Q.I. Productions – a wombat, the sink, and how it got there

Right, it’s been a while… how does this work again? Right. Anyway.
I’ve been following Mark Bernstein’s posts on building a dashboard in Tinderbox and enjoying them… and puzzling out how to implement them, in a lot of cases.
One thing I wanted to do, once I figured out how the example he gave in the post [...]

[From Coding Horror: You're Doing It Wrong]
Jeff Atwood talks about templating engines (for generating html) being wrong… and I agree, with code like this:

<%foreach (var User in Users) { %>
<div class=”action-time”><%= ActionSpan(User)%></div>
<% if (User.IsAnonymous) { %>
<div class=”gravatar32″><%= RenderGravatar(User)%></div>
<div class=”details”><%= RepSpan(User)%><br/><%= Flair(User)%></div>
<% } else { %>
<div class=”anon”>anonymous</div>
<% } %>
<% } %>

But, and I might be biased [...]

Okay, so we got a Wii a few weeks ago (it might be two now).
And we’ve been playing Wii Sports after the kids go down to bed. And just today we got this:
Active Life Outdoor Challenge
Wow. Okay, so I may have ruined any (you know me) street gamer cred I may have had by just [...]

I think I’ve mentioned it before (I have), but if you’re a Boston area Mac developer you’re really sitting pretty at the moment. There sure is a lot of interest in Mac developers coming across my wire these days.

I’m addicted!

This is from the short story “A Short Story” (I’m fantastically lazy sometimes)… which I’m nearly certain I’ll be posting on RedRoom.com really soon.
Again, cloud by Wordle.

Caught this fun little tag cloud service the other day… and created one for “Destiny Calling,” the story I recently posted to the RedRoom.com:

See more at Wordle…

A handy tool for testing services in your app is in the good old LaunchServices framework:
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -f
Running it without flags will print out usage info… a great tool to save you time logging in and out.

Anyone looking for Mac dev (Cocoa) work in the Boston area (Woburn), drop me a line.
It’s not with me, which has to be a positive.

Interesting first shot by Mark Bernstein, with promises for more:
Mark Bernstein: NeoVictorian 1: Civilization and its Discontents
Why do I say we are unhappy?
…
• Our scientific conferences are filled with papers that focus on incremental improvements observed when asking unskilled laborers (whom we call “novices”) to perform office chores. We call this “usability”.
• Scholars interested in [...]

Took a look at this thread over on the geared up NaNoWriMo.org site and figured I’d write down my favorite tech suggestions.
It’s basically culling my tools from this post, as well as a few of the general tools from this post:
Writer.app for drafting, Tinderbox and OmniOutliner for thought organization and outlining, Mellel for general word [...]