An automagically updating collection of things that I've either created, liked or had written about me.
Sun, 20 Jul 2008 14:45:57 PDT
Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:05:32 PDT
Sun, 13 Jul 2008 03:21:22 PDT
Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:47:52 PDT
Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:41:03 PDT
Sat, 28 Jun 2008 17:37:27 PDT
Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:52:29 PDT
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:58:21 PDT
Sun, 15 Jun 2008 23:57:19 PDT
Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:59:56 PDT
Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:59:29 PDT
Tue, 20 May 2008 13:46:04 PDT
Mon, 28 Apr 2008 06:40:45 PDT
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:45:36 PDT
Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:10:58 PDT
Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:10:21 PDT
Thu, 03 Apr 2008 08:40:11 PDT
Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:49:42 PDT
Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:35:03 PDT
Sun, 23 Mar 2008 06:20:38 PDT
So, this last weekend was BarCamp Brighton 2. I’ve already posted about that elsewhere, but what I haven’t blogged about yet is my talk.
Recently I’ve been playing around with Twitter Bots. I had a need to be able to let just the people I work with when someone had brought food into the office, so I created yahoofood. I wanted near real-time updates of when The Ten Word Review was updated, so I created the ttwr bot. I also want to allow people to review things on The Ten Word Review using their mobile phones, so I’m going to be needing to create a bot for that.
Wed, 19 Mar 2008 05:19:04 PDT
I’ve recently started using IRC again. Unfortunately, one of the channels that I use is somewhat infested with bots. This is a pity because when there’s signal in the channel it’s very useful stuff to be aware of. So, instead of whining like a little girl I decided to “man up” and do something about removing the bots and related noise from my view.
Sat, 08 Mar 2008 03:07:40 PST
Thu, 21 Feb 2008 01:17:08 PST
I’ve known about the benefits that gzipping the content on my sites would give me for quite some time (files are zipped up as they travel to your users, making them faster to download and leaving you with a smaller bandwidth bill), but I never got around to enabling it because, well, I’m lazy.
It’s really easy to set up things on your server to automatically gzip all sensible files though, and most of the code you need is very easily found in the Apache 2 documentation. All you have to do is copy and paste the following into your .htaccess file, and all your files (except images) will end up being gzipped for you. Awesome.
Tue, 19 Feb 2008 03:19:57 PST
cvs status 2>/dev/null | grep Status: | grep -v "to-date"
That’s what I use on the command line to see which files aren’t up to date within my CVS tree at work (at home I use SVN, which in my opinion is a lot nicer).
Sat, 16 Feb 2008 08:15:39 PST
Wed, 26 Dec 2007 03:20:24 PST
Storage space on an iPhone is at a premium. There just isn’t enough space on it to be able to store an entire season of a TV Show that you’ve ripped from the DVDs you bought. But then, there shouldn’t really need to be - most people will only need or want to watch a couple of episodes of something between times that they’re able to dock with their home machine. So, it would make sense to be able to just sync the next couple of unwatched episodes of a few shows to your iPhone, iPod etc. You’d think you’d be able to just do that with iTunes, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, out of the box you can’t.
What you can do though is run a little AppleScript voodoo that’ll do the job for you. Installing the script onto your system will take at most five minutes, and then you’ll simply have to run the script before you sync your iPhone so that it knows which episodes need syncing.
Sat, 08 Dec 2007 04:30:00 PST
This last weekend I attended BarCamp London 3, at Google’s Headquarters. Even though I’d managed to get tickets for the previous two I’d wussed out at the last minute, thinking that I hadn’t got anything of worth to add to the proceedings. Well, the first time I also had the fact that it was going to be the first full weekend that my then girlfriend (now fiancée) Becca and I were going to have had together for about 3 months. The point is, this was my first one.
I’ve got to say, I had fun. I stayed up all night with David and presented my talk about automating TV downloads first thing on the Sunday morning bleary eyed but to what I like to think were a receptive audience. I’ll be putting an expanded version of my notes from the talk up in a couple of days so that people can make use of, and expand on, my technique.
Thu, 29 Nov 2007 03:45:55 PST
First off, lets get one thing straight. Generally, I love my Apple products. I have a MacBook Pro, a Mac Mini, a G4 iBook, a 160Gb AppleTV, a 30Gb iPod Video and a 1Gb iPod Nano so that I can use my Nike+ trainers. So, I’m not about to go into an “I hate Apple rant”.
That said, I definitely won’t be buying an iPhone. Why? Lets get started…
Tue, 06 Nov 2007 22:36:27 PST
Tue, 23 Oct 2007 07:38:05 PDT
I’ve been working in Yahoo’s London offices for just over a year now, and I’m loving it. Awesome people to work with, as much free coke as I can drink, good projects to work on and Pool, Foosball and Ping-pong tables to play on. What more could a boy want? Not a lot really.
And, guess what? We’re looking for six more awesome people to come and join us in making super awesome websites that will be seen by countless people around the world. If you’re a web-developer with good all-round skills, are always willing and wanting to learn new things and are happy to be working in London’s groovy West End then I want to hear from you! Drop me a line and your CV at neil [dot] crosby [atatat] workingwith [dot] me [dot] uk and I’ll pass on your information to those who need it.
Wed, 17 Oct 2007 03:00:38 PDT
Fri, 12 Oct 2007 04:27:55 PDT
Tue, 09 Oct 2007 01:52:47 PDT
To the very lovely Rebecca Courtley. More details to follow once we get back from our holiday…
Tue, 18 Sep 2007 03:55:36 PDT
Mon, 10 Sep 2007 08:26:53 PDT

When moo.com brought out their stickers a couple of months ago, the ones from their sample book that I was most impressed with were the little speech bubble stickers with the oh so very “web 2.oh” phrases printed on them. Unfortunately, you weren’t able to make up similar ones on the site unless you wanted to create them yourself in PhotoShop first.
