Apr 23 2010
Does the alt text in today’s xkcd remind anyone else of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire”?
… a less painfully eighties (is there any music-video cliché not used in this video?) lyrics-only version can be viewed here instead.
Mar 28 2010
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:
[cc lang=”objc” inline=”true” width=”0″ theme=”geshi”]
– (CGSize)drawInRect:(CGRect)rect withFont:(UIFont*)font lineBreakMode:(UILineBreakMode)lineBreakMode[/cc]
… 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 26 2010
After succumbing to unbearable pressure (e.g. my Mum mentioned in passing that she was thinking about getting one…) and buying one of the new DSi XLs, the next task was to find a solution to playing all of the games I’ve bought since getting my original DS Lite several years ago – without the hassle of carrying around, changing, and then losing hundreds of tiny cartridges.
On the DS Lite, the CycloDS Evolution was pretty much a perfect solution for me – it was fast, stable, customisable, and frequently updated with the latest fixes and upgrades. Unfortunately, it was also completely incompatible with the DSi, and so also the DSi XL.
In order to find an acceptable solution which works on the DSi (and therefore the XL also – the two machines run identical firmware, and only differ physically in form-factor) I ended up ordering one card, and then another – and so it occurred to me that a comparative review could well be useful… especially since one seems to be very popular but really doesn’t work at all well, whilst the other takes some effort to get working but is really very good once it’s sorted out!
Mar 26 2010
Mar 23 2010
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 9 2010
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 8 2010
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 2009
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!
Apr 29 2010
Building a 32-bit kernel on a 64-bit host…
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.
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By Stuart • Technology, UNIX 2