Jon Simpson

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. ↩

CoffeeScript - 7 Reasons You Are Totally Gonna Hate It

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 01:49:30 +0100

From the CoffeeScript homepage:

CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Think of it as JavaScript’s less ostentatious kid brother — the same genes, roughly the same height, but a different sense of style. Apart from a handful of bonus goodies, statements in CoffeeScript correspond one-to-one with their equivalent in JavaScript, it’s just another way of saying it.

This 7 reasons presentation is wrapped in a nasty flash-document viewer, but shows off some nice examples of the syntax and the getting started process.

A re-introduction to JavaScript

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 01:43:16 +0100

While often derided as a toy, beneath its deceptive simplicity lie some powerful language features. 2005 has seen the launch of a number of high-profile JavaScript applications, showing that deeper knowledge of this technology is an important skill for any web developer.

Dated, but a concise single page introduction to Javascript. At least it doesn’t pertain to the 1998-era, DHTML/IE4, clock following your mouse cursor variety.

Core Data and iPhone Applications - Protecting Your Data

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 23:13:26 +0100

A good review of the security features added to iOS in version 4, along with the device features and versions that support them. Bookmarked for future reference on securing Core Data stores.

Pools in Python

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:12:07 +0100

Object pooling is pre-allocating a number of objects to use later. It is done by creating a group of objects (pool) initially and when you need an object, you take one from the pool rather than creating it. When you are done with the object you send it back to the pool.

Nice explanation and small example of using object pools in Python, along with some performance measurements.

Matt Cutts' SEO site review session from Google I/O 2010

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 23:15:52 +0100

A couple weeks or so ago, we did an SEO site review session at Google I/O 2010. The video from that session is now live. The video is about an hour long, but I hope it’s a pretty good use of your time if you’re interested in search engine optimization. Enjoy!

Google provide a mass of information on how to create websites that rank well that’s both accessible and informative - this video adds to the pile, I always seem to pick up one or two new ideas for designing new templates and information flows (along with wanting to change everything that’s out there already…)

Invisible Status Bar Safari Extension

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 23:10:13 +0100

Save display space or appeal to your own sense of minimalism by hiding Safari’s native status bar, and using the Invisible Status Bar instead. Only shows up when you hover over a link, i.e. when you need a status bar.

Copies Chrome’s behaviour of displaying the URL a link goes to onmouseover. A nice way to reclaim the ~20 pixels the status bar occupies if like me, you have the status bar enabled purely to see where links go.

Gmail Checker Safari Extension

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 23:06:42 +0100

A Safari Extension for staying on top of your inbox.

A quite a stylish and unobtrusive way to integrate GMail into Safari, having the unread count next to the address bar in all open browser windows does feel like it could be a little too visible in terms of stealing focus from other tasks. Will be interesting to see how these extensions last in daily use.

cells. A massively multi-agent Python programming game

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:43:48 +0100

Cells is a programming game, meaning that the player programms the agents before actual gameplay starts, and then watches pits his code against that of his oponents. It features two or more teams of hundreds or even thousands of identical agents, which I call “cells”. These cells live in a 2-dimensional simulated environment, and compete for the control of resources scattered around the world.

Looks really interesting - might be neat in CO538 next year to bring in some of the agent simulation? The dynamic of raising/lowering the terrain (changing the brightness of the background) is a nice touch.

Go to University, Not for CS

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sun, 30 May 2010 11:35:39 +0100

Computer science is shallow, and nearly every place it’s taught is at the mercy of “industry”. They rarely teach deep philosophy and instead would rather either teach you what some business down the street wants, or teach you their favorite pet language like LISP. Even worse, the things that are core to Computer Science like language design, parsing, or state machines, aren’t even taught unless you take an “advanced” course. Hell, you’re lucky if they teach you more than one language.

Hyperbole aside, I think there’s a good point here - some of the most interesting and interested students I’ve taught have had staid joint honours courses. Perhaps some blame lies with the standard format of the UK degree.

Temperature Sensors for the Mindstorms NXT

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Tue, 04 May 2010 04:21:05 +0100

DI-Thermal Series by Dexter Industries is a line of temperature sensors compatible with the Lego NXT Mindstorms system … These thermal sensors can easily be incorporated into chemistry, engineering, and environmental experiments with NXT-G and Labview.

