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Using the Wiimote with Processing, Max/MSP, and a whole load of other things (via OSC) on Mac OS. Fun!
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“Little handpainted people, left in London to fend for themselves”
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Second issue of Joss Whedon’s online comic.
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“For five years I also wrote a monthly column of the same title in the industry’s critical Bible, Edge magazine. All those columns are archived”… on Poole’s website. Excellent.
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Great selection of links to Raph Koster’s “Design For Everywhere” – a talk at GDC to the games industry about designing games (and, by inference, software) for use in any context. Important!
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“Here are some of the common pitfalls that lead to failure when building social web applications.”
WordPress 2.3: a look at tagging
09 September 2007
So, this blog (for its sins) is running on WordPress 2.0.5. That’s a bit out-of-date. The main reason is because it has all sorts of jiggery-pokery to make it work the way I want – a tagging solution based on Jerome’s Keywords that was modified when I moved to 2.0; all sorts of template hacking to make the beautiful breadcrumb trail at the top you see work.
I’ve resisted upgrading due to the hell that was hacking plugins and templates into future versions of WordPress. Until now, that is. WordPress 2.3 (finally) introduces a proper tagging solution – entirely separate to the “categories” system. Well, not quite, as we’ll see – but it finally means that the architecture of Infovore.org is now entirely possible within WordPress itself.
Of course, now you’ve got to convert your custom tagging solution to the new schema. I’ve written a small script to do this for myself – only took about an hour, and that’s mainly because I was exploring the schema, and my PHP is a little rusty. Of course, now I know a reasonable amount about how tagging is implemented in WordPress 2.3, and felt I should write this up properly, so that anybody else converting custom tagging solutions might save themselves some time.
Continue reading this post…
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Scientists show their science-related tattoos. Some are better than others.
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“It seems to me that Coverflow replicates everything that is frustrating and unpleasant about looking for something in the real world.”
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“FHM was selling 800,000 for a reason, and it wasn’t to those of us who’ve seen all three endings of Deus Ex” Gillen talks about the resurgence of PC Accelerator.
Good Experience: Apple Airport Express
06 September 2007
I bought an Airport Express this week. They’ve been around for a while now, and I’m sure they’re probably going to end up being refreshed in the near future, but I couldn’t hold off any longer. For various reasons, it made no sense to put it off any longer.
So far, I’ve been really impressed with it. Not so much what it does; it does exactly what I ask of it, which is exactly what the site said it will do. What’s impressive is the way it does it. The experience of owning it, of using it, has been excellent.
Wireless networking is complicated. It’s not designed to be user friendly. It’s not too hard to get a router/modem up and running and sharing around a nice, public, stealable connection, but fine-tuning and configuring it is a total pain for most users. The terminology is complex and unintuitive.
To make matters worse, almost every router (wireless or otherwise) has a miniature webserver in it running an administration interface. This sounds like a good idea for most users: the controls and interactions are familiar, and no special software is required. But in practice, it’s a disaster.
Continue reading this post…
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“Prince is a computer program that converts XML and HTML into PDF documents.”
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Interesting-looking little PHP web-forum.
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“When a work of art becomes useful, it becomes a craft, or it becomes propaganda. When a toy becomes useful, it becomes a tool, or a weapon.”
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“HasFinder is an extension to ActiveRecord that makes it easier than ever to create custom find and count queries.” Looks excellent. Might well be making use of this.
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“In this prsentation… we examine key agile practices, that when applied judiciously to Ruby, retain the amazing productivity, improve the quality of code, etc.” Looks good.
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“Scrolling works. Long pages work. Anything else tends to be informationarchitecturitis.”
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Webistrano is a Web UI for managing Capistrano deployments. It lets you manage projects and their stages like test, production, and staging with different settings. Those stages can then be deployed with Capistrano through Webistrano.
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Some good stuff on ActiveRecord proxy usage. I’m doing some of this already, but the advanced examples look really handy.
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“Bungie’s designers aren’t just making a game: They’re trying to divine the golden mean of fun.” Large Wired article on how Bungie do UX research for Halo 3.
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Some useful tips on keeping Lightroom data safe.
Seaside
25 August 2007
I’m off to the seaside on holiday. To Whitstable, to be precise (which still isn’t in Dopplr, despite the remarkably good gazetteer update). Looking forward to it a huge amount. I’ve been a bit burnt out in recent weeks, with piles of work and other things. Means I’m behind on uploading photographs, writing about things, putting things out into public.
Never mind. I’ve got 7 days on the coast to read, walk, eat, and recharge my batteries.
And then we begin again.
It’s hard to describe how much I’m looking forward to this. The beautiful weather can only be a good sign, right?
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“Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against”. Sounds awesome!