Angus Thinks…

Chalkboard Paint makes a chalkboard anywhere you can paint.

Some ideas on what to actually do with the stuff on the walls.

I like the idea of a calendar made of the stuff.

This is a simple template to use SoyLatte in Mac OS X 10.6 and have it appear in the JavaPreferences system.

You need to copy all of the contents of the /usr/local/soylatte16-i386-1.0.3/ directory into the directory contents/Home (inside the package), then copy the .jdk folder to /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/

soylatte16-i386-1.0.3.jdk_1

[Edit] revised based on suggestions by Mike Swingler, it now doesn’t advertise capabilities that the SoyLatte distribution doesn’t offer.

Also another version: This simply symlinks to the existing installation in /usr/local/soylatte16-i386-1.0.3/ and doesn’t require anything except copying the result to the /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/ folder.

soylatte-103-symlink

A vision of a technology future that is almost magical in its fluidity and the absence of any obvious equipment. This is what the future should be:

Spotted recently in a technical forum (which shall remain nameless):

Although I still don’t know what the final answer was, alas…

Real cocoa buyers, who are probably chocolate manufacturers, are getting tired of excessive speculation in the cocoa market; they’ve threatened to move from London to unspecified US cocoa futures exchanges if something isn’t done to improve things:

Telegraph Article
(Third section, after Gold movements and Shipping rates)

I suppose speculation is good if it balances demand and evens out prices, but bad if the end customers feel that they are being cheated.

More

Another article: Mystery trader buys all Europe’s cocoa.

No wonder people are annoyed.

back in my day, we didn’t pay to win a video game … we simply played them well

Marketing crazy

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 Bread Advert

It made me laugh, anyway.

(On their own site too)

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

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)

🙂

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

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.

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 🙂

So another one of these articles, shock horror, some public body has spent thousands of pounds buying hot drinks for their staff.

Clearly, the whole lot of them should be hanged  …

except, if you look at the figures quoted, the outrage breaks down:

From the article,

440 staff and a total bill of 70,000 over 3 years.

Assuming a 48 week working year for everyone for 3 years, this means that the amount spent per week per person is

(70000/(48*3)) = 486 per week

486/440 = 1.11 per person.

Yes, just over 1 pound per person, per week!

Outrage, I say, outrage!

Ignoring for a moment, the fact that visitors apparently got hot drinks too for the money; given the large amounts of money and the vitally important decisions that a group like the GHA makes, making the right decisions is important. If spending a few pounds a week on hot drinks makes a key decision even slightly better, then it’s worth it.

The same is true of biscuits, snacks and even meals. Anything that improves the performance of the organisation at such a low cost is worth doing.

So as far as I’m concerned, this is money well spent.