Could be interesting in terms of data collection experiments with occam the NXT’s, especially using the Bluetooth. It’s interesting how these vendors are shipping blocks for NXT-G and Labview with these sensors - visually ‘slotting in’ black boxes with well defined interfaces.

Google Mail is becoming Gmail in the UK

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Tue, 04 May 2010 04:06:08 +0100

As a Brit, my friends and family often tell me they’re miffed that they get an @googlemail.com address instead of @gmail.com. Today I have good news for them: Google Mail is soon becoming Gmail again in the UK.

Finally - the odd alternate logo which hasn’t looked right in alternate themes and generally awkward use of ‘Google Mail’ as a substitution for Gmail throughout the web interface is over. Can’t wait.

Jobs: Theora patent issues ahead?

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Tue, 04 May 2010 03:48:01 +0100

A FSF staffer sent a mail to Steve Jobs querying the allusion to H264 as an open standard and received quite an interesting bit of information in reply (as well as the obvious clarification that ‘open’ doesn’t imply anything about the patent status of codecs) :

All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now.

Further to my earlier comments on Google’s upcoming release of VP8 (an advancement from the Theora family of codecs) as open source and free to the community, I think there’s likely to be a flurry of patent-related activity once one of these codecs has a significant target behind it. It’s not clear whether VP8 is going to suffer the same fate, I’d certainly expect Google to clarify their position and set expectations appropriately for the patent ecosystem surrounding it at their release - possibly at Google IO later this month.

It’s worth noting that Apple and Microsoft have both avoided Theora and stuck to H264 - both are members of the MPEG-LA patent pool for H264/AVC, it would seem likely that both are liable to be privy to these threats behind closed doors, along with high value targets for any potential suit.

Many seem to be interpreting this as Apple or Microsoft being the aggressors - I can’t see them being the parties to bring this suit. In fact, one of Microsoft’s browser developers has since clarified that they actually pay more to MPEG-LA to licence capabilities for Windows than they make from licence fees in the patent pool.

It’s all pointing to the HTML5 <video> tag and browser codec support lining up to have its very own Unisys/GIF shakeout period, barring Google clearing the way.

Apple Sells One Million iPads

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Tue, 04 May 2010 03:35:47 +0100

Apple® today announced that it sold its one millionth iPad™ on Friday, just 28 days after its introduction on April 3.

Available only in the US, and in half the time it took to sell one million iPhones - I’m convinced the iPad is a clear sign to the future of things coming from Apple. We’ve had a decade of OS X - I think the iPhone OS is going to be the basis of Apple’s next ten years.

Google Python Style Guide

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sat, 01 May 2010 20:32:33 +0100

Python is the main scripting language used at Google. This style guide is a list of dos and don’ts for Python programs.

Good rules here for consistent use of Python - hadn’t come across pychecker before.

Customize UIKit with Method Swizzling

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sat, 01 May 2010 16:51:07 +0100

Method swizzling, in short, is switching methods at runtime. So you can say for UINavigationBar don’t use the standard drawRect:, but instead swap it with a different one.

Nice to have an alternative to overriding methods - this seems like a cleaner way to structure customizations of the standard Apple classes.

CFPropertyList

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sat, 01 May 2010 15:24:40 +0100

The PHP implementation of Apple’s PropertyList can handle XML PropertyLists as well as binary PropertyLists. It offers functionality to easily convert data between worlds, e.g. recalculating timestamps from unix epoch to apple epoch and vice versa. A feature to automagically create (guess) the plist structure from a normal PHP data structure will help you dump your data to plist in no time.

Useful layer for sending data back and forth from iPhone apps - JSON is popular but requires third-party libraries on the phone.

Transmit 4.0

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:20:43 +0100

By the numbers, we’ve got one near-total rewrite, one brand new interface, over 45 new features, up to 25 times the speed, and one particularly awesome new feature.

The Transmit Disk feature seems to be competitive with Expandrive, which I’ve fallen out of using due to various slowness and glitches when editing several files over sftp. I’ll see how Transmit gets on - the UI polish on the full client is nothing short of stunning.

An Edge Over Which It Is Impossible To Look

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:13:31 +0100

“What we have here,” he adds, “is a geometrical oddity: an edge over which it is impossible to look. Because you can see the endless walls of the abyss both below you and facing you, nothing is hidden except what is down the hole. Standing on the rim, you are very close to a mystery: a space receiving the light of the sun into which we cannot see.”

Regarding the drainage wells found in reservoirs.