Monthly Archive for August, 2006

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things to be done in places for people

Published on 12/08/2006 in everything. 2 Comments

The problem is, I’m in incorrigable geek.

I sat down to write a list of stuff to do, since shit had been mounting up. Halfway through I thought, “ooh, there’d be a widget for this”. So I searched about, tried no less than three, then settled on one that worked with iCal’s database. So then I had to re-organise how I use iCal, naturally. And then I noticed how I was getting bored of my desktop background, so I trawled though some comics looking for a nice double-page spread to employ and fired up the gimp to crop and re-size to perfection.

After an hour and a half, I have done two things on my list, and only those because I could do them online.

>.<

A terribly rare condition

Published on 11/08/2006 in everything. 1 Comment

Today my powerbook was acting kind of funky, so I rebooted it.

Only, when it rebooted it presented me with a login window, asking for my username and password. And my username and password didn’t work. And the Tiger install disc told me there were, in fact, no user accounts present on my system at all.

Thankfully, I knew just what to do because it had happened before. Indeed the apparently superfuckingrare condition, known colloquially as “my fucking netinfo database got fucking corruped, rargh!” struck my mac mini less than a month hence. It didn’t help that I didn’t have a backup this time, but it wasn’t a massive pain.

But yeah, it’s really, really rare. I think my macs are cursed.

The upshot of this is that I’ve had hammered home the importance of manually running cron jobs (such as backing up the netinfo database), since my laptop generally sleeps through the alotted period (typically between 3-5 of the AM clock, since you’re asking). To this end Versiontracker hooked me up with YASU, which does such tasks without any of this whole “rain dance protect mac from big evil – waga-ugga waga-ugga” bullshit that is used to push so many such utilities. It can also empty some caches, which I gleefully selected, and I guess they were pretty full, or whatever, since system responsiveness is way up.

decisions, decisions

Published on 10/08/2006 in everything. 6 Comments

Things I want to call my cat:

- Professor Wafflesworth
- Waffle for short
- Evil the Cat
- Stipple

That is all

hang on lads, I’ve got an idea

Published on 10/08/2006 in everything, pictures and web design. 1 Comment

things scratched into the table of trendy coffee shops must be true

So, this came to me while walking about, bear with me.

You see, web 2.0 is all about communities and shit, and that’s great. It’s also all about web-browsers, and making them do things they weren’t designed to do, which is also great (if you can do it right).

However, web-browsers are pretty clumsy tools, and you often end up scanning a pretty packed page for one little bit of information… for a dozen different pages. As such, my idea was this: what if you had an app that checked all your social networking sites, all your forums, all your email, and presented it in one unified interface?

I’m picturing a clean interface which immediately presents the user with a summary of what has happened on the interweb since they last looked. New photos of Britney’s third baby on her flickr, Brad’s snide comments on Emmy’s latest LJ entry, a PM from l33tcl0ud on the gentoo forums asking where you found those drivers, a friend request on facebook from some kid you sat next to at lunch once: all of it sat in one place, waiting your eager young eyes.

Of course, it’d be a complete bastard to set up, mostly because APIs for such websites are few and far between. Which is pretty fair, really – if your sole source of revenue was from pairing eyeballs with adverts, would you make it easy for someone to suck just the information they wanted off your server into a program?

OK, I would too, but that’s because I’m a beautiful young idealist whose startup would flop quicker than a penis on a British nudist beach.