Angus Thinks

Category: General

  • Randall Munroe talk at Google

    Randall Munroe (of xkcd) gave a talk at Google.


  • Macbook Wheel (by the Onion)

    The Onion on a new Mac …

    🙂

    They got that Mac tradeshow look so perfectly too.

  • iPhone Shuffle?

    The iPhone Shuffle,
    (Advert 1)

    (Advert 2)

    (Advert 3)

    🙂

    Plus the obligatory Wired.com article (a bit more serious though)

  • Adam Savage, Dodos and the Maltese Falcon

    I just happened to watch this amazing presentation by Adam Savage
    (of Mythbusters)

    Adam Savage on Obsession
     (Fora.tv)

  • Zend Framework – run in a subdirectory

    This article explains how to use Zend Framework MVC in a subdirectory (rather than in the DocumentRoot)

    [Link]

  • Zend framework Quickstart and SQLite

    I was building the Zend Framework quick start tutorial example but I kept getting the following error:

    Message: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 14 unable to open database file

    This was despite the fact that I had correct privileges on the database file.

    However it turns out you seem to need write and execute privileges for Apache on the directory that contains your sqlite database (not just the database file itself).

    I added them to the containing directory and everything seems to work now. 🙂

    [Link] (Nabble.com and the original source of this solution)

  • Is there a pilot on board?

    In movies like Airplane! the pilots have all been incapacitated and a desperate call goes around “is there a pilot on board?” To which some brave soul then stands up and says something like, “Yes I can fly the plane”.

    What’s weird though is that something a little like this actually happened recently.

    An Air Canada Boeing 767 (C-FMXC) on a flight between Toronto and London was midway across the Atlantic when the First Officer showed signs of being confused and unwell. The captain decided the first officer should be relieved of duty and he was removed from the flight deck.

    At this point the passenger lists were inspected to see if there were any airline pilots on board, unfortunately there were not, however one of the flight attendants held a commercial pilots license and she was asked to assist the captain. (There is suggestion on one forum that this flight attendant was either former or reserve Canadian Airforce)

    The aircraft diverted to Shannon airport in Ireland where it landed safely. The captain later commented that the Flight attendant sitting in the second seat was “not out of place”.

    The ill first officer was taken to a nearby hospital in Ireland and later flown back to Canada.

    So that is an outline, but it raises so many interesting questions, many of which I may never know the answers too. The most important one of course being, how many cabin crew have piloting qualifications?

    The accident report (by the Irish AAIB) is suitably detailed but, quite correctly, doesn’t include enough information to identify the people involved, so I may never know the complete story. Hopefully someone will make a documentary out of it. (But changing the names perhaps to keep the privacy of the ill pilot)

    Irish AAIB Report

    Guardian Article
    (Mostly the same as the official report)

  • Loyalty Cards

    I was looking at my wallet and I realized that I have a whole collection of loyalty cards.

    Am I really loyal to all of them? I don’t think I can be, since some of them are for direct competitors.

  • Cinema Audio

    A Fascinating Video with Ioan Allen of Dolby Labs talking about different kinds of Film audio system.

  • Is the iPhone NDA still in effect?

    This post from yesterday on the cocoa-dev list seems to suggest that it is.

    I wonder what is happening?

    (Although it doesn’t affect me much because I’m still not doing iPhone development at all yet)