Angus Thinks

Author: AngusThinks

  • SQLEditor + Django

    Good news everyone…

    the new Django plugin for SQLEditor is now available.

    It allows you to import, edit and export Django model classes with SQLEditor.

    Django Plugin Page

    There are some limitations still, in particular it doesn’t support all of the SQLEditor object types and there are some limitations with foreign key support, but the basics should work pretty nicely.

    The Django plugin is also now built using the new SDK, which is getting closer to public release.

    I’m really interested in knowing what people think of this, so a feedback on this is particularly welcome. 🙂

  • Election Day 2010 – Remember to Vote!

    It’s the day of the UK general election.

    It’s your democratic duty to vote!

    If you don’t vote, you can’t complain about the government we get.

    So please vote 🙂

  • Warburtons Ad

    Warburtons Bread Advert

    It made me laugh, anyway.

    (On their own site too)

  • safari supports pdf in img tag

    I didn’t know this before but it definitely seems to work.

    SVG is more compatible for web pages, though this could be useful for embedded webkit apps.

    From High DPI Websites

  • Idea: EU prize for learning all of the European languages

    In the nature of the European cooperation, I propose that the European Union should give out prizes to people who can speak significant numbers of european languages.
    Perhaps 1 million euros for a person speaking all of the EU significant languages.

    Then smaller prizes for people who speak some fraction (5 or 10 different languages perhaps)
    I don’t know how many people could manage the million euro level (perhaps only a few hundred people, maybe even none?) but it would be a good thing to encourage us all to speak each other’s languages.

    It would also offer a clear and obvious reward to study languages. (Like winning the lottery, just more predictably achievable)

    🙂

  • iPhone multi-tasking

    A thought occurs to me (although I don’t do iPhone development).

    One possible approach to multi-tasking on the iphone might be to allow a background thread that complied with some sandbox requirements to execute with access to certain apis only. (Sound output being an obvious one, internet access being another, possibly hardware interaction) You wouldn’t be able to do user interface tasks (except some kind of notification system) and definitely no way to switch apps without user intervention.

    Apple probably has something totally different on the way which is much cooler but this is my best idea so far

  • Wanted: Cookie categories in web browsers

    Given that I delete my browser cookies fairly regularly, it would be useful to be able to divide them into categories.Then I could delete marketing and tracking cookies without affecting more important login cookies.

    Some categories I would like:

    1) Always delete at end of session (for security critical things)

    2) Use standard rules

    3) Delete at interval

    4) Don’t delete unless I tell you

    This is sort of confusing the idea of being able to delete cookies by category with overriding the default rules on expiry, but it mostly gives the idea.

    I think what I really want is a function called Delete unwanted cookies which would magically determine which cookies I want to retain and which I want to delete.

  • Portal for Mac!

    Valve have announced Portal for Mac.

    Played it for the first time a couple of weeks ago and have been wondering how best to play it at home.

    From April I’ll be able to play it (and lots of other Valve games) on my Mac.

    Fun 🙂

  • Big changes to Mac Developer Program

    Apple have rearranged their Mac developer program so that it now costs only $99 and seems to have only one paid variant rather than the three previously available. (Student, Select, Premier). The online only variant is still available and still free of charge.

    It appears that this is possibly influenced by the amazing success of the iPhone developer program, which is also $99.

    Anything that makes it easier and cheaper for developers to develop applications is probably a good thing. Although obviously you only need this developer program if you need access to pre-releases of Mac OS X and the other benefits it provides. It isn’t now and never has been a required purchase.

    They’re still upgrading the sites as I write this, so I haven’t seen all of the details yet, but definitely looking good.

    [edited to correct information about the free online program]

  • Rails Migrations and Schemas

    • A schema.rb file is typically a ruby script containing a call to the ActiveRecord::Schema.define method.
    • A rails migration is a ruby class which inherits from ActiveRecord::Migration and contains a method called up

    The useful fact that I realized only after doing some ultimately unnecessary work today is that because the schema file contains a method call, it’s actually easier to extract the information from it than with a migration (which needs SQLEditor to figure out a class name and then call the up method)

    Hopefully this new work will appear soon in SQLEditor