James Frost

Singletasking

2009-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

In recent years, I’ve become increasingly concerned about my scatterbrained-ness. I find it hard to focus on a single task for a prolonged period of time: for example, I find it takes me far longer to get through a book, or even read a short passage of text, than it ever used to. I don’t listen to the other person when I’m having a conversation – or rather, I try to listen, but the information somehow always seems to pass through my brain without being stored anywhere. I’m not really present in the moment. My brain gets distracted very easily, and I’ll swear I hadn’t had that conversation with you. My comprehension of texts is perhaps worse than it’s ever been, too. Not all the time, but often, I have to concentrate quite hard in order to actually take in the details of what I’m reading if I want anything more than a cursory understanding. When using the computer at home, I never seem to do anything productive – just follow an endless cycle of checking my feed reader, my e-mail, Twitter, and flicking through my open tabs. Sure, I get things done, but slowly, and piecemeal. My concentration usually feels scattered, my focus divided, my brain like it’s trying to juggle too many balls/clubs/knives/porcupines at once.

The first time I noticed this really happening was after starting university. My arrival at uni coincided (I think) with my first really portable, useful laptop (an iBook G4) with real internet-wherever-I-was; with the rise of update services like Twitter; with the rise of tabbed browsing. More and more things calling for my attention at any given time, and an increasing number of easy distractions. I think taking a laptop into lectures was a big mistake. What with web browsing, instant messaging, and the computer society chat room, I’d often leave lectures not having a clue what we’d just been told about. Closer to exams, I’d be going over course notes and sample exam papers and come across topics that I was sure I’d never been taught. Of course, I had – I just hadn’t been paying much attention.

It’s a problem that feeds itself. Checking your e-mail or Twitter account and finding a new message or some new updates from your friends is very… moreish. Each new ‘thing’ you discover is like a reward for your brain – well done!, it says, you checked for a thing, and you found one!. And so you check again. And again, and again.

Modern technology makes it easier than ever to be distracted; for your focus to be divided. Everything is at your fingertips. The problem is that if you’re trying to write a report on the computer and your brain keeps diving off to skim through some websites, or check your e-mail, or see what your friends are up to, it leaves very little time to actually devote to what you were trying to accomplish in the first place. And every time you check on one of these things, and your brain gets that little reward, it spends more and more time looking at more and more things. Ergo, you don’t finish that report – never mind, I’ll finish it tomorrow. But tomorrow, you’re just as distracted. You feel bad for not finishing, but your brain can’t help seeking its little rewards. It becomes a habit. An addiction. So the downward spiral goes.

I think multitasking’s partly to blame for this detrimental effect. As much as we like to think we can work on lots of things at once, the fact is we’re simply not that good at it - and I don’t think it’s particularly good for us, either. It’s stressful, and it trains our brain that it’s okay to only focus on tasks for a short period of time before switching to something else - but that’s no way to get things done. Even when relaxing, my brain still thinks it should be doing other things. For years, I’ve been overloading myself with information and trying to do too many things at once. Without even noticing it, I’ve been training my brain to always look for opportunities to perform this kind of rapid context-switching, which has left me less and less able to focus on any one thing for any length of time.

And lately, it’s been getting to me. I want to read more (I used to love reading books and would devour them ever-so quickly); I want to write more; I want to create more. Every time I attempt to settle down to do one of these things, that crack-seeking part of my brain gets excited by the slightest thing, pulling my attention away from what I want to do. What was that noise? Have I done this? I should remember to do that. I wonder if I have any e-mails? Are there any updates to my iPhone apps? Has anyone posted on Twitter recently?

I’m genuinely concerned about the effect it’s going to have on my long-term ability to focus on tasks and on my memory. The change I’ve described thus-far has arisen over a fairly short 4 year period. Current research seems to be backing up this idea that multitasking may well be problematic. A recent CNN article covers a study in which multitaskers did worse on attention tests than non-multitaskers. The multitaskers were more easily distracted by irrelevant information, and retained useless information in their short-term memory. Researchers aren’t sure whether these effects are reversible or not – I’m inclined to think they are, given enough time spent trying to correct them. So, I’m planning to do something about it and start trying to reverse the effects. It’s like realizing that for years I’ve been eating junk food on an alarmingly regular basis, and training my body to crave the taste of it. It’s time to throw away the Big Zinger Whopper, go on a diet, and start an exercise regime.

For starters, I’m going to be attempting to take up meditation on a daily basis. After all, applying single focus for a prolonged period of time is part of what mindfulness mediation is all about. Training my brain regularly in this way should help increase my mindfulness and focus when going about my day-to-day activities.

The goal of this kind of meditation is to bring an inner peace and a lasting happiness. Along the path to that goal, you get a lot of other benefits such as being more connected to your body, more aware of your feelings and emotions, and less caught by your thoughts and what’s called the “monkey mind” – a mind that won’t rest and that, over time, contributes to the kinds of anxiety and stress many of us feel each day. An Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation - Hivelogic

I’m also going to be trying to cut down on multitasking. If I’m doing something creative, or talking to somebody, or reading something, I want to give that my full attention. No aimless web browsing, or e-mail/Twitter/feed checking, whilst I’m trying to half-participate in a conversation with you. That doesn’t mean I can’t browse the web or read my feeds - but there’s a time and a place, and keeping these things distinct means that I should be more effective at whatever it is I’m doing. As with meditation, singletasking should help my ability to focus on a given task. It won’t be easy and it won’t be fast, but I guess it’s a bit like learning to run a marathon - take small, incremental steps, practice as often as you can, and you’ll get there.

After I began drafting this post I bought a book I’d read about online: The Power of Less. It may sound like a load more self-help nonsense, but it puts forward some useful ideas about applying meditation techniques to singletasking in your daily life. Simply focus on the task at hand – if you find your attention drawn away, be aware of what’s happening, breathe, and return your focus to the task. I’ve written the first draft of this blog post with no distractions whatsoever - just me and a text editor. I’ve written nearly 1000 words in about half an hour, because my attention has been on writing, and only on writing. Singletasking might just be the way forward.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

OS X on a Dell Mini 9

2009-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

These days, my primary computer is a 15” MacBook Pro. It’s an amazing machine, but sometimes those 15” can be a little unwieldy (yes, that’s what she said).

Apple used to make a small, very portable laptop: the 12” PowerBook, which was unfortunately retired during Apple’s switch to the Intel platform. However, the transition did introduce the potential ability to run Mac OS X natively on non-Apple hardware. Whilst Apple don’t (currently) make their own netbook¹, a big community has sprung up around running OS X on non-Apple netbooks. I should note from the outset that installing OS X on non-Apple hardware potentially violates the OS X EULA. If you’re going to do this, in the very least ensure you own a legal copy of Mac OS X Leopard.

The current netbook au jour is the Dell Mini 9. BoingBoing’s compatibility list shows it as the only device that currently supports every piece of hardware² under OS X. And it does.

I bit the bullet and bought a Mini 9, which finally turned up a couple of weeks ago. It has a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom processor, 1GB RAM (user upgradable to 2GB), and a 16GB SSD drive. I ordered it with Ubuntu pre-installed - and let me tell you, this thing is fast. Ubuntu boot time was a respectable 30 seconds, and the user interface felt extremely responsive. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen OpenOffice load so quickly. I’ll go as far as to say that out-of-the-box, this was the best experience I’ve ever had with Ubuntu - things just worked, which has rarely been the case for me with desktop Linux before. I put an SD card in the Mini 9’s SD reader, and it instantly mounted on the desktop; I plugged an external monitor into the Mini 9’s VGA port, opened the display settings, and was able to rearrange the monitors / change resolutions / etc; Flash in the browser worked without needing to install or fiddle with anything; heck, even wifi just worked. If you’re not comfortable with sticking OS X on there, the Dell Mini 9 running Ubuntu is a lovely machine.

So, back to OS X. Aside from a few minor niggles due to my hardware setup³, installation was a breeze. This is one of the things that makes the Mini 9 such an attractive proposition as a Mac netbook - all of the wrinkles have been ironed out of the process by the clever group of people over at http://mydellmini.com. I won’t re-iterate the process in full here (I followed this guide), but in short it’s a case of:

Create a DellMiniBoot boot disc (either CD or USB) and boot from it.
Swap the disc with the Leopard installation DVD and tell DellMiniBoot to boot it.
Install Leopard.
When prompted to reboot, do so using the DellMiniBoot disc, and tell it to boot from your hard drive.
Once you’re in OS X, run the DellEFI application to install the fixes that’ll make sure everything works ok.
If you want two-finger trackpad scrolling, you’ll want to install these trackpad drivers.

It’s fairly straightforward, as long as you follow the guide. I had the odd problem crop up now and again, but a quick Googling saw me through - in particular, when rebooting after the installation, I had to boot into safe mode (using the -f flag) so I could get all the way through the post-install setup process. Other than that, it was pretty smooth.

The Mini 9 runs OS X beautifully. I’ve been using the Mini 9 a lot over the last 2 weeks and haven’t run into anything that hasn’t worked.

Things I like

Tiny and light.
This is überportable. I’ve been chucking it into my work bag and taking it to the office with me every day. By comparison, I’ve taken my MBP in twice in the last 6 months because it’s just a hassle.
Silent.
Fast. Very fast.
Fullscreen HD flash video gets a bit stuttery, but hey, this is a netbook. Streaming 480p H.264 movie trailers works brilliantly, however.
Convenient.
For small tasks around the house, taking to work, to a friend’s house, going home for the weekend, surfing in bed, and assorted other scenarios, this is a brilliant solution.
A built-in SD card reader.
Works flawlessly, and is extremely useful.
Cute.
C’mon, look at it! It’s tiny!

