Author Archives: Sharpy

Could the iPad be the tipping point?

Update: To get where I’m coming from here I highly recommend that you read the following articles from Joel on Software: Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems and Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!. The tipping point, Joel on Software: One thing you see a lot when there is a transition from an [...]
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Software is hard

Allan Odgaard’s Textmate Blog lead me to the linked article: If you’re doing top-down design, you produce a specification that stops at some level of granularity. And you always risk discovering, come implementation time, that the module or class that was the lowest level of your specification hides untold worlds [...]
Posted in Computing, Programming, TextMate | Leave a comment

The complexity stick

Humanity has a habit of glorifying complexity. "Gritty" movies are hailed as masterpieces, whilst wonderfully simple stories of love and loyalty perform poorly. I wonder if someone hit me with the complexity stick too many times. I wonder if it was me.

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Thematic

Wrote a post a little while back saying that I’d returned to the default WordPress theme Kubrick. This is no longer the case. (I can’t actually remember when I switched away.) Now I’m actually using the theme framework known as Thematic. It’s got a nice minimalist default stylesheet, with great support for extensions and customisations through [...]
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The purpose of serving in the church

So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and [...]
Posted in Christianity, The Church | Leave a comment

Ryan Bates’ TODO List Textmate bundle

After wracking my brains to try and remember a random website where I’d watched a video about TextMate so that I could find the To-do List bundle he mentioned, it turns out a simple search solved my problem. The wonderful GetBundles for TextMate returned what I was after, Ryan Bates’ todo-list.tmbundle. It’s pretty simple to use: A [...]
Posted in Computing, Programming, TextMate | Leave a comment

Hiding the GrowlTunes menu bar icon

Update: You can now find this hint on macosxhints.com, along with some (hopefully) helpful comments. GrowlTunes is a nice little app included with the default Growl distribution. It watches iTunes and then whenever a song changes pops up a notification window giving details about the track, album art, your rating etc. Something that has really annoyed me [...]
Posted in Computing, Growl, Mac OS X | 1 Comment

A month of Vim (including Ruby, cron and GeekTool)

The general idea Teach myself Vim by using it exclusively for 1 month Write my first (somewhat) useful Ruby script to show me how long I have left (i.e. how long until the month is complete) Use GeekTool to display the regularly-updated results (via cron) on my desktop But why? I need to learn Vim, and this is a cool [...]
Posted in Computing, Programming, Ruby, Text Editing | Leave a comment

Installing the Git man pages locally

(NOTE: The following applies to git under Mac OS X 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard). I can’t make any guarantees for other versions, but you still may find the article helpful.) So, today I spent an insane amount of time trying to get my git install completely up-to-date, which meant installing the documentation locally on my machine. Sounds [...]
Posted in Computing, Git, Programming | Leave a comment

Kubrick returns

I wrote a little while back that I was trialling a new WordPress them, Wu Wei. After using it for a little while, I’ve decided to return to the WordPress default, Kubrick, for a little while (I have made my own minor modifications). Why? A couple of reasons: widgets such as Archives and Categories didn’t play [...]
Posted in Blogging, Computing, WordPress | 1 Comment