The jquery-simple-color plugin has received a bunch of callback-related goodness thanks to jbergen. He’s also added a live preview option which displays the currently-hovered-on color.

I’m a huge fan of the design of Reeder, and wanted to take a stab at recreating their fading two-tone horizontal rule in CSS for this blog.

I keep forgetting how to do this, so purely for my own benefit - how to set up Ubuntu to send via sendmail and SendGrid.

My old recursive-design.com site has served me well for a couple of years of contracting and consulting, but having jumped headfirst into a startup, my focus is now on reducing my workload rather than increasing it :)

One of my favourite services at the moment is Transloadit, who provide an image processing API that works a treat on top of platforms like Heroku, where there are strict request timeout limits that make large uploads difficult. They handle auto-orientation of images automagically by default, and normally I’m not even aware of it happening during testing since my camera and OSX also handle auto-orientation transparently.

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time playing with ruby-processing (and processing in general) recently. It’s also been my first exposure to JRuby which has been a bit of an eye-opener, in terms of the sheer number of Java libraries that it makes available in Ruby.

All the fun stuff in processing seems to be OpenGL-related, and after a lot of research the easiest way to dig in ended up being the GLGraphics Java library, which was made specifically for use in processing.

There was a surprising amount of discussion on Hacker News today on whether or not underscores are stupid, with suggestions ranging from changing key bindings to using the Dvorak layout.

Here’s an alternative (although possibly slightly drastic) solution - get a Japanese keyboard:

The last year has been a bit of a whirlwind, and saw Emi and I leave Tokyo, travel Asia, Russia and Europe for a couple of months, spend some time back in Australia catching up with family, and eventually take up an offer we couldn’t refuse to co-found a startup in Christchurch, New Zealand.

I recently installed ruby 1.9.2 via rvm, and suddenly every command started spitting out hundreds of line of deprecation messages :

I’ve spent the last couple of evenings playing around with some Hello World-type stuff for Facebook app development in preparation for an up-coming Facebook/Rails gig.

After creating a new app on Facebook, you are presented with the code for a basic starter-page for the app: