July 2009
12 posts
2 tags
Patents
A thought, regarding simple rule to restore the balance:
If, in the intervening time between a patent being applied for and granted, the invention is independently crafted by an unconnected party, the patent should automatically be invalidated.
(In other words, the “prior art” test should be applied up to the point of granting, not the filing date).
Of course, this gets murky where the...
5 tags
John Gruber on the Slow Decline of Microsoft
This sentence caught my eye, because it’s so reflective and accurate of so many markets:
The photo nerd who’s delighted with their $2,500 Canon SLR is likely to recommend a lot of $250 Canon point-and-shoots to friends and family.
(Be sure to read the full piece)
And it’s true in this context. The developers with their MacBook Pros will recommend a Mini or a lower-spec MacBook to their...
3 tags
My bash prompt
My bash prompt has evolved somewhat over the years. Nowadays, it’s quite straightforward. As somebody who logs into a multitude of hosts and a variety of different users, it’s important for me to be able to see at a glance who the system thinks I am, what host I’m connected to, and whereabouts in the filesystem I happen to be. I recently extended it, thanks to this tip, to...
1 tag
DTerm: A command line anywhere and everywhere →
clint:
A neat Quicksilver-esqe utility by Ben Rister. Check out their video for quick, lucid explaination of how it works:
No matter what application you’re in, no matter what document you’re working with, just hit DTerm’s hotkey and it’ll be there for you, already set to the working directory of your current document. When you’re done, hit escape or just go on about your work, and it’ll...
3 tags
Magic Beans
John Gruber lands squarely on the nail’s head.
Either absolutely nothing at all will amount from this, or it will go down in history as an idea as equivalently monumentally stupid as “hey guys, I’ve got a great idea—let’s buy AOL!”
3 tags
Embedding iPlayer
You’re not supposed to do this.
Let’s say, b00lt0sw:
View source; tweak attributes as desired. Can’t say I’ve extensively tested.
3 tags
Finding out what's in an FLV
I must confess, I pay attention to my Tumblr dashboard about once a week and even then only if I’m not busy with other things. This in in sharp contrast to, for example, Twitter, which has a typical latency of about 30 seconds.
As such, I hadn’t noticed Paul Mison reblogging my lossless H.264+AAC FLV to MP4 container conversion tip (doesn’t that just roll off the tongue).
He...
4 tags
Formal response to the revised Project Canvas...
Today the BBC Trust published the additional information it had received from the BBC Executive regarding Project Canvas and re-opened the consultation until 1st September.
What follows below is my formal response to the revised consultation. I’ll leave this hanging around for a few days before submitting it to the trust, in the event that there’s a fatal flaw in my arguments, or have...
2 tags
So you have an H.264+AAC FLV and want to convert...
Well, you can—with no loss of quality—with the aid of ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i source.flv -acodec copy -vcodec copy dest.mp4
(Ubuntu users note: ffmpeg as shipped appears to suffer an epic failure when it encounters H.264 FLVs - see this thread for instructions on how to build a useful version).
2 tags
Adding a column to a MySQL table if it doesn't...
Sometimes, through the course of developing something, you end up with a SQL script containing various statements which you intend to run on a staging or live database once you’re happy with it. The snag is, if your statements add any columns to a table, you can only run it once. You could split your script up into two, but if your script is fairly straightforward this might seem to be...
4 tags
Mac Software Update
I love the fact that most Mac apps ship with Sparkle, a nice software-updating framework.
There’s one thing that bugs me, though: I have to run each app in order for it to update. Sometimes, this isn’t a problem, but there are occasions where I’d just like to be able to update all of my apps.
AppFresh aimed to solve this, but last time I used it, it was clunky and buggy, and...
