February 2012
1 post
“When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than...”
– Why the Lucky Stiff
Feb 24th
November 2011
2 posts
2 tags
Nov 28th
3 tags
Getting Behat to Beep When it's Finished
Some times when you’ve got a big Behat test suite to run you want to go off an do other things. Which means you have to constantly check back on your terminal to see if its done. Wouldn’t it be better if the terminal beeped when it was done? Well using Behat’s hook its as easy as: /** * @AfterSuite */ public static function beep(Behat\Behat\Event\SuiteEvent $event) { echo...
Nov 6th
53 notes
October 2011
2 posts
Oct 13th
“Gold farming is on of those things that make you want to quit writing science...”
– Neal Stephenson
Oct 13th
September 2011
2 posts
“You’re going to change your mind a thousand times. That’s a good...”
– Anna Rascouët-Paz
Sep 25th
andrewmale asked: I was interested to see the mobile app you are developing at Kent and your posts about Agile. I've started as the Head of Web Services at York and I would be interested to talk to you about both of these subjects.
Sep 5th
July 2011
1 post
6 tags
Jul 13th
3 notes
June 2011
7 posts
2 tags
Unicorns are real
@jodykemsley: Look a horse!
@jodykemsley: Oh no, its not a horse.
@msaspence: Well its not a unicorn.
@jodykemslet: No I don't think it's either.
Jun 27th
2 tags
Jun 27th
5 notes
7 tags
Jun 26th
20 notes
5 tags
Add a bit of fun to your designs →
Jun 9th
7 notes
“I believe that software patents should not exist. They are a tax on innovation....”
– Fred Wilson
Jun 3rd
3 tags
Jun 3rd
6 tags
Jun 2nd
3 notes
May 2011
4 posts
9 tags
"The Cloud" is just clever marketing
The cloud is a buzzword that is floating around more and more these days, its even creeping in to tv adverts. In reality though it’s just another rebrand of the interweb. “The Cloud” is just the interweb For consumers “The Cloud” is just the interweb. Yes services like Dropbox and Spotify have become more prolific, but having services and files online is nothing...
May 19th
6 tags
How to: Multiple default avatars assigned to...
Gravatars are awesome, they let commenters add a personal touch to their comments but most importantly, I think, they are way to aid visually tracking the back and forth of a conversation. Problem is not everyone has a Gravatar. Wordpress let’s you define your own default avatar but only one. I wanted a way to define a set of defaults that got assigned randomly but consistently to a commenter...
May 19th
3 notes
3 tags
“Every visit is a new user.”
– http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/blog/alpha-gov-uk-design-rules
May 17th
1 note
4 tags
“Google is the home page”
– http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/blog/alpha-gov-uk-design-rules
May 11th
November 2010
4 posts
“If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer;...”
– http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/r2As1AIftFs/if-youre-not-paying-for-it-youre-the-product
Nov 23rd
“i would swim through a river of piss with my mouth open just so i could smell...”
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFjbPoMN5jg
Nov 19th
WatchWatch
Black magic i tell you, black magic. This video is 100% CGI!
Nov 17th
2 tags
The product of software development is two-fold
- The behavior of the system
- The options for extending and modifying that behavior in the future.
Nov 10th
September 2010
2 posts
Sep 28th
“Designing a website to be usable is like baking a cake to be edible. It’s simply...”
– Stop Designing Aesthetics, Start Designing Emotions
Sep 5th
August 2010
3 posts
Aug 19th
1 tag
Aug 19th
2 tags
Aug 4th
June 2010
12 posts
WatchWatch
A quick test of the iPhone’s camera with video. My video skills leave a lot to be desired, especially as Aslan is massively overexposed (I didn’t know that I could just click him to get the light balance right), but the sharpness in the grass is pretty impressive.
Jun 24th
2 tags
Jun 24th
2 tags
Functional design vs emotive design
Design can be described as functional, emmotive, any shade of grey in between or neither (otherwise know as bad). Functional design is normally the kind of design you see in applications it’s clean, effective even “pretty” but it aim is to make functionality usable not illicit an emmotion response or manipulate the user. Emmotional design is the kind of design you see in websites and advertising....
Jun 19th
3 tags
WatchWatch
Some cool tip and tricks if you’ve got a spare hour.
Jun 17th
4 tags
Jun 14th
Jun 13th
4 tags
Jun 11th
1 note
2 tags
Jun 10th
4 tags
The death of hover? →
Whilst all these new touch devices do present us with the need to consider how we use events like hover, I’m not sure when I would ever have the hover action do something different from the click action. Tool tips perhaps but I would consider that more of aid than an action and not essential to the functionality of the system.
Jun 9th
4 tags
Cool shopping cart →
Very tempted by these, but the reason I’ve linked this up is the shopping cart. I reckon the add to buttons could be more obvious, but the animation and ajax of it all feels polished with just the right level of intrusiveness.
Jun 9th
Google web fonts →
kevinnuut: I am heavily against this.  I cannot agree with everything being hosted in the Google cloud.  I’m all for data deduplication, but the internet cannot rely on single sources to run, that’s how the terrorists win. Thanks hunsonisgroovy! Yes… but no one else was doing it, hopefully now Google have dived in other will follow. The danger is people assuming they can’t compete...
Jun 5th
36 notes
4 tags
Smokescreen: JavaScript SWF Interpreter  →
Could this be the answer to Apple vs Adobe
Jun 1st
May 2010
16 posts
4 tags
Select a row and its descendants within a... →
May 27th
3 tags
Defining a custom index controller in Zend...
In the Zend Framework the default controller (ie if you at http://www.example.com/) is index. That’s fine but what if you want to change it? Good luck trying to out how to do, what to me seemed like, a relatively simple requirement from a framework, by searching the documentation. Anyway here is the solution I found by trawling through the source code, @rikkicarroll came back to me with the...
May 17th
3 tags
The Zombie Home Page Chronicles →
This reminded me of a few meetings I’ve been to.
May 17th
2 tags
New Programmer Jargo →
May 13th
4 tags
May 12th
3 tags
20 Fresh High Quality Free Fonts →
May 11th
3 tags
The Web is a web of content, not an application... →
I could not agree with this post less, the web is what we make it Whilst there is some truth in this post: the web has historically been a web of content, and may or may not be better at serving that end. To suggest that the web is or can be anything other than what we (developers and users) make of it is simply ridiculous.
May 10th
3 tags
WatchWatch
Update: I’ve now embedded a SD version as the HD one was hard to make out when reduced in size. The HD version is still available on Vimeo. I’ve been playing with a cool bit of software called gource this weekend. Gource is a software version control visualization tool, and this is the fruits of my labours. This is a visualisation of all the activity on the list8D project since we...
May 9th
4 tags
Theme update
My tumblr theme now displays notes and comments nicely, and is one step closer to being submited to the theme garden.
May 9th
3 tags
WatchWatch
People dont do what you do, they buy why you do, and what you do simply proves as the proof of why you do it.
May 9th