Issues

Somewhat cramped keyboard on the right side.
For some reason, our UK keyboard seems to have had an extra key squeezed into each row, meaning that the keyboard is a little more cramped than the US one. It took a little adjusting to - the tiny right-hand shift key, which is the one I usually use, was quite easy to miss at first.
Screen size is a limitation in some situations, although for what I’m using it for it’s generally fine.
I’ve had one occasion where the mouse didn’t work properly after waking, and one or two other assorted issues where it hasn’t-quite-woken-up-properly.
Very very occasionally, it doesn’t boot (the spinner doesn’t appear on the boot screen). If that’s the case, just turn it off and on again.

One final point it may be worth making is that this is not a replacement for a full-size Mac. This is a netbook, and a compliment to an existing machine - don’t go thinking you’ll get the same experience you will from a full-sized MacBook, because you won’t. Rumours are that Apple may be creating their own netbook-like device to be introduced later this year. Time will tell whether this is true or not - I’d be very much interested to see Apple’s take on the whole netbook thing.

I was going to finish off by filming a walkthrough showing how well things run on the Mini 9, but Mr Andy Ihnatko does a sterling job of it himself:

Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh Test Drive from Andy Ihnatko on Vimeo

There’s the MacBook Air, of course, but that’s thin - whereas the most important factor for portability in my opinion is width and depth. A Macbook Air, whilst lighter, takes up essentially the same amount of space as a normal MacBook - you’d still need a > 13” bag.
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Note that their caveat beneath the compatibility table is incorrect - you don’t need a replacement SSD for sleep to work. Just make sure you get a 16GB or bigger SSD in it. 8GB just doesn’t cut the mustard.
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You need an external DVD drive to load the Leopard installation DVD, and I was using an internal IDE DVD drive with an IDE -> USB convertor. The Mini 9 didn’t want to boot from this, though - so I had to copy the Leopard DVD image to an external hard drive, and boot from that.
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From WordPress to Jekyll

2009-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

Over the last week or so, I’ve migrated this blog from WordPress to Jekyll - a ‘blog-aware static site generator’, written in Ruby.

Jekyll takes a directory of posts and layouts, runs them through various converters, and produces a static website. Posts are stored in plain text files written in Markdown which makes it super easy to write HTML documents without the need to actually write HTML (and thus lose your flow). For example, making bold text is as simple as **this**. When Jekyll runs, it takes these posts, converts them into HTML, inserts them into an HTML layout, and produces a static HTML file. It’s really rather neat. If you want to see an example of how the back-end’s organized, check out this example of a Jekyll website on GitHub.

The main advantages, for me, are:

It’s much faster than a PHP/MySQL based website like WordPress. You can’t really get much quicker than plain ol’ HTML files. There’s nothing for the server to process other than serving up the files the user requests.
Posts are all stored in plain text files, which means they’re instantly accessible and usable anywhere I may want them - I don’t need to worry about having to export/convert posts from a database. I can also write my blog entries in my favourite text editor, TextMate - which is good, as I really don’t like blogging via a tiny textarea on a web page.
Because the posts are in plain text, I can very easily version control my entire site; everything’s kept neatly in a Git repository and I can roll back to any previous version of any file/post if I need to.
It’s ultimately a much simpler, smaller solution than using WordPress: I know exactly what’s in every file that makes up my website (and there really aren’t that many of them). WordPress is a much more complex system, and I really don’t know what half of it does or how it works.
It makes blogging fun again!

One downside of static files is that this means that the site can’t run its own commenting system. However, I’m using Disqus (a javascript solution) which seems ok. It’s a little more intrusive than I’d like, but I can live with it.

Using Git allows me to automate the regeneration of my site when I write a new entry. I write the post in a local clone of the site’s Git repo (or, on my server if necessary), commit my changes, and push them to the master repository on the server. When the server receives the changes, a handy little Git post-update hook that I wrote pulls the changes into the ‘live’ repository, and runs Jekyll to regenerate the site. It’s rather cool.

Now to work on:

A. Writing more.
B. Writing better.

Instapaper Inconsistency

2009-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

I love Instapaper. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s a really easy way to store articles that you come across online so that you can read them at a later date. Super simple, and with a nice iPhone app allowing easy reading on-the-go. Great stuff. Yesterday, Marco rolled out some new updates to Instapaper. Whilst I’d normally welcome any additions to this excellent service, some of these latest changes just don’t make sense.

Here’s how Instapaper used to work. Previously, you had two lists: Unread (all the articles you have yet to read) and Archive. Once you’d read something on your Unread list, it’d be automatically moved to your Archive. If you wanted to pull an item out of your Archive and into your Unread list, you’d simply ‘Mark Unread’ - makes sense, right? It’s the opposite of ‘Mark Read’ (which is essentially what you’re doing when you Archive). If you wanted to remove something permanently, you could delete it from either list (via a ‘delete’ link), and it’d be gone for good.

