I finally got around to upgrading to Dev Studio 2010 Express. It looks nice so far but I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the number of fundamental UI mistakes they have made with the documentation system. Have Microsoft learned nothing about user interface and user experience in the 18-odd years they have [...]
This bizarre error message had me tearing my hair out this morning. I’ve finally figured it out. Here’s the scene: You have two classes, each class has an init method with the same name and taking the same parameters. Here’s an example: @interface myClass1 : NSObject { } -(myClass1 *)initWithName:(NSString *)name; @end @interface myClass2 : [...]
I’ve been doing a lot of GPS work lately. Here’s a little utility I wrote which I’d like to share with you all. It’s an NMEA checksum calculator written in PHP. Try it out here: http://siliconsparrow.com/nmeachecksum.php Here’s the source code: <html> <head> <title>NMEA Checksum Calculator</title> </head> <body> <h1>NMEA Checksum Calculator</h1> <?php // Simple NMEA Checksum [...]
Well here’s a curly issue I blundered into today. I was trying to replicate a Postgres database from an old server to a new one using pg_dump/pg_restore and found some errors like this: invalid byte sequence for encoding “UTF8″: 0×92 After some investigation it turns out the older version of Postgres defaults to ASCII encoding [...]
Here’s a real easy way to do close-up when you’ve only got a phone. All you need is a loupe which is a magnifying lens inside a tube, they are used a lot by jewellers, artists and well, people who work in micro-electronics like me. Just plonk it over the lens of your phone’s camera [...]
I’m developing a couple of new electronic products and once again I am infuriated by the lack of suitable enclosures. Don’t the enclosure making people understand what I want?! Take a look at these fairly typical boxes from Hammond Manufacturing: A lot of the boxes produced by Hammond and such companies tend to have small [...]
My Mum made me a birthday cake with my logo on it. Thanks Mum! Happy birthday to me!
Business has been doing a little better this last month so I bought myself a treat – a new HTC Desire HD from Vodafone. It is so nice to be back on Android again after being stuck with an old Nokia 6300 non-smart-phone for the last couple of months. I felt like one hand was [...]
I just bought myself a new SMD rework station, it’s a fine tool but I want to share with you a few choice excerpts from the extremely poorly translated manual. I think the Chinese manufacturers put no effort at all into the English translation these days: “Intelligent system that could alarm, Fault detection automatically” “Green [...]
Hmm, this blog seems to be getting a lot of comment spam. I’m going to try the NoSpamNX plugin and see if that helps.