30th August, 2009
… they have no word for …
There is a (snopes-confirmed) apocryphal story that former US President George W. Bush commented to then British Prime Minister Tony Blair that the problem with the French “… is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur”. As much as I would like to think it’s true, it happens not to be.
However, that’s doesn’t stop us from having fun with a bit of word-play. I would like to come up with as many of these as possible, and I am looking for donations: How many “The X can’t Y: they have no word for Z” are there out there? I’d say there’re thousands. I’m going to kick it off here, and anyone who wants to leave a sample or a few, please do so as comments, and I’ll add them to the post.
Posted at 8:17 pm | Comments Off
29th August, 2009
locale mockup
A mockup I’m played around with that tries to support the normal mortal case of just selecting the right locale, but supporting the apparently common situation of
a) wanting just the UI in US English which leads people to effectively set LANG=en_US and then fighting their applications one at a time to get them to not use Letter paper, not use a baffling date format, getting . vs , in numbers, inches vs cm, and so on
b) wanting dates in ISO format
and at the least letting you know up-front the effect your settings will have on applications.
e.g. X wants everything to be standard German
e.g. X wants UI in English because X finds that more comfortable but normally X will be writing in German and using metric, wants the normal German formatting rules to apply for numbers and currency, except for dates because X wants to use the ISO date format to avoid cross-cultural cockups on dates like the 6th of April and the 4th of June.
What maps to what
Posted at 8:47 pm | Comments Off
28th August, 2009
OpenStreetMap in the news again
Spotted two new articles on OpenStreetMap recently – one on the PocketLint site: “OpenStreetMap – Crowd sourced cartography set to re-map the world“; and the other on Wired: “GPS Hackers Blaze Own Trails With Crowdsourced Maps“.
They both mention how OpenStreetMap cartography is more detailed than the alternatives produced by Navteq, Teleatlas et al and the Wired article even goes to include at least four links to various parts of the OSM wiki and mentions some of the devices that our maps can be used on such as iPhones, TomToms and so on.
What with this and more OSM ‘love’ spilling into Episode 83 of Floss Weekly – Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap, was interviewed in Episode 81 it looks like activity is only going to increase.
Posted at 7:45 am | Comments Off
23rd August, 2009
DEV300_m55
callcatcher results for DEV300_m55 now show rdbmaker and basctl as unused method free. Overall unused methods drops to 949. (desktop +1)
Posted at 9:58 am | Comments Off
12th August, 2009
Schäedz Sunglasses
Just had a ping from an old friend and classmate who has recently started up a new business … Schäedz (pronounced “shades” I presume) selling fashion sunglasses for kids with 10% of profits going to preventable blindness charities.
Got to be worth a look at www.schaedz.com if you’re in the market (it’s a bit rainy in Dublin these days to worry about ‘em just now, but kids do love sunglasses !)
Posted at 5:04 pm | Comments Off
10th August, 2009
Something that’s been keeping me rotund^Wbusy on occasion lately …
With three kids all looking for treats, this comes in quite useful far too often 
Fruit scones:
Ingredients : (All measures are approximate)
- 3 Cups (approx 700g) Plain flour
- 1/3 Cup (approx 75g) Caster sugar
- 250ml (1/2 pint) Buttermilk
- 2 1/2 teaspoon Baking Powder
- 1/2 teaspoon Salt
- 1/2 teaspoon Baking Soda
- 170g – 200g Butter / Margarine
- 225g (generous cup) Dried Mixed fruit / sultanas etc
Utensils:
- Large mixing bowl
- Measuring cups / spoons / jugs
- Baking tray
- Dough cutter or highball glass
- Sieve
- Ideally – pastry / egg-wash brush
Method :
- Preheat the oven to approx 180c
- Sieve Flour, Sugar, Baking Powder, Salt, Baking soda into a large bowl
- Mix gently by hand
- Dice up the butter/marge and drop into the flour
- Rub in the butter until the entire mix has a breadcrumb like consistency
- (Use your fingertips and thumbs to rub the flour and butter together, take your time !)
- Add in the fruit and mix by hand to ensure no clumps remain
- Form a well and add in most (not quite all, leave a dribble) of the buttermilk
- Use one hand to turn the bowl, and the second in a ‘claw’ shape to mix the dough to a consistent texture
- (Keep the bowl turning in one direction only, and mix gently with the clawed hand)
- (If the mix is too dry, try adding a bit more buttermilk, if it’s too wet, add more flour, you’ll know !)
- Once the dough has a good texture, spread some flour on a work-surface and lift it out of the bowl onto the floured surface
- Knead lightly for about 5 mins, and flatten to approx 1″ (2cm) thick
- Scatter flour lightly and evenly on the baking tray
- Dip your dough-cutter / glass rim into flour (to at least the depth of the dough) and cut out your scones, re-flouring cutter and re-kneading the dough into a usable shape as necessary.
- Place cut scones onto floured baking tray
- Brush small amount of buttermilk onto tops of scones (helps ‘em brown nicely)
- Optionally sieve some caster-sugar on top
- Place in oven to bake for 15 – 20 mins depending on the oven (they’re done before they burn, but after they stop being “squishy”)
- Turn out onto a wire rack to cool
- Enjoy !
Posted at 12:56 pm | Comments Off
7th August, 2009
DEV300_m54
DEV300_m54 callcatcher results show a modest -8 to 959 unused methods though sw sneaks in a new unused method.
Posted at 1:19 pm | Comments Off
3rd August, 2009
ms protected sections
So even if only one section in MS Word is protected against changes, then Word disables the ability to track-changes or add comments globally for *ALL* sections. Unfortunately the Table of Contents in OOo is by default a read-only element, because editing it is a bad thing to to as your changes will be blown away the next time the toc is automatically updated. So…
OOo->export to .doc->read-only OOo toc becomes a word toc in a readonly section->word refuses to insert comments anywhere in the doc, even though you can manually edit the rest of the sections in word.
Sigh, *drums fingers*. Basically it’s bustage in word isn’t it, but still a problem. No bug in OOo. Changing the OOo default to make TOCs editable would “fix” it, but suboptimal. Not exporting readonly sections as such is wrong as well.
Clearly, hacking the special case of exporting a TOC that is set to read-only to output an editable section is broken too, but might be the best solution.
Posted at 10:58 am | Comments Off