And here’s how Instapaper works as of today. I’m going to ignore the new ’Starred’ list, as that’s just fine - it makes sense and has no bearing on the issues I have with the other lists. Now, you have two lists: Unread (all the articles you have yet to read) and Deleted. Archive has now become Deleted. So now, once you read an article from your Unread list, it’ll automatically be deleted. Of course, deletion isn’t as scary as it sounds, as the Deleted list is essentially the same as your archive. Although, to me, it does sound scary - ‘archive’ sounds like a nice warm, fluffy place where my read articles are kept nice and safe for me to look at a future date; ‘deleted’ sounds like a temporary could-go-missing-at-any-moment kind of place. Your articles hang around in your Deleted list until you ‘Permanently Delete’ them. If you wanted to pull an item out of your Deleted list and into your Unread list, you click… ‘Mark Unread’. But wait, that’s what we used to click before! How is ‘Mark Unread’ the opposite of ‘Delete’? That does not make sense. Why would a Wookie live on Endor?

My problems with the Instapaper changes, then, are the following:

Previously, Unread -> Archive -> Delete made sense. One could go back from Archive to Unread with ‘Mark Unread’. But now, Unread -> Deleted -> Permanently Delete does not make sense. One goes back from Deleted to Unread with ‘Mark Unread’. That’s plain inconsistent.
Why is the archive of old, read articles (because, let’s face it, that’s what it is) called Deleted? The articles that are in there aren’t actually deleted at all. As proof of this, I have the ability to delete them even more from the Deleted list! Should we rename our Tumblr/Blog Archives lists to Deleted too? After all, these entries are also removed from our main view, and can be deleted further.
Why is the ‘Delete’ link (to move an article to your Deleted list - where it should still be safe) identical to the ‘Permanently Delete’ link (where your article is lost forever) in all but tooltip? Two identical buttons that do very different things. Pretty dangerous, huh? Thankfully, the ‘Permanently Delete’ button does pop up a confirmation dialog to confirm our actions.

An article entry in the Unread list note the cross-in-a-red-box delete button.

An article entry in the Deleted list note the cross-in-a-red-box delete button.

I love Instapaper, and use it every day. I even bought the Pro iPhone app because it’s so darned good. But I’d urge Marco to reconsider these changes. Archive makes far more sense, and is a much happier place for my read articles to live than the wilds of Deleted.

Drabble

2009-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Inspired by Andy’s recent drabble, I thought I’d have a go at one myself. In case you haven’t heard of one (I hadn’t!) a drabble is a short story of exactly 100 words. I’ve been wanting to follow more creative pursuits for a while now, and this seemed like a quick and easy opportunity. So, without further ado:

The books shook on their shelves in the bibliotheque. Plumes of dust fell from the fusty covers; debris settled itself on the floor below. The smoke lingered for some time.

Henry giggled with glee. He took down one book from the closest shelf. He flicked through it quickly from beginning to end, skimming the text keenly. He pulled the next book; then the next; then the next, checking over every one, smiling wickedly.

He chuckled once more. He’d done it. He’d bloody done it.
He’d removed the letter ” ” from written english. Oh, how he’d show them. Letter by letter.

Fitting in with the theme of the story, my drabble is also a lipogram. A lipogram is another form of constrained writing, in which you write your piece missing out a particular letter (or group of letters). Hint: there are no letter A’s in the drabble - because Henry removed them all! Neat, huh?

I first heard about lipograms and constrained writing via this article from Mark Pilgrim. Seems like a good way to get the creative juices flowing.

Other drabbles: (if you’ve written one, let me know and I’ll stick the link here)

Why Do We Tweet?

2009-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

This post has been sitting in my blog drafts pile since August last year; for some reason I never got round to posting it. Recent Twitter-related conversations with friends (including Nick’s recent Twitter post), as well as the move of Twitter into the ‘mainstream’ have inspired me to dig it out, dust it off, and finish it. This was originally going to be a post allowing me to examine why I use Twitter and how it fits into my life, and to open up a discussion of why you, dear reader, tweet (if indeed you do).

So, why do we tweet? Why do I tweet?

Back to the beginning

I found it quite interesting taking a look back at my very first tweets, and seeing how they’ve changed over time. They started off very much to-the-point; simply answering the original Twitter question: What are you doing?

I consciously began every tweet with a verb, as though each was prefixed with an invisible “I am” or “I was”. I did this for two reasons: 1) for consistency, and 2) with the forethought that I might one day integrate my Twitterstream into my blog/website, and I could then automatically pull in what “I am” doing or what “I was” doing at any given time.

So, I began using Twitter in, I guess, the way it was originally intended: I simply stated what I was doing. But due to trends in the way people used it, Twitter evolved. People began replying to each others’ tweets, prefixing their replies with @username to target a particular user. After a while, the folks at Twitter picked up on this, and made it a proper feature of the site. But for a long time, I was reluctant to use it. In fact, it was only after many months that I began using a very occasional @reply, and only quite recently did I finally broke out of my “I am”/”I was” style of writing tweets. I think the reason I was reluctant to adopt @replies was that to me, they changed the nature of Twitter; they added extra functionality, and to me detracted from the original idea behind the service. “What are you doing?” isn’t answered by replying to a friend.

