December 2011
2 posts
My themes and WordPress 3.3 compatibility →
So far it’s looking good. All three of my themes – Ahimsa, Audacity of Tanish and Rachel – seem to have no issues (at least new issues!) with WordPress 3.3, which was released yesterday.
The bizarre world of Android →
We already knew that Microsoft makes more from Android than it does from Windows Phone 7: Microsoft gets $5 for every HTC phone running Android, according to Citi analyst Walter Pritchard, who…
September 2011
1 post
The trouble with non-GPL open licenses →
Marco Arment is understandably peeved that Business Insider is exploiting Marco’s generous license to lift and reproduce his writings wholesale. Regarding the license, he writes: Business Insider’s…
August 2011
1 post
The real Steve Jobs →
Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced his resignation from Apple. This has prompted an outpouring of touchingly sentimental stories from those who have interacted with the man. John Gruber has been…
June 2011
1 post
Google’s new design/experience: taking Chris... →
Google has progressed since the days of 41 shades of blue. At least in the user interface of their products. I had no insight into whether this reflects a change in the underlying process. But now…
May 2011
1 post
∅ What is MobileMe supposed to do? →
Via MacApper: “In Fortune’s story, Lashinsky says Steve Jobs summoned the entire MobileMe team for a meeting at the company’s on-campus Town Hall, accusing everyone of “tarnishing Apple’s…
April 2011
2 posts
Switching to British English on Mac OS X →
If like me you have not yet learnt to drop the ‘u’ from ‘colour’, then you might have noticed that Mac OS X Snow Leopard makes it annoyingly difficult to switch the system language preference,…
Gitting over Dropbox: the preamble →
I am fairly certain I was one of the earliest adopter of Dropbox. I loved the simplicity of the application and the free version provided a generous amount of disk space (2GB). I used it religiously,…
March 2011
1 post
My search for a tasks+notes app →
I have been searching for an app that lets me quickly write notes that also double as tasks – and therefore could use a due date/time and reminder alarm. There is the built-in “todo” capability in OS…
December 2010
1 post
So, you finally switched to a Mac? →
Apple has a couple of great pages (1, 2) for switchers. What they fail to tell you about are the great non-Apple apps that make the Mac experience a worthwhile switch. So, here they are (at least…
November 2010
2 posts
The user is the consumer is the employee is the... →
Three year olds are clever people. Take the example of my son who vehemently resisted our pleadings to ingest more food: “My stomach is full. There is just no place left for any more food”. But his…
How Marco Arment’s leaving Tumblr made me quit... →
Right at the outset I must admit that the title of this post is a fair bit exaggerated. Marco leaving Tumblr isn’t the sole cause of my reduced usage of Posterous. As is always the case,…
October 2010
2 posts
The false seductiveness of obfuscation and... →
Douglas Crockford, in the intro to Javascript: The Good Parts:
When I was a young journeyman programmer, I would learn about every feature of the languages I was using, and I would attempt to…
App-Chasing: Fast Times on an Apple Fanboy High →
The fanboys have moved on. As they always do.
Just this last 2005 you bought one of the most expensive laptops in the world, a MacBook. For a year or two it was glorious. You read all the top Apple…
September 2010
5 posts
Twitter is not a newsreader →
Since the commercialisation of the Internet (say around 1994) there have been many “say what?” moments for us regulars; times when the likes of Wired first made up technology via terminology and…
The iPad and the Free world →
A clever play on Apple’s exaggerated description of the iPad, from a remarkable NYRB article (with an anti-climactic poor ending):
Whether all this adds up to a game-changer able to revive…
The Future of Google →
Google has transitioned from a “growth company to a cash cow” — that’s the conclusion of Michael Copeland and Seth Weintraub, writing for Fortune:
Long-term projections for growth in the…
Download: Ahimsa 3.3 →
The only three things guaranteed in life are death, taxes… and your periodic update to the Ahimsa theme. Fortunately only the first two are injurious to your health, while the surgeon general…
Why Apple Ping’s privacy setting is going to bite... →
TechCrunch thinks the privacy settings in Apple’s fledgling social networking service, Ping, is brilliant:
I haven’t used Ping enough to tell if it will actually be useful. Given that this is…
August 2010
5 posts
On Analogies and Metaphors →
In the 1994 surprise hit Il Postino, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is shown impressing upon the town postman and aspiring poet, Mario, the importance of metaphor in poetry. Good poetry is…
The Hurd affair and HP’s greatness →
The New York Times addresses the puzzlement that has occupied many, on the flimsy reasoning behind the dismissal of HP CEO Mark Hurd. The article sheds much necessary light on the larger reasons for…
David Foster Wallace on Perl Programmers →
Okay fine, he is talking about a particular kind of tennis trainee, but it seems worrisomely applicable to those (like me) who are unable to part ways with Perl:
You’ve got the Complacent type,…
The Blackberry Apex →
You know that old saw: “first they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win”? It occurred to me that it applies quite well — except for the ‘then you win’ part — when it…
Time to Wave Goodbye →
And so another great Google experiment comes to an end. CNN reports that Google Wave is on its deathbed:
Google is pulling the plug on Google Wave.
