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
May 13
The other weekend I spent Sunday at RAF Upwood, an abandoned RAF base near Peterborough, on a photo-shoot organised by Alex Beckett. Alex has put together a video of the event, featuring some of the most striking photographs taken.
If you keep your eyes peeled, you might even spot me in a couple of the pictures 
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.
Apr 23
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
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 26
… on Jo Whiley’s Live Lounge.
“Go Do” starts at 5:38, and the Live Lounge cover track at 15:41.
More from Jónsi here.
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.