Ben Pickles. Saying stuff about stuff.

Physics Invader

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 02:22:27 -0700

Physics Invader

C

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:13:14 -0700

Brainwave most likely to strike at 22:04

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 03:28:38 -0700

Brainwave most likely to strike at 22:04

Awesome photos from Formula 1’s first ever night race.

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:25:20 -0700

Awesome photos from Formula 1’s first ever night race.

DEFENDER of the favicon

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 09:19:08 -0700

DEFENDER of the favicon: DEFENDER of the favicon

Cows automatically point to the north

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 01:15:18 -0700

Cows automatically point to the north

"we all have to remind ourselves, all the time, that we’re not smart enough to get anything important..."

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:36:52 -0700

“we all have to remind ourselves, all the time, that we’re not smart enough to get anything important right the first time”

- ongoing · Build One to Throw Away

Ruby 1.9 Nested Methods

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 03:09:18 -0700


def toggle def toggle "subsequent times" end "first time"
end

Ruby 1.9: What to Expect

"every 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1% of profit"

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 03:39:27 -0700

“every 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1% of profit”

- Radar Theme: Web Ops - O’Reilly Radar

Handling Keyboard Shortcuts in JavaScript

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:10:50 -0700

Handling Keyboard Shortcuts in JavaScript

Unix Signals for Live Debugging

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:10:26 -0700

Unix Signals for Live Debugging

Via Coolio Video

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 06:50:13 -0700

Via Coolio Video

Super Mario Bros. wallpaper

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:27:20 -0700

Super Mario Bros. wallpaper

Researching your MySQL table sizes

Mon, 19 May 2008 07:34:38 -0700

Researching your MySQL table sizes

Rebranding Satan

Sat, 17 May 2008 07:21:31 -0700

Rebranding Satan

Cubeecraft.com - Print, cut and fold your own papercraft toys!

Sat, 17 May 2008 07:20:41 -0700

Cubeecraft.com - Print, cut and fold your own papercraft toys!: Waiting for Princess Leia.

Photo

Fri, 16 May 2008 02:37:00 -0700

Session variables without cookies

Wed, 14 May 2008 01:59:00 -0700

Session variables without cookies: Store session-like data with Javascript using window.name - via my bro

Portrayal of George W. Bush - via Monoscope

Tue, 13 May 2008 01:24:00 -0700

Portrayal of George W. Bush - via Monoscope

Gardening Is Peaceful

Mon, 12 May 2008 12:27:00 -0700

Gardening Is Peaceful:

So true.

Me through the looking glass

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 03:49:59 -0800

The other day I had the fortune of being photographed by my good friend James Hill for a personal project of his. The result is a sincere and slightly revealing portrait of me, so check me out.

Autotest and Growl

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 11:30:58 -0800

I’ve been trying without success to setup autotest Growl notifications for some time but never quite managed to get it fuly working. There are plenty of solutions out there already but things still didn’t seem to come together for me… until today – the latest version of seems to have smoothed things.

Unfortunately there’s a bug in growlnotify so whether the Growls will actually be displayed is another question (they randomly don’t appear). There is a fix for this, however, which provides a drop-in workaround – remember to stop and start Growl from Preferences.

Last but not least is the pièce de résistance: what pass/fail image(s) shall I show? Fortunately somebody has already answered that for me and in the most pleasing way possible.

A little tweaking here and there (like renaming the fail images 1-5) and I give you my .autotest Growl hook.

Shortwave Gist

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:05:14 -0800

I’ve been using Shortwave for a while, it’s lightweight (a bookmarklet) and particularly agreeable as it syncs with my iPhone. Today I finally tired of having to look through the git docs site and decided to create a custom Shortwave commands file.

In an inspired move I’m storing it in a Gist for easy access and maintainability – I simply point Shortwave to the raw version.

It makes me wonder what else I could store in that there tinterweb…

Of course the downside of this is that Shortwave has to parse the file on each request and github isn’t exactly fast.

P.S. Here’s the Git docs command I added:

git http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-%s.html Git command help.

What is oEmbed and why is it useful?

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 11:26:56 -0800

From the oEmbed site ¹:

oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites.

Cool… what?

For example Vimeo will return the HTML required to embed one of its videos – oEmbed is particularly useful for videos ².

http://vimeo.com/api/oembed.xml?url=http://www.vimeo.com/935317


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<oembed> <type>video</type> <version>1.0</version> <provider_name>Vimeo</provider_name> <provider_url>http://vimeo.com/</provider_url> <title>Weird Fishes: Arpeggi</title> <author_name>flight404</author_name> <author_url>http://vimeo.com/flight404</author_url> <is_plus>1</is_plus> <html><![CDATA[<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="504" height="348" data="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=935317&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;fullscreen=1&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=1&amp;color=00ADEF"> <param name="quality" value="best" /> <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /> <param name="scale" value="showAll" /> <param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=935317&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;fullscreen=1&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=1&amp;color=00ADEF" />
</object>]]></html> <width>504</width> <height>348</height> <duration>318</duration> <thumbnail_url>http://20.media.vimeo.com/d1/5/57/04/55/thumbnail-57045532.jpg</thumbnail_url> <thumbnail_width>160</thumbnail_width> <thumbnail_height>120</thumbnail_height> <clip_id>935317</clip_id>
</oembed>

Hidden away amongst the cruft you can see that the html element contains their movie player embed code.

Why?

Think bookmarks, tumbles and other such delights. It’s like a rich meta description – though that sounds awfully close to being a cringe-worthy marketing buzzword creating developer cynicism.

Resources

oEmbed – The official oEmbed site
Vimeo oEmbed API documentation
oohEmbed.com – Get oEmbed code for resources from non-oEmbed supporting sites

¹ Gotta love their ASCII art:

 __ __ /\ \ /\ \ ___ __ ___ ___\ \ \____ __ \_\ \ / __`\ /'__`\/' __` __`\ \ '__`\ /'__`\ /'_` \
/\ \L\ \/\ __//\ \/\ \/\ \ \ \L\ \/\ __//\ \L\ \
\ \____/\ \____\ \_\ \_\ \_\ \_,__/\ \____\ \___,_\ \/___/ \/____/\/_/\/_/\/_/\/___/ \/____/\/__,_ / ===== because 'open embed' sounds too dirty =====

² One could argue that embedding videos is all it’s really useful for at the moment as it seems to be most popular among video services (not YouTube!) but that’s a discussion for another day.

Civilization really coming to the DS!

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:40:46 -0700

Civilization Revolution

Manualist Plays Sweet Child O' Mine

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:05:40 -0700

Give him a minute to warm up. My personal favourite is The Trooper.

Cursor*10

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 02:56:20 -0700

Amazing self-collaborative game – via my bro

Touch My Tweak Unit

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:33:32 -0800

Have Google Bought Flickr?

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:34:23 -0800

Happy New Year 2008!

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 06:16:58 -0800