If you spend a lot of time online, it’s easy to become disillusioned and bitter. You only have to start reading the comments on a Techcrunch article to think that everyone on the planet is an angry, opinionated buffoon. The web is a mess of criticism and negativity with everyone vying for their little...
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As usual, my work schedule prevents me from writing a comprehensive post, but I wanted to quickly jot down a couple of “thoughts in progress”. “Minimum Viable Product“. This is an extremely useful pattern to follow – develop and design only what you need to test and deliver the first version of your idea....
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We’re still snowed-under with work, but we’ve just moved into a new apartment in Shinjuku, Tokyo, where we’ll be for the next 6 weeks. I wouldn’t normally post anything about toilet-roll holders… but I love the simplicity of the one in our apartment. Simple, robust and fast to change. Great design.
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I’m still snowed under with work at the moment so don’t have time for a long post, but thought I’d quickly post this little thing. I was conversing with Carl Morris of the excellent Sleeveface (amongst other things) last week, and we got to talking about when it makes sense to put Amazon Associates...
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Apologies for the lack of updates recently; we’re spending every waking hour on project work, so have had little time for writing and sharing (and replying to emails/comments – sorry if you’re still waiting for a response). In the meantime, here’s something I needed to create for a Facebook game that we’re building, that’s...
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That’s quite the mouthful. Let me start with a huge caveat: I’m not an expert on this, and much of it may be incorrect. I studied Bayesian statistics about fifteen years ago in university, but have no recollection of it (that sounds a bit like Bill Clinton: “I experimented with statistics but didn’t inhale...
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At the end of August 2010, all Twitter apps that use Basic Authentication to post/query the API will no longer work. Apps need to migrate to OAuth authentication, but this can be a little tricky. I’ve created something for my particular use-case that you might find useful too. I have a number of automated...
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As part of another project I’m working on, I’ve built something that extracts palettes from websites – not just hex codes from the CSS, but the proportion of ‘on screen’ colours, including images. I’ve built a palette – with proportions – for a number of popular websites. Can you guess which is which? Here...
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If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ll know that about four months ago, I experienced problems with 123 Reg – the same problems that many other people have (and still do). I haven’t experienced problems since because, basically, I’ve switched to the excellent Dreamhost. It’s been a while, so I had forgotten about...
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Stack Overflow was set up by two successful high-profile businessmen, attracts over 7 million unique visitors a month, and has received $6 million in funding. So I found it a little jarring when I visited the site to see this: My eyes puked from the motion sickness of not-knowing-where-to-look-oh-my-god-everything-is-everywhere-ness of the page. It’s a...
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