The UNIX Philosophy

If you’ll allow me a brief segue, I think I may be able to explain why I wasn’t a fan of @replies to begin with, and it’s best summed up by the UNIX philosophy. The UNIX philosophy is really a set of 9 precepts, but it’s sometimes simply summed up as:

Do one thing, do it well.

To me, allowing one to answer the question “What are you doing?” and to see my friends’ answers to this question is doing one thing, and well. Using such a system to chat with one another seems to be another use entirely - and there are far better software systems whose whole purpose is to allow you to chat. They do one thing, and well.

This is the reason I don’t like or use Facebook: from my point of view, it’s about as far away from ‘small is beautiful’ and ‘do one thing, do it well’ as you can possibly get. If Facebook was simply a way to keep a public profile, and to get in touch with old friends (and for them to get in touch with you, via your profile), then fine. That’s doing one thing. But Facebook attempts to be:

A photo gallery.
A chat system.
A blog system.
A Twitter-like status-updating micro-blogging tool.
A video hosting system.
A messaging system.
An application platform.
And much more besides.

And I’d argue that it does none of these things particularly well. For instance, the photos section of the site (for those of you unfamiliar with it) only displays images at a maximum resolution of 604 pixels wide (whoever decided that?!), and it doesn’t even store the original image. Just ghastly - your images deserve better than that. There are already many pre-existing systems that are targetted specifically at the various functions that Facebook half-heartedly includes, and they do a much better job of it. Small is beautiful. I think @lottiotta summed it up fairly well, recently:

Twitter for status, flickr for photos & email for keeping in touch. Will quit facebook; not ‘cos of the drama, just ‘cos I don’t need it.
5:52 PM Feb 18th

I have Flickr for photos, Jabber/MSN for chat/instant messaging, WordPress/Tumblr/etc for blogging, Twitter for status, Vimeo (or YouTube, if you like) for video, e-mail for sending messages, and a computer and a web browser in which to run my applications. Sorry, Facebook, but I don’t need your half-baked features and your incredibly low signal-to-noise ratio.

So really, why do I tweet?

I joined Twitter to answer a question: “What are you doing?”. So that’s what I did, and I hoped someone would perhaps have an interest in what I had to say. And even if no-one cared, I did - Twitter essentially allows me to create a diary, without even thinking about it. In years to come, I’ll be able to look back and have a fairly decent record of what I got up to in the early 2000s and beyond.

And once I started tweeting, and my friends did too, there arose a larger, secondary, less selfish reason to use Twitter: it allows me to more easily be a part of my friends’ day-to-day lives. Friends who I might not see for days or weeks otherwise. I know what they’re doing, as they do it, as though I was there with them. It allows me to share in their lives, when I’m unable to be there in person. And, at least to me, it helps me feel closer to them.

I have something of a problem with Twitter’s current ascent towards being ‘mainstream’. In recent weeks, an increasing number of high-profile celebrities have begun using Twitter (thanks in no small part to @stephenfry), and this has caused people who would ordinarily have absolutely no interest in Twitter to sit up and take notice. The regular media have latched on to it, resulting in frankly trashy pieces of reporting, telling people how to get started and what they should be doing with it. I’m sorry, but if you need a guide to tell you this, you’re probably not in it for the right reasons, and you’re just doing it for the sake of it. One piece I came across at the Times Online stated:

“it’s not about connecting with people you know, it’s about following people that interest you.”

To me, this isn’t Twitter as I know and love it. To me, Twitter is precisely about connecting with people I know. In fact, I only follow 2 or 3 people who I don’t actually know/haven’t actually met. Fortunately, Twitter by its very nature lets you avoid the things you don’t want to see, and so by and large people can use Twitter how they like without impacting too much on anybody else. I couldn’t give a crap about celebrity gossip, so I’m not in it for that - Twitter is not my ‘Entertainment Weekly’. Twitter isn’t my RSS reader (despite many websites seeming to think otherwise and using Twitter to push out news which really deserves to have proper articles written about it, in the proper medium). Twitter is not my e-mail: (you don’t have to read every single message). Twitter isn’t my f*cking khakis.

Twitter is my friends.

Why do you tweet?

Dramatic Saul

2009-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

Dramatic Saul from me on Vimeo.

My impression of Saul Tigh’s (Battlestar Galactica) default expression. Apologies if you haven’t seen the show - you won’t get this! :)

TextMate Ctrl-Escape Shortcut Fix

2009-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

One of the most important shortcuts in Textmate is Control-Escape, which opens a ‘Gear’ menu with important context-sensitive functions. However, if you turn on the Screen Sharing or Remote Management features of your Mac, you will find that the Control-Escape key combination no longer works. The remote-access applications hijack this shortcut.

