Angus Thinks

Author: AngusThinks

  • Concept car with robot on dashboard!

    This looks really cool: IT World: Nissan adds a robot helper to its concept car

    It’s a concept electric car which has a small robot on the dashboard that offers directions and tries to keep the driver cheerful.

  • 10.5 support

    At the moment I believe that both SQLEditor and HTMLValidator are compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 and should work without functional difficulty.

    A minor issue that I found is that the toolbar icons don’t look very good against the 10.5 window style. These have already been redrawn and the new icons will appear in the 1.4 release.

    This assumes that there weren’t any major changes between the version that I used to test and the release version of 10.5 which will be released on October 26th.

    Overall it looks good though.

  • OneMonthApp and SQLEditor

    OneMonthApp is using SQLEditor!

    OneMonthApp is a project where they are building a complete web application in a month. It’s going to be a simple and easy to use cash flow application, apparently. And they’re going to make it free, which is great too.
    I’ve signed up to be notified when it’s done, which the counter is promising for sometime in the next couple of days. (They started in September, so less than a month)
    Stephen over at OneMonthApp very kindly included SQLEditor in a list of 20 tools for web application development that they’re using for the project.
    Maybe I need an “I use SQLEditor” badge icon or something?

  • DHL

    Got a package this morning delivered by DHL and an interesting thing happened.

    I recognised the delivery person and the delivery person recognised me. Which was nice. 🙂

    I think they must work a particular route, because the same woman tends to deliver most of my (DHL) packages.

  • Automatically fill in captcha fields

    I get tired of filling in captcha fields on forms.

    Wouldn’t it be handy if there was a facility in web browsers to fill them in automatically.

    🙂

  • Television

    This says it all really.

    (Though saying that there are still some smart shows on tv. I just wanted to link to that page)

  • Google Tech Talks

    I’ve been watching educational stuff on the internet recently.

    One of the things that I really like is Google Tech Talks on Google Video.

    These are talks given at Google on different subjects and many are now available online.

    Amongst the really good ones I’ve seen:

    (And there are lots of others, these are just ones I could find the links to easily!)

  • iTunes tv shows in the UK

    Well the iTunes store is finally offering tv shows in the uk. It’s totally disappointing. The prices are ridiculously expensive and the list of shows is small.
    All of the MalcolmHardie software sales are denominated in dollars so I watch the exchange rate with great interest.

    The current exchange rate at xe.com as of today is 2.01599 USD to 1 British Pound. (In the reverse direction that is 0.49603 British Pounds to 1 USD).

    iTunes in the US charge 1.99USD for most tv shows. Therefore the UK price correctly should be 99 pence. (0.99 British Pounds). Given the usual kind of price gouging that goes on, possibly 1.29 or even 1.39 would have been acceptable.
    Instead they have decided to charge 1.89 British Pounds. This is almost twice as expensive!
    Add 9 pence and it would be exactly twice as expensive.

    I almost thought of writing to them and asking if they have mistaken the exchange rate somehow.

    The most annoying thing is that while the catalogue will increase in size, the prices will probably be fixed.

  • XML, UTF-8 and Java

    Apparently, valid UTF-8 strings aren’t necessarily valid XML. You can get a situation where you have valid UTF-8 strings which fail xml parsing.

    Fortunately Mark McLaren offers a solution.

  • Retro Mac OS WordPress theme

    This made me laugh when I saw it:

    http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/article/retro-mac-os-wordpress-theme

    Definitely memories of simpler times 😉