Phil's Ramblings

Link Wrench plugin for WordPress

Phil — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:12:27 +0000

I made a WordPress plugin to make it easier to decorate links in the way I wanted for StrawberryCat.com. You can get it from github if you wish.

The effect I want is black text with a red underline, the way we achieve that is to style the links with:

a:link, a:active, a:visited { color: [...]

Serious Objective-C

Phil — Sun, 06 May 2012 15:56:04 +0000

There are some challenges to making large and/or complex software with Objective-C. The main thing I miss from other systems is levels of method protection.

However, it is quite easy to get the effects of traditional public/package/private method protection levels with a bit of work. First, and obviously, public methods go into the main header [...]

Syntax Highlighting Objective-C in WordPress

Phil — Sun, 06 May 2012 09:38:37 +0000

I have added support for Objective-C to the Auto SyntaxHighlighter plugin for WordPress; it is in the official plugin as of version 2.3.3.

Here is some code for the sake of demonstration, based on content from Wikipedia’s article on Objective-C. Here is Person.h:

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h> @interface Person : NSObject { @private NSUInteger age; } @property(readwrite,copy,nonatomic) [...]

Scrap Charities

Phil — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:39:46 +0000

Seriously, I mean it.

There has been a recent hoo-hah about the tax-deductibility of donations made to charities by individuals with large incomes. The proposal tabled as I write this limits the amount of tax-deductible donations to the greater of £50k or 25% of the person’s income. The justification for it is that the current [...]

Check out what I helped make

Phil — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:31:00 +0000

We just finished making a newsstand magazine app for Harrods. If you have an iPad you can get the app from the app store, once installed you can download issues manually and/or subscribe (for free) to have new issues delivered to you automatically.

I am most proud of the makeup tester feature which is linked [...]

DIY

Phil — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 22:19:42 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of little jobs since we moved into our new house. This experience causes me to want to write down the things I wish I had known this time two weeks ago.

The most important one is that if you want something to stay on the wall where you put [...]

Fscking hard-disks

Phil — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 21:39:24 +0000

Usually when I wake up I have three emails from cron on my home server. Two report the status of various automated processes to maintain strawberrycat.com and the other reports the status of backing-up this blog. If I get only two it usually means that this server has failed in some way; if I get one [...]

I want a Flightscope X2

Phil — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 18:05:22 +0000

I had a golf lesson on Saturday with my usual pro and the assistance of a Flightscope X2. I don’t know that I would want to have a lesson without it now that I’ve seen what it can do.

A golf shot’s outcome, it should be obvious, is determined by the fraction of a second [...]

Benefits cap

Phil — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:59:58 +0000

It is quite rare for something in the news to make me really angry, but the coverage of the proposed benefits cap has succeeded. In particular this BBC News article about a family that will be affected by the cap has vexed me considerably.

They will need to save £82.40 per week if the cap [...]

Triptych 1

Phil — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:24:15 +0000

During my time off in December I acquired a cheap airbrush, some acrylic paint, 3 canvases and a can of air. I used them to create a triptych.

They are meant to hang in a vertical column, thus:

They are currently being framed with brushed-aluminium-effect frames. I [...]