To continue using the default Control-Escape shortcut with Textmate, you have no choice but to turn off all of the remote-access applications.

via Textmate: Use Command-Escape as a Shortcut to the Gear Menu.

TextMate stopped responding to Ctrl-Escape for me a while back, and it’s been irritating. I discovered today that this was the reason; I turned off screen sharing, and BAM! the shortcut was working again.

My iPhone App Store Stats

2009-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

We’re almost at the 6 month-iversary of the Apple App Store, so I thought I’d take a look at just how much I’ve used it. Plus, being a geek, it seemed like a fun little project to grab the data and work it all out.

I hoarde all my e-mail in Google Mail, so I did a quick search for all my iTunes receipts (‘iTunes label:eReceipts’), and gave them a tag of iTunesReceipts. Then, I downloaded those mails to plain text files, with the help of OfflineIMAP. A short Python script later, and the job was done. If anyone’s interested in getting a copy, let me know and I’ll clean itÂ up for public consumption.

Anyway, onto the stats!

First receipt date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008
Last receipt date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 (so, a 6 month period)
Total apps downloaded: 141
Of those:
Free apps: 116
Paid apps: 25
Total cost: £69.75
Average cost per app (across all apps): 49p
Average cost per app (just paid apps): £2.79

That’s rather a lot of apps, but I’m not too surprised. I don’t really think I have my money’s worth out of that £70 though - there’s only a few of the apps I paid for that I use on a regular basis. I’ll stick up another post soon regarding my favourite iPhone apps.

My Day, Yesterday on Flickr

2008-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

A very neat idea (and good use of Flickr’s 90 second video format): film your day, cut it into a 90 second clip, don’t add any extra sound or music other than what the camera records, and then post it up the next day.

"And I've seen everything"

2008-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of this - It’s so well acted on both sides, and utterly hilarious. :D

YouTube - Patrick Stewart Fantasies

Fifty People, One Question: Restored on Vimeo

2008-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Fifty People, One Question: Restored on Vimeo

I really like the shooting style of this, and it’s pretty moving near the end. What’s your answer?

EepyBird's Sticky Note Experiment

2008-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment on Vimeo

From the guys who brought you Diet Coke & Mentos, some awesomeness with stationery and pretty colours! What could be better?

Sonny J - Can't Stop Moving, Mirwais Mix

2008-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

YouTube - Sonny J Can’t Stop Moving

I’m loving this song - and the video’s cool, too! Happy happy fun!

Twitter Thoughts

2008-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

I was just thinking about the problem of status updates, and multiple sites that allow you to post them, and the fact that most of us use Twitter and it’s generally pretty flaky.

I realised that a potential solution would be to have a kind of status update protocol, that all of the status update sites can conform to (some can have their own extensions, of course, such as pictures/locations, etc). Then people can host their own status update systems, much the way they host blogs now, or you can use one of the many ready-hosted services. The fact that all of these systems conform to the same protocol means that if, say, I used Twitter for my updates, I could still add you as a friend even if you were using your own self-hosted update system, and see your updates within my Twitter dashboard (and vice-versa).

Thoughts? Ideas? Anyone know if anything like this is happening already? Is there a big hole in my idea?

Losing

2008-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

You may remember that back in May, myself and shepherdnick began a challenge to post one blog entry a day for an entire month, in an effort to get us writing more. Of course, the month deadline expired long ago - but how did we do?

In short, I failed miserably! I did well to begin with, keeping up with the contest and sometimes posting in the wee small hours of the morning in order to get a post in. And then I pretty much dropped off the radar. I think mainly I ran out of things I really wanted to write about (or at least, write reasonable entries about). I’m sure if I had more of a tumblelog-style blog (where I’d post links, videos, pictures that I’ve found and linked) I’dve had more than enough material to keep me going. However, I have now developed a backlog of things I want to post about and thought I’d best round off the contest before making a start on those.

As for Nick, he did fantastically - as far as I’m aware he only dropped a couple of days - and wrote some brilliant entries. Great job, Nick! You were an excellent rival! I owe you a pint/ice-cream/ice-cream-in-a-pint! :-D

The Items We Carry

2008-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

Some time ago, I came across the Flickr group “What’s in Your Bag?” and so posted a picture of what was in my bag. It’s a bit of a shallow, materialistic meme, but hey.