No matter, I thought - that’ll be a nice little wizard that they’ll be sure to add to the site pretty quickly since I can’t be the only person who thinks that the speech bubbles are cool. That didn’t happen though, so In the spirit of all things web, I decided to make my own.
The Moo Sticker Bubblifier that I’ve come up with is very simple - you give it some text (on multiple lines if you’d like to span multiple lines on the sticker), say what font and colour you want, and you’ll be magically presented with an image you can save and then use with moo to make some stickers.
The are a couple of things I’m fairly pleased with about this hack. First off, the URLs used for the created images are nicely hackable, and look like they’re just any old image even though they’re being produced by PHP as and when they’re requested. Secondly, the wizard will dynamically resize the text you give to get you a best fit. So, if you wanted a sticker that said “WTF?” then the text would be larger than if you wanted a sticker that said “I alone am best!”. Currently all lines of text on a sticker are always the same size, but I might have a fiddle later so that you can choose to have differing text sizes within a sticker if it’s something that people want.
So, there you go. What are you waiting for? Get out there and make some speech bubbles!
Sun, 09 Sep 2007 10:20:00 PDT
Mon, 23 Jul 2007 06:11:30 PDT
Wed, 27 Jun 2007 01:48:55 PDT
Sun, 13 May 2007 02:45:19 PDT
Fri, 04 May 2007 09:19:54 PDT
Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:40:34 PDT
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:46:44 PDT
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:44:06 PDT
Mon, 21 Jul 2008 02:10:43 PDT
Sun, 20 Jul 2008 13:14:32 PDT
Sun, 20 Jul 2008 09:12:18 PDT
Sat, 19 Jul 2008 12:04:19 PDT
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:24:50 PDT
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:34:40 PDT
Tue, 15 Jul 2008 06:21:29 PDT
Take a look at this when it becomes available in the UK
Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:32:56 PDT
Sun, 13 Jul 2008 13:51:18 PDT
Jul 200826
Come, all and sundry, for an event of such magnitude it had to be planned twice. This time, it's really going to happen.
Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:58:17 PDT
Jul 200827
Come, all and sundry, for an event of such magnitude it had to be planned twice. This time, it's really going to happen.
Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:58:06 PDT
Aug 20082
Summer's coming up, you say? And you like Theme Parks? Come and meet us at Alton Towers on the 2nd August then.
Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:56:43 PDT
Sep 200827
The hugely popular "un-conference" is back and being held in leafy Richmond right by the Thames - hopefully we'll have some great weather!
Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:27:29 PDT
Aug 200830
Offset Festival is a huge showcase of the UKs most exciting new bands - and the artists who influenced them.
Tue, 01 Jul 2008 05:51:02 PDT
Vouchers for use on game.co.uk
Tue, 24 Jun 2008 02:02:14 PDT
I need to buy a slice of hosting and start moving my non-essential sites across to begin with. The Ten Word Review can wait.
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:10:09 PDT
After installing Changes, install this update for svnX so that it can use Changes as its diff tool.
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:26:43 PDT
A FileMerge replacement for OSX. It costs $40, but knows about UTF-8, which FileMerge doesn't. This makes it a winner for me. Leopard only.
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:25:58 PDT
"Don't feel rubbish Becca, you're great! I'm the Doctor who i can't be wrong."
Thu, 19 Jun 2008 03:39:19 PDT
Try using these servers instead of OpenDNS
Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:33:25 PDT
If you're missing your "cool outlining" of DOM elements when you inspect them with Firebug in Firefox 3 then update to this version
Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:03:10 PDT
The Ten Word Review linked to from a BDSM website. Hooray!
Thu, 12 Jun 2008 22:41:44 PDT
How Brian Sudo parses classes out of elements that may contain more than one set class. Thanks @BenWard
Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:59:29 PDT
Take a look at this. Will is replace svnX for me?
Thu, 05 Jun 2008 06:40:17 PDT
A bunch of information about which PHP constructs are faster than others. Use with caution and develop for humans first, machines second.
Wed, 04 Jun 2008 08:56:52 PDT
There's one person in the world that this t-shirt was designed for, and his name is Simon Willison
Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:17:13 PDT
Skull and crossbones motif made out of stick figures and AWESOME
Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:30:02 PDT
Reprinted, and on cotton
Tue, 20 May 2008 05:57:15 PDT
So very perfect for me, since I'm missing a finger
Sat, 17 May 2008 16:36:34 PDT
Sat, 17 May 2008 12:41:25 PDT
Sat, 17 May 2008 12:05:09 PDT
So, there are two xxl hoodies still available for this, but no tees. Not to matter though, the men's shirt was a poly/cotton blend anyway.
Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:09:48 PDT
Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:24:14 PDT
Possibly use this on iwearcotton.com?
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:40:56 PDT
An orange dressed as a pirate. I want this, but I'm neither in America nor Canada.
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:53:44 PDT
I want this, but I'm neither in America nor Canada.
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:53:02 PDT
Oct 200824
Singularity is the first large-scale online web conference in the world.
Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:17:52 PDT
Aug 200822
Guest of Honour: TERRY PRATCHETT
Mon, 11 Feb 2008 08:22:47 PST
Sep 20083
dConstruct is an affordable, one-day conference aimed at those designing and building the latest generation of social web applications.
Mon, 11 Feb 2008 08:18:24 PST
Mar 201413
Celebrate the 100th Pub Standards!
Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:54:42 PST
Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:48:00 PDT
Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:05:00 PDT
Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:40:00 PDT
Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:56:00 PDT
Wed, 07 May 2008 06:24:00 PDT
Some sort of footer crap