Category Archives: tech
Why US broadband sucks
In 1999, the high-end Mac was a 500 MHz Power Mac G4 and cost $3500. In 2006, the high-end Mac is a 2×3 GHz Mac Pro and costs $2500. That’s more than 12X faster for 30% less. In 1999, I was paying CAD$36/month (then worth US$25 @1.47:1) for broadband (Bell Canada). In 2007, I am …
Speaking at WWDC: Bug Reporting Best Practices
At this year’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, I’m giving version 2.0 of my Bug Reporting Best Practices talk. The official blurb: Bug reports that are complete and reproducible help to isolate known issues in system and application software, making a solution much more likely. Learn the bug reporting best practices that Apple has developed in …
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MySQL database backup script
I wrote one of these for Mailman last fall, and finally got around to putting together a quick script to back up your MySQL databases. It optimizes and repairs all of your tables, then creates a directory for today, dumps each database into a SQL file and zips it up, leaving you with a directory …
Come to my SXSW panel on user interface consistency
At this year‘s SXSW Interactive festival, I’ll be moderating the panel Getting to Consistency: Don’t Make Your Users Think. The blurb: Predictable and consistent software is much easier to use. This session explores interface consistency, examples of consistency failures and their consequences. This is going to be a really interesting discussion. I have three fantastic …
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thoughts on code
“The best code you have is the code you didn’t write.” “Legacy code is any code without tests.” (likely paraphrasing Michael Feathers)
Address Book AppleScript example
Here’s a simple AppleScript that exports all of the email addresses in your Mac OS X address book as a comma-separated list: tell application “Address Book” set emailList to {} set peopleCount to (count every person) repeat with i from 1 to peopleCount set emailList to emailList & (get value of every email of person …
Windows Vista upgrade decision flowchart
Windows Vista upgrade decision flowchart
What is my IP address?
Ever been stuck behind a firewall, proxy, NAT box or other such device and wanted to know where you really where? Here’s my simple, easy and clean What is my IP address site.
My Toronto Star crossword puzzle fetcher
On weekday afternoons, the Toronto Star publishes an eight-page PDF edition, “Star PM.” I download this for one reason: the free crossword puzzle. But sometimes I forget to download this, and since there’s no archive, I lose the opportunity to do that day’s crossword. So I wrote a script to automatically fetch today’s Star PM …