That was 2 years ago, and I just stumbled across a similar (and seemingly currently popular) group on Flickr: The Items We Carry. Without further ado, I present my updated ‘stuff’:

If you visit the photo on Flickr, you can rollover the items for an explanation, but I’ll replicate them here:

WHSmith Notepad + Fisher Space Pen: These go with me pretty much everywhere. The notepad is tiny, and acts as my GTD inbox. The Space Pen isn’t the best pen in the world to write with - it’s kind of scratchy - but it’s really small!
iPod Touch: I loves my iPod, I does.
Sony Ericsson K800i: This is a nice phone, and I really like the Sony Ericssons. However, my contract’s nearly up, so I’m hoping to switch to an iPhone soon. Then I’ll only need to carry one thing instead of two!
Keys: Lots ‘o keys. The carabiner is from when I watched the Calgary Hitmen play ice hockey when I was in Canada in my gap year.
Moleskine (plain notebook) + Pentel Hybrid Gel Grip pen: These are a very recent addition, but they’re both brilliant. The Moleskine’s really nice, and replaces an A5 WHSmiths pad I used to use but that all the pages kept falling out of. Being stitched, I’m thinking the pages will stay in the Moleskine :-). The Pentel Hybrid Gel Grip pen was a recommendation from Rands in Repose, and is excellent to write with.
Money + Cards: I rarely have my wallet with me (I don’t like the bulk in my pockets, so only have it if I have a bag with me), so I just carry these loose.
Inhaler: I haven’t carried an inhaler with me for ages, but my hayfever’s just started playing up a tiny bit, so I’ve started taking this with me.

I still use my tiny Gul rucksack that I showed in the original photo but it’s starting to show its age, and the zips are breaking a bit. If anybody knows of a nice, slim, A5 - A4 sized messenger bag/man-bag I can replace it with and fit this stuff in, please let me know! Also let me know if you do one of these photos yourself!

5 Artists, 5 Songs

2008-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

Gareth tagged me to do Five Artists, Five Songs, a blog meme.

List your five favourite artists, your five favourite songs by those artists and tag five other people to do it.

This was pretty tricky for me to answer as I generally seem to go in phases with music, and I’m not really ‘loyal’ to any particular artists. I also have a lot of single tracks from one artist in my collection (so, that artist only occurs once) which I love, but of course are no good for this meme. I used last.fm to determine my ‘top artists’:

The Offspring
OK Go
Pendulum
Belle and Sebastian
Jack Johnson

I wasn’t sure how accurate this would be, as I don’t always scrobble reliably (although, moreso recently) and I haven’t been actively using last.fm until fairly recently, despite being a member since 2005. However, I’d say The Offspring and OK Go should almost certainly be in my top 5, and the other 3 are all good too. Mika was just off the bottom of the list, here. Determining my top 5 songs for each artist was a little more tricky, but again last.fm came to the rescue!

The Offspring

Want You Bad
Why Don’t You Get a Job?
No Brakes
Have You Ever
All I Want

All great songs, and Want You Bad is almost certainly my favourite. All I Want is fantastic, too (and in Crazy Taxi!). In fact, I’m pretty certain it was Crazy Taxi that introduced me to The Offspring in the first place.

OK Go

Here It Goes Again
A Million Ways
A Good Idea at the Time
Don’t Ask Me
It’s a Disaster (+ Hello, My Treacherous Friends was on equal ranking)

OK Go are great, and their music has a pretty good range: some really energetic, some slower and gentler. Here It Goes Again deserves its place at the top - it’s my Power Song on my Nike+ running aid, and can just really perk me up when I’m flagging to complete that last quarter of a mile! Plus, fantastic video! :)

Pendulum

Blood Sugar
Slam
Distress Signal
Granite
Prelude (through the loop)

I was introduced to Pendulum… last year, perhaps? I can’t remember who by, but it was almost certainly one of Chris, Dave, or Steve. Some of their stuff is so damn catchy (if not a bit samey).

Belle and Sebastian

I’m a Cuckoo
Dear Catastrophe Waitress
Wrapped Up In Books
Expectations
Piazza, New York

Belle and Sebastian are great (especially the Dear Catastrophe Waitress album), and I discovered them through I’m a Cuckoo, which is most likely why it’s at the top. Expectations is perhaps my current favourite (and featured in the Juno soundtrack!).

Jack Johnson

Sitting, Waiting, Wishing
Constellations
Breakdown
Never Know
Do You Remember

Jack Johnson makes some good music, although I’m not sure I would’ve particularly considered him when thinking of a top 5 myself. That said, all of these songs are fantastic.

So, those are my 5/5 according to last.fm. I figured that whilst I was looking at some music-related stats, I’d post some other things that might be of interest:

My favourite album is almost certainly the Garden State soundtrack. I love every single track on there. It’s just awesome (although, perhaps best if you’ve seen the film).

As I mentioned earlier, I have a lot of individual tracks for many artists, rather than whole albums. I thought I’d take a look at my top 10 tracks overall, to see what’s in it:

Regina Spektor - Fidelity
Yael NaÃ¯m - New Soul
The Offspring - Want You Bad
Belle and Sebastian - I’m a Cuckoo
Jonathan Coulton - Code Monkey
Duke Special - Everybody wants a little something
Skins Cast & Cat Stevens - Wild World
José González - Heartbeats
Amy Adams - That’s How You Know
Pendulum - Blood Sugar

All of these tracks are fantastic (although, I haven’t listened to Heartbeats for ages), but note that this only includes two tracks from my ‘top five’ artists. Fidelity and New Soul are quite similar sounds to one another, I think, and they’re both recent finds of mine so I find it fairly amazing that they’re already at the top of the list. Duke Special is another current favourite, that I discovered through The Cabel Yay! Awards. Oh, and That’s How You Know? Let’s just call it a guilty pleasure. :)

I tag Nick and Tom!

