May 2012
1 post
“Don’t think of gamification as anything other than clever strategies to motivate...”
– Rands In Repose: Two Universes
January 2012
2 posts
“I’m forever wanting something new. Something I’ve never seen before,...”
– Fever Dream of a Guilt-Ridden Gadget Reporter
June 2011
2 posts
Anonymous asked: why has the "When it Drops" site eliminated the new books section?
“A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.”
– George Bernard Shaw (via theimpossiblecool)
March 2011
1 post
“Dropbox is one reason I now have a strict rule to only invest in teams. There...”
– Dropbox and why you should invest in people
February 2011
2 posts
“At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality....”
– Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it
January 2011
1 post
“Don’t worry about what others think about you. Take your light and make it shine...”
– Michael Lopez - It Must Be the Shoes…
October 2010
2 posts
August 2010
1 post
July 2010
1 post
June 2010
2 posts
“Steve Jobs’ vision for Apple, repeated in yesterday’s keynote address, posits...”
– Subtraction.com: Better Screen, Same Typography
“We’re just trying to make great products. We don’t think Flash makes a great...”
– Steve Jobs at the D8 Conference
May 2010
3 posts
6 tags
Resize Images with RMagick
I’m working on a little command line tool for generating HTML photo galleries and needed to resize some images with RMagick. Unfortunately there were a shortage of good, concise examples of how to use it. So, for my own future reference and yours, here’s how to resize an image to maximum dimensions while preserving its aspect ratio. You can provide a width and height to resize_to_fit, or just one...
WatchDry the River on Black Cab Sessions
April 2010
31 posts
WatchSpeak with Conviction
Poem by Taylor Mali. Kinetic Type by Ronnie Bruce.
Editorial: Engadget on Microsoft Kin →
I’m completely confused by the Kin. Here’s Engadget trying to make sense of it. I like this quote from Josh:
It was literally one month ago that the company was extolling the possibilities and benefits of its completely rethought OS, a ground-up, reboot effort from the Windows Mobile team. An OS which taps into the Zune ecosystem, plays Xbox Live games, is built around the concept of...
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“Opera Mini: like VNC-ing from your iPhone to a Motorola Razr with a really fast...”
– Neven Mrgan
“Cross-platform tools dangle the old ‘write once, run everywhere’...”
– Jean-Louise Gassée (via Daring Fireball)
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“I guess it’s about respect. It’s about a relationship I had, and I think many of...”
– Ed Finkler: My Friend Twitter
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If, like me, you hastily installed iPhone OS 4.0 before adding your iPhone to the Registered Devices list in the Provisioning Portal and now you can’t get your UDID from iTunes, you can find it in System Profiler > USB > iPhone > Serial Number (oddly enough).
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“What makes me optimistic about iPad sales is just how delightful it is to use...”
– marco
2 tags
“The iPad has the proportions of a paper page. It’s a familiar format, which...”
– Gizmodo: Understanding the iPad’s Industrial Design
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Regex Two Step
I spend a lot of time parsing and cleaning up text files with regular expressions, and there’s a problem that comes up fairly often that used to really puzzle me. How do you replace something that requires complicated, multi-step logic?
Everyone who has used regular expressions is pretty familiar with doing something like this:
>> "5553331234".gsub(/(\d{3})(\d{3})(\d{4})/, '(\1)...
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It's a Frame Inside the Frame
I’ve noticed a somewhat annoying trend where iPad app designers are putting a “frame” around the content of their applications. Nobody did this on the iPhone because pixels were too precious, but it seems the iPad’s plethora of pixels are begging to be wasted. In all the cases below, the extra space could be used to show more information usefully. Articles seems to be the...
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Quick Tip: In the terminal in Mac OS X you can easily pipe the output of commands to your favorite desktop text editor (providing it supports it) for much easier reading.
$ curl http://www.apple.com/ipad/ | mate
$ ruby script_with_massive_output.rb | bbedit
“It’s really not hard. It’s a 10 inch flat screen where magic happens. Get it? Of...”
– MorrisonFilm: THE MAGIC PAD
“I’m getting a necklace case for it, and I’m going to rock it like...”
– Bryan about the iPad
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Comparing CSV Files with Ruby
Today I was tasked with comparing a spreadsheet of carefully verified data to what’s now on our production servers. After spending less than a minute staring at two spreadsheets in Excel and knowing I didn’t want to compare lots of rows of data with my eyes and scroll wheel finger, I decided it was time to get Ruby on the job. Here’s the outcome:
require 'rubygems'
require...