALIX 2C3.
Mar 28
So far as I can tell, the iPhone SDK exposes no method to truncate an NSString to a given width (in pixels). This function obviously exists since it is used when drawing UILabels, and you can even draw truncated text with the method:
- (CGSize)drawInRect:(CGRect)rect withFont:(UIFont*)font lineBreakMode:(UILineBreakMode)lineBreakMode
… but there’s no way to read-back the rendered text.
A quick search of the ‘net revealed some methods which would truncate a string based on the number of characters, but nothing to perform the operation based on the rendered width in pixels.
Mar 23
Enterprise backup, it ain’t
In December of last year, after only nineteen months of use, my 500GB Time Capsule died of a dead PSU. As documented here (a great graph, sadly lacking a scale on the y-axis…) the average lifespan of a Time Capsule was, for these first generation units, nineteen months and 20 days – and mine was only eighteen days short of this.
In any case, Apple offered to replace my out-of-warranty unit free of charge – but noted that they had no backup service to recover the contents. When asked, they did say that they were happy for me to dismantle the Time Capsule and backup the data myself though. Them’s fightin’ words 
Feb 09
After a long slog ironing out some last-minute bugettes (and a major performance issue I’d accidentally introduced by attempting to bubble-sort an 10,000-entry strong list) I’ve just posted an updated release of Æther Tool to Apple for approval.
This is my first commercial app, admittedly, but it has taken a great deal of time, sweat, and (almost ;) tears to progress this far… and it makes me wonder how other small- or one-man developers approach the development process and how long this generally takes.
And now, following in the footsteps of the seminal “How 12 Hours, 2 Guys, 6 Cups of Coffee = 1 iPhone App there’s Sahil Lavingia‘s oneweekapp.com.
Jan 08
Hotmailers Hawking Hoax Hunan Half-Offs
Server seems to be coping for now (and saying that’s likely the kiss of death…)
Original post here – be gentle 
Dec 30
Finally realised that to trial Xbox LIVE Gold you need to create a new account – I never got a trial because I imported my old Xbox account.
Underwhelmed by the new Gold-only features: Facebook is alright – I like the photo browser, but doesn’t appear to be integrated; Twitter is an #epicfail without a browser for following links (my phone can do this, ferchristsakes!) and likewise doesn’t seem to integrate with anything else; and the Sky player stutters even on lowest quality whilst I can watch BBC iPlayer in HD without problems.
In all, anyone who upgrades to Gold for these features (which can’t even be trailed without) will be disappointed – Microsoft should stick to selling Gold accounts for multiplayer access, rather than convincing people to upgrade for gimmicks.
(Even better, PS3 multiplayer is free!)
If I were Microsoft I’d give people an hour of Gold/multiplayer membership a day, but require a payment to upgrade to permanent 24×7 multiplayer. This would let casual gamers get a feel for multiplayer (and so probably end up selling more Gold subscriptions) without removing the impetus from hard-core players to pay for the service. Simple!
Nov 10
Having bought a Unibody MacBook Pro and running Mac OS 10.6, I decided to upgrade my Samsung NC10 from running Mac OS 10.5.8 to running the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) from Canonical.
Canonical have completely revolutionised the concept of Linux on the desktop by packaging a distribution that is lightweight, fast, attractive, functional, and is – above all – actually usable as a day-to-day computing environment by your average computer user: as with OS X, the powerful underpinnings aren’t exposed and so don’t scare away the casual user.
Oct 12