Building Ruby 1.9 on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

2008-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve recently been learning Ruby, and I wanted to install Ruby 1.9 on OS X to try out some of the new features (the current ‘stable’ version of Ruby is 1.8.6). Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one cohesive guide to doing this, and instead had to mash together various instructions from across the interwebs. I’ve pieced everything together here in the hope that it’ll help out someone else. :-)

Step 1

Firstly, readline needs updating, so grab readline 5.2 from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/. After extracting it (tar xvzf readline-5.2.tar.gz) you’ll need to make one or two changes so that it will build correctly on Leopard. Simply apply this patch to support/shobj-conf in the readline directory you’ve created. The patch is necessary because readline currently doesn’t check for Leopard, only for earlier versions of OS X. In fact, the patch is simple enough that you could change the two lines by hand if necessary.

Then, configure readline, specifying a location so you don’t interfere with what’s already on your system, then build and install it:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/
make
sudo make install

Step 2

Next, you’ll want to download Ruby 1.9: http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/. Again, we want to specify our own install location, and we also need to tell it where our newly installed readline is. We’re also specifying a program-suffix here (-trunk) so we can differentiate Ruby 1.9 from our pre-installed Ruby (so we’ll access 1.9 with ruby-trunk, irb-trunk, etc, and 1.8.6 with ruby, irb, etc).

tar xvzf ruby-1.9.0-1.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.9.0-1
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/ruby1.9 --program-suffix=-trunk --with-readline-dir=/usr/local --
make
sudo make install

Step 3:

Finally, because we’ve installed Ruby in a specific location, you’ll most likely need to add its location to your path. I have a bin/ directory in my home directory, so I simply have the following line in my .bash_profile:

# Add Ruby 1.9
PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/ruby1.9/bin

And you’re done. You can test by running ruby-trunk --version. Any problems, sound off in the comments. I may have missed something, as it’s rather late - and I could’ve almost certainly written this better. Hopefully I’ll revisit it in the future. If you get stuck, the articles I used to put this together might be of use:

Installing Ruby 1.9 on Mac OSX
Trouble with readline and building Ruby 1.9
Also, thank you to Han Kessels for helping me via e-mail.
And I’m sure there were some other sites, that I can’t recall at the moment.

Swapping Variables

2008-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

I thought I’d share a little trick I learnt the other day regarding swapping variables.

A common coding/computer science task is to swap the values of two variables. In some languages, such as Java, one may start by creating a new temporary variable. For example (assuming we already have two ints, x and y):

int temp = x;
x = y;
y = temp;

This creation of a new variable uses more memory, and whilst in most circumstances would be fine, it could become an issue if we’re swapping many times, for example in a sorting algorithm.

Some languages allow us to do a nice swap without extra variables, using multiple assignment and tuple packing and unpacking:

x, y = y, x

This is pretty neat, although is apparently slower than using a temporary variable.

Anyway, yesterday I discovered a third method: XOR swapping. Again, this doesn’t require the use of an extra variable, and I thought it was pretty clever (here ^ represents XOR, as in Python):

x = x ^ y
y = x ^ y
x = x ^ y

Neat, huh? It’s fairly simple to see how it works if you simply walk through the steps. Let’s swap x = 7, y = 9:

x = 0111
y = 1001
x = x ^ y = 1110
y = x ^ y = 0111
x = x ^ y = 1001

Apparently this method is quite commonly used in embedded assembly code, however you won’t find it appearing much in code on a desktop computer. It usually is slower to compute than using temporary variables, as most processors attempt to execute commands in parallel - and of course, each of these instructions depends upon the previous result, so they must be executed sequentially. Still, it’s a nice thing to know.

The short version: it seems that if you’re trying to save memory then XOR swap or use multiple assignment, otherwise if efficiency is an issue, use a temporary variable.

James Frost

Singletasking

OS X on a Dell Mini 9

From WordPress to Jekyll

Instapaper Inconsistency

Drabble

Why Do We Tweet?

Back to the beginning

The UNIX Philosophy

So really, why do I tweet?

Dramatic Saul

TextMate Ctrl-Escape Shortcut Fix

My iPhone App Store Stats

My Day, Yesterday on Flickr

"And I've seen *everything*"

Fifty People, One Question: Restored on Vimeo

EepyBird's Sticky Note Experiment

Sonny J - Can't Stop Moving, Mirwais Mix

Twitter Thoughts

Losing

The Items We Carry

5 Artists, 5 Songs

Building Ruby 1.9 on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3:

Swapping Variables

"And I've seen everything"