Right Now

⏳ Waiting for the APIs in the Cloud for what's going on right now ...

Visual Cues In OS X

After working on a Mac full time for almost a year, I've come to realise that OS X provides you with a lot of nice visual cues which greatly enhance the usability of the system. Here's a nice example I came across the other day; take a loook at this screen grab of a TextEdit.app window.

A TextEdit.app Window

Hidden In Plain Sight

I had some hardware delivery to the office this morning; nothing too spectacular, just some disks and some memory. The delivery was taken and signed for by a colleague who works in our IS department and they'd checked that the consignment contained exactly what we'd ordered and paid for.

In order to do that, they'd had to open the box which, judging by the ripped, torn and otherwise mangled top of the box was quite a challenge.

Bilbo Spams My Inbox

As fast as an anti-spam mechanism appears on the net, the spammers try to find a way to circumvent it; recently I wrote about the attempt of spammers to try and create realistic sounding names in an attempt to bypass spam filters with unintentionally amusing results.

The latest weapon in the spammers arsenal seems to be inserting passages from works of popular fiction into mails in an attempt to defeat natural language heuristic checks, with passages from Tolkein's The Hobbit seeming to be a firm favourite, judging by the contents of my Junk Mail folder.

It Should Be Wrong …

I used to have a home made anti-stress ball, consisting of a flour filled balloon; it was made for me by one of the French students currently on industrial placement at work. I say used to as one of my colleagues managed to break it, which at least proved it really was a balloon filled with flour. Which is a shame as I was rather fond of it.