Category Archives: Computing

Could the iPad be the tipping point?

By Sharpy | Published: February 8, 2010
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

By Sharpy | Published: February 8, 2010
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 [...]
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Thematic

By Sharpy | Published: February 4, 2010
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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Ryan Bates’ TODO List Textmate bundle

By Sharpy | Published: January 16, 2010
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 [...]
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Hiding the GrowlTunes menu bar icon

By Sharpy | Published: December 29, 2009
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 [...]
Also posted in Growl, Mac OS X | 1 Comment

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

By Sharpy | Published: December 18, 2009
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 [...]
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Installing the Git man pages locally

By Sharpy | Published: November 21, 2009
(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 [...]
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Kubrick returns

By Sharpy | Published: November 21, 2009
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 [...]
Also posted in Blogging, WordPress | 1 Comment

PHP Markdown

By Sharpy | Published: October 31, 2009
While watching a video about blogging from TextMate, I went on further to discover this pretty awesome PHP version of Markdown. After then downloading PHP Markdown Extra and installing it on my site, this is my very first attempt at a blog written purely in Markdown syntax, with no HTML at all. Hope it works! EDIT: looks [...]
Also posted in Blogging, Mac OS X, TextMate | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Waxing thematic

By Sharpy | Published: October 27, 2009
So. Whilst visiting imjustcreative.com I read this post about WordPress themes which lead me to this article—a list of some pretty cool minimalist/typographical designs. I couldn’t go past this one: Wu Wei, by Jeff Ngan. There’s just something about the gorgeous, chunky Helvetica (well, actually it’s Helvetica Neue—if you have a Mac you’ll be seeing what I’m [...]
Also posted in Blogging, The Web, Typography, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment