Simon Starr's Blog

"There’s a common attribute that makes for good designers, good engineers, good employees, and..."

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:19:05 +0000

“

There’s a common attribute that makes for good designers, good engineers, good employees, and good companies. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Was it practice? Was it skill? Was it innate ability? Turns out, it’s none of those. It’s taste.

When I first started designing as a hobby, I hated everything I made. I knew it was terrible, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never make it good enough for myself. But I didn’t give up, and after a while something clicked. I started to sort of like my work. But I am still not satisfied; every day I reach higher, trying to grasp the level of awesomeness that I can feel but can’t recreate.

”

- Dustin Curtis

Text the Nation Ringtone

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:19:39 +0100

80s Dance Bass Synth 06 from the default GarageBand loops, a.k.a. the theme music for Text the Nation, in ringtone form.

iTunes Ringtone version for iPhones.

MP3 version for not iPhones.

Right click, download, have a nice day.

Network Solutions on Rails

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:38:43 +0100

If you’re trying to get your Rails app working on a site hosted by Network Solutions, remember to put the hostname rather than the IP address of the database server in database.yml

My Experience of Buying Adobe CS4 from UKtechstore.com

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:38:37 +0100

This post is for the benefit of anyone else who can’t believe how much cheaper it is to buy Adobe CS4 from UKTechStore.com and is Googling for reassurance.

Last week I set out to buy a copy of CS4 Web Premium and decided that £1512.25 (the price on Adobe’s website) was a bit steep. Google lead me to UKTechStore.com, who were selling it for £799. This seemed suspiciously cheap so I decided to do some research which lead me to these two threads on different forums. Satisfied that it probably wasn’t a con, I went ahead and ordered last Thursday 25th June and was relieved when UPS delivered it on Monday.

The software arrived in a legitimate looking cellophane wrapped DVD case with a serial number sticker on the back and I’ve since installed and registered it without any problems.

Here’s a photo of the package:

Here’s a screenshot of the order tracking from UPS.com:

Disclaimer: I have no involvement with or connection to UKTechStore.com beyond placing an order with them and being a satisfied customer. I spent 5 minutes writing this post to help reassure anyone else who was thinking of ordering from them by sharing my experience. If they suddenly turn evil and decide to start ripping people off it’s not my fault. IANAL. YMMV. HTH. HAND.

Using Ruby and LibXml to Parse XML From FriendFeed

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:26:53 +0100

LibXml is hard to beat if you want to parse some XML but there aren’t many samples of code about. I find I learn best from looking at practical examples so here’s a heavily commented snippet from a rails project I’m working on at the moment…

This example is taken from the code behind http://simonstarr.com/.

Stalking Adam & Joe

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 08:15:00 +0000

Adam & Joe have various creative outputs on the internets but there’s never been any way to combine them into one pure stream of concentrated greatness…until now. The Adam & Joe Stalker uses Yahoo! Pipes and twitterfeed to tweet everything they do in one place.

At the moment it grabs the RSS feeds from Adam’s blog, Joe’s MySpace page, Adam’s YouTube channel and the BBC 6 Music podcast. If you have any other ideas for sources, please post a comment and I’ll have a look.

The text of each tweet is prefixed with one or two letters to indicate where it came from:

AB: Adam’s Blog
JB: Joe’s Blog
AY: Adam’s YouTube
P: Podcast

If you have a Twitter account you can follow the stalker here and be notified of their every move.

n.b. For legal reasons I must point out that no actual stalking takes place and your statutory rights are not affected.

P.S. You can see the source of the pipe here.

Essential iPhone Apps

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Today I decided that having over 60 apps installed on my iPhone was a bit much, so I did some pruning. This made me think about which ones I couldn’t live without and there now follows a list of the top 5…

Things

I’ve been using the desktop version of Things for ages now and have come to rely on it for keeping my life organised. The iPhone version complements it perfectly and allows me to keep track of tasks and add new ones when I’m away from the computer.

Download Things at the iTunes store

Fieldrunners

Ever since Kev introduced me to PixelJunk Monsters on his PS3, I’ve had a serious weakness for tower defence games. I’ve tried a few on the iPhone, including Mote Massacre and The Creeps, but Fieldrunners is the one I keep going back to. It saves your progress automatically after each wave so it’s perfect for a quick game on the bus (or while waiting for your wife to come out of a changing room when clothes shopping).

Download Fieldrunners at the iTunes store

Helipad

Helipad is an online notebook which is ideal for scribbling down lists and making quick notes. The iPhone app allows you to keep all your notes synchronised and accessible from anywhere - ideal for shopping lists, train spotting (probably) and keeping handy reference notes.

Download Helipad at the iTunes store

iSSH

iSSH is a near perfect SSH client for the iPhone. It even supports the use of an RSA or DSA key for passwordless logins and you can have it run a command after it connects as well. I mostly use it with screen and Irssi for chatting on IRC while I’m out and about or too lazy to get off the sofa but it’s also come in handy a few times when I’ve had to connect to a server and restart something in a hurry.

Download iSSH at the iTunes store

TwitterFon

This is my current favourite iPhone Twitter client. Not much else to say apart from it handles links nicely, has a search interface and doesn’t cost a penny.

Download TwitterFon at the iTunes store

Olympic 'protest pens' empty | The Australian

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:55:16 +0100

Olympic 'protest pens' empty | The Australian