Google intended the messaging program,…
July 2010
3 posts
SysAdmin Day or The decline and fall of the system... →
There is an unfortunate class of jobs, the need for which are noticed only at times of failure. System administration, the hidden art of keeping the computing universe humming along, is one such….
iPhone vs Droid and the compulsion to treat the... →
Below is Apple explaining an important feature — FaceTime — of the new iPhone 4:
These, they are saying, are the many ways in which this feature might be useful to the public….
Apple’s bar hopping shennanigans →
In his translation of Apple PR speak to human language, John Gruber offers an interpretation, of Apple’s placing blame on the bars calculation formula, that I too have strongly suspected to be the…
June 2010
11 posts
I love you just the way you are? →
A strange thing happened on the way to Safari Extensions. I lost interest in (or the need for) extensions of any sort. I still love Firefox. I still think the cornucopia of Firefox extensions is a…
Screenshots: Rachel 0.93 for WordPress →
Below are some screenshots that demonstrate support for WordPress 3.0′s background colour and image in Rachel 0.93. Download link coming next.
[qfgallery title=’Rachel 0.93’ scale=0]
…
Download: Rachel 0.93 for WordPress →
Germany might have spanked English bottoms today but you can come out on top with this spanking new release of Rachel for WordPress! This is version 0.93 and along with fixing various annoyances and…
The future of software? (from a user perspective) →
There are two unrelated success stories that I wish to tie together in this bit, and if I am successful and justified in doing so, then you too might worry as I do about the future of software.
…
UI clarity: does the Mac do better? →
Much [and often deserved] fun has been had at Microsoft’s expense with regard to their incomprehensible dialogs. Examples can be gathered from the Daring Fireball blog (for example, this one)….
Screenshots: Rachel 0.8 for WordPress →
[qfgallery title=’Rachel 0.8’ scale=0]
http://ahren.org/code/wp-content/uploads/misc/rachel1.png|Main Page
http://ahren.org/code/wp-content/uploads/misc/rachel2.png|Sidebar
…
Download: Rachel 0.8 for WordPress →
Rachel is a theme for WordPress. Read more about it here.
Comment isn’t free: Gruber vs Wilcox →
Daring Fireballer John Gruber is annoyed with Joe Wilcox because Wilcox is being a bit sulky about the inability to comment on Daring Fireball (a blog that dispenses with the ubiquitous reader…
Change, even if slicker, does not equal progress →
Not to worry, this is not a post about politics, but about design (I am an expert in neither field). You have probably grown tired by now of reading this popular quote attributed to Steve Jobs, but…
Download: Fotile 0.9 →
Fotile is a simple web app for generating a tile puzzle from an image, which can then be solved by swapping pieces. Images can be loaded from a URL, from a local directory (under your Fotile…
Shortcodes in Ahimsa for WordPress →
For a couple of releases now, the Ahimsa theme for WordPress has included two shortcodes which I have been too lazy to document, and this post attempts to rectify that.
Quick Fancybox Gallery
If you…
May 2010
7 posts
The state of the web (apps) →
Joe Hewitt is not without credentials. Pretty solid credentials. The man participated in Firefox development, worked at Netscape (remember Netscape?), and was the author of the Facebook application…
Download: Ahimsa 3.2 for WordPress →
You can now download Version 3.2 of the Ahimsa for WordPress theme from the link below, or from the Wordpress.org site shortly (once it is approved). If you are upgrading from a version of Ahimsa…
Screenshots: Ahimsa 3.2 for WordPress →
Below are screenshots of Ahimsa 3.2 (download link coming next) for WordPress. The first screenshot highlights the two new visible changes (there are others under the hood): rotated text in the…
Apple iCal, Google Calendar, CalDAV and SOCKS →
A breakthrough in my long-running quest to reach Google Calendar via CalDAV through SOCKS from behind a firewall! If that’s a mouthful the solution is equally contrived, but quite worth it… for…
Google [finally!] brings beauty to the Web →
I confess I am not much enamoured of Google design, what with that choice of startling blue and all, but they have taken a great step in the direction of redemption:
The Google Font Directory lets…
A fundamentally flawed defence of the Apple app... →
In a climate where the market reigns supreme and the mantra “nothing succeeds like success” has never been truer, it should be unsurprising to see someone write:
Thomas Fitzgerald responds to Ted…
Google Voice and Lysenkoism →
Back at the height of the Soviet Union, the story goes, a biologist named Lysenko won the favour of über-dictator Stalin, in major part due to his notion (not original to him, see: Lamarckism) that…
March 2010
4 posts
Backups →
Merlin Mann and John Gruber have been, quite admirably, extolling the virtues of backing up your computer in recent blog posts. They remind you that it might be tedious, but it will be well worth it…
Slipcover for Mac OS →
Slipcover is a free Mac OS X app that can be used to “create custom case icons for all your media files”. In other words, customise the icons of your files, typically media files. Its a slick app and…
IE9 to support rounded corners →
This is a bit old (from the IE9 blog) but important and interesting news for users of my Ahimsa for WordPress theme: IE9 will support the CSS3 border-radius property, WebKit/Gecko (Safari, Chrome,…
Yet another Markdown Cheatsheet →
I have created a cheatsheet for Markdown. See this page for info and download links.
[qfgallery orient=landscape float=left…
February 2010
4 posts
links for 2010-02-23 →
Movist is a strong VLC alternative for Mac
(tags: apple, free, software, video, player)