Jon Simpson

Versioning & Xcode 4 Info.plist Processing

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 16:01:17 +0000

rmate + SSH RemoteForward

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:17:45 +0000

Recovering lost Amazon RDS master user login

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:03:42 +0100

Broken PHP in user directories on upgrade to Debian Squeeze

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 02:41:21 +0000

Apple's Design Process

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 11:55:16 +0000

Every week, the teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely. As Lopp put it: to “go crazy”. Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other’s antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work.

Given the quality of output from Apple, notes about their process are a potential source of best practice in product design and iteration.

We Showed 'Troll Physics' Comics to a Physics Professor. Here's His Reaction.

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:43:27 +0100

… To give a sense of how hard of a push that is, let’s assume that the stupid troll thing in the wagon weighs 50 kg.

This is the tone throughout, brilliant.

Call of Duty: Gaming and Reality in Modern Warfare

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 00:53:19 +0100

All that realism crowding out reality. You were there… what was it like? they’d ask.

“The next time you get killed playing Call of Duty,” I tell one of them, “take the game out back, back behind your dorm. And bury it. Along with a picture of your best friend. That’d be a good start.”

“Why a picture of someone else? I thought you said the next time I get killed.”

“Your own death is too abstract.”

Amazing piece on the modern war-game/FPS and its relationship with real combat. The S.L.A. Marshall statistic that 75% of WWII soldiers never fired on the enemy - even under direct threat - and the solution in modern training is thought provoking.

Not Your Average iPhone Screencast

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 00:50:27 +0100

You could make a screencast by clicking around in the iPhone Simulator, but that has a tendency to look like you just clicked around in the iPhone Simulator.

Tips and tricks for making a screen-recorded iPhone app video look and feel ‘right’ from Loren Brichter (of Tweetie, now Twitter fame). A realistic set of apps and carrier name go along way to blurring the boundary - a lot of app demo videos don’t follow these points and it’s slightly jarring.

Under the covers of the App Engine Datastore

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 00:46:11 +0100

Really nice illustration of keyed, sharded datastores and how SQL queries map onto the bigtable/key-value store approach in this presentation by Ryan Barrett of Google.

The Geometry of Pasta

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 01:24:26 +0100

Pictorial, complete with dimensions and recipes.

[via Fresh Signals]

Domain Event Driven Architecture

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 19:36:30 +0100

Nice introduction to introducing event driven architectures (EDA) into a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to increase modularity and ease extensibility between components.

By exposing relevant Domain Events on a shared event bus we can isolate cross cutting functions to separate systems

The pdf deck of slides is more legible than the slideshare widget on the page.

[via “Why Domain Event Driven architecture?”]

Ten Things I Have Learned

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 02:01:50 +0100

Came across this some years ago, stumbled into it again around the web — tiny grey text on a yellow background rang a bell. As an exception to the rule that all ‘X things that…’ articles are fairly poor¹, this one resonates particularly with me.

See cracked.com or Lifehacker for examples of this meme. Merlin Mann did a great call-out of the genre some time ago, specifically “5 great house hacks”. ↩

ignore the code: Chris Clark

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 01:41:26 +0100

Interview about UX/UI design for iPhone/iPad with a nice discussion of process for prototyping. This part about language caught my attention:

Language is a trap: you have to avoid instructions or requests that will lead someone to the desired outcome. You see tests where a researcher says «OK, now how would you export this video to share it online?» so they search through the menus for the key words «export» and «share», and if they find either one of them they’re home free. Never mind that the majority of people in the real world might be looking for the words «upload» and «YouTube.» Using the language of the app to pose questions about the app — getting the subject to think the same way you think — is the antithesis of what you’re there for.

This tendency to explain the workings of an app or process in it’s own vocabulary tends to stunt the early experiences of those without a common frame of reference. Testing with people who have no pre-conceived experiences of both the target platform and problem domain strikes me as a good way to shallow the learning curve of an application.

Sky Open Source Software Downloads

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 01:39:00 +0100

You should not experience any significant differences in the functionality that you enjoyed in the previous version of software. However, some of the software that has been loaded onto your Sky HD box is Open Source Software.

This new update coming down for Sky+ HD changes the OS on the box to be ‘darwin’. This is actually a codename for their new Linux-based firmware, rather than the open-source BSD variant maintained by Apple. Rumours suggest this update will make use of the Ethernet port on the back of the HD box to allow Sky Broadband customers to do video on demand. (Anytime+ in Sky parlance). Would be neat if this release spurred the development of alternate firmware for the box, but I’d expect there are proprietary hardware components not covered in the release.

What is your academic paper for?

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 20:55:17 +0100

You are not allowed to keep delight to yourself. Moron. This, above all the other things, is the thing the Academy has lied you into misunderstanding, with its delayed gratifications and postponements of your life:

Delight, kept secret, always fades to nothing.

Thought-provoking piece on writing in academia.

git-feature workflow tool

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 20:44:59 +0100

Adds a git feature command which simplifies the creation of appropriate feature branches and a git finish command for merging back into masters. Might be useful in trying to make better use of git’s branching.

Reset root Password on Linux

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 20:38:06 +0100

In the Grub boot menu:

Find the line that corresponds to kernel, and again press “e”. Add the following line to the end of the line. single init=/bin/bash

This seemed to work on the Ubuntu box I’ve been struggling to log in to due to forgotten user/passwords.

UTS #35: Locale Data Markup Language

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 03:30:01 +0100

Specifically, bookmarked for reference to the date and time format string patterns used by NSDateFormatter when formatting NSDate objects to strings on OS X and iOS.

Indefinite in Number, But of Certain Fixed Shapes

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 03:03:08 +0100

Produced in the late 1800s by a company called Richter’s — “Designed and Executed by Dr. Richter’s Art-Department,” then located at 74-80 Washington Street, New York, NY — the blocks and their instructional manuals that you see here were no mere playthings; they were marketed as intellectual stimulants, Frobelian educational props, for teaching children nothing less than how to think.

via BLDGBlog, photos of various manuals and instructions supplied with sets of Anchor Stones, small building blocks which feel (and look) like miniature stone blocks. I came across them in a toy store whilst staying with Matt Jadud in Boston in fall 2008 (picture above). There seems to be an active UK supplier, although I imagine the pieces would get everywhere… Very, very cool toy — looks like grown-up LEGO.

Welcome to Vim

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 01:55:49 +0100

This is a Vim Introduction to be watched by those looking to start using Vim or are curious about what it can do, or whatever… You don’t necessarily “learn” anything here except that Vim is amazing and you get to learn my personal take on it :)

Roughly half-hour long hands on video exploring Vim and what you can get up to in terms of customising and exploiting the environment. Can’t seem to break the visual editor habit personally, Textmate is beginning to show age in some places though, having not been significantly updated for several years.¹

I regularly run into a bug whereby the default path is set to / is quite annoying, and doesn’t seem to have been fixed despite being reported in September 2009 as a consequence of the Snow Leopard upgrade. ↩