UK Politician Tweets About “Retards”

A politician from Hull in the UK described protesters as “retards” on Twitter, the BBC reports:

Conservative group leader John Fareham made the comment after Friday’s meeting, which saw the council approve a controversial £65m savings plan.
[His tweet read:] “15 hours in council today very hard hitting day and the usual collection of retards in the public gallery spoiling it for real people.”

I’m not up on foreign usage, but here in the UK “retard” is a term of abuse that’s used to describe people with physical disabilities. It’s also a word that career-minded politicians really, really shouldn’t use.

I’m constantly amazed how many people use social networks on the assumption that no-one’s paying attention. Folks: the whole world is paying attention.

Those Sneaky Footnotes

Yesterday’s article on OS X Lion’s full-screen mode included the following footnote from Apple’s Lion preview page:

[Some features are only] available with apps that have been developed to work with Lion.

I’ve added “some features” to represent the asterisks which are spread through the page, linking certain features to the disclaimer above. The explanation of Lion’s new auto-save feature, for example, reads like this (in full, including footnote):

Lion saves changes in the working document instead of creating additional copies, making the best use of available disk space. The lock feature prevents inadvertent changes from being saved and automatically locks documents after two weeks. And the revert feature returns you to the state the document was in when you last opened it, so you can feel free to experiment with confidence.* [Jump to footnote] Available with apps that have been developed to work with Lion.

English translation from legalese: this feature might not be available in non-Apple apps. Here’s a list of the features from the Lion preview page which won’t automatically work with non-Apple apps:

  • Full-screen apps
  • Auto save
  • Versions
  • Resume

Ok, so. Apple are doing what every other profit-making business on the planet does: they’re emphasising the great new features of their shiny new operating system, and they don’t want to spoil the show by shouting about how, you know, whether or not this stuff works in the apps you use is actually down to the work of third-party developers. Just installing Lion isn’t enough.

I don’t have a problem with this. But I do think it’s interesting how many people will take Apple’s promise that feature X will be available in Lion as a promise that feature X will be omnipresent in Lion. I guarantee: three minutes after Lion has been released, someone will be blogging about how they’re angry at Apple because their non-Apple app won’t go full-screen. Come back at the end of 2011 and take away my blogger’s license if this doesn’t happen.

Rails 3.0.5

Rails 3.0.5 has just been released: no major new features, but some nice bug fixes. Grab it while it’s hot.

Linking To Existing Posts In WordPress 3.1

One of my favourite features in WordPress 3.1 is the option to link to existing posts when you’re using the rich text editor. It’s just so simple: select the link text, hit the link icon, and pick the post you want to link to. WordPress does the rest.

I just love this: recently I’ve been linking to myself a lot (it’s basically egoism) and I’ve been wishing for exactly this feature. Now it’s here, it’s such a time saver: no more tabbing back and forth to get links to my own posts from pages on my own blog.

A small change that makes a big difference: the hallmark of great development.

The Mathematics Of Voting Reform


One of the reasons the UK needs some kind of electoral reform is this: a person’s vote is more or less powerful depending on which political party the person votes for.

That’s not democratic.

The graph above shows the disparity between votes (inner circle) and seats in parliament (outer circle). All parties suffer from some kind of distortion between votes and seats, but look at the Liberals (yellow) and the “others” (grey): they have to get many more votes compared to, say, Labour in order to get the same number of seats. If you vote Liberal, your vote counts maybe half as much as it would if you vote Labour.

Voting reform would give more power to smaller parties, but only because it would create parliaments that more accurately reflect those parties’ votes. The system we have in the UK right now is massively biased in favour of Labour and the Conservatives.

Full-Screen Apps on OS X Lion

Lions & Lion Cubs

The developer preview of OS X Lion is out. I’m going to resist “cage” puns and focus on one of Lion’s new features: full-screen mode.

Recently I’ve started using most of my regular apps in what I would, until now, have called full-screen mode. On my Mac, running Snow Leopard, this means that the active application window grows to fill the desktop area — its border and title bar remain visible, as does the menu bar, but after entering this mode I can no longer see the desktop or other windows behind my application. The effect is “fill-desktop” rather than true full-screen.

I’m not going to be picky though: “fill-desktop” is a great way to reduce distractions and it almost harks back to my MS-DOS days. It’s weird that interface design is coming full-circle in this respect: we’ve moved from one app on screen at a time, to many apps in many windows, and back to (the option to have) one app on screen at a time.

Of course this isn’t a return to one-app-at-a-time systems: even if the app you’re using fills the screen, you’re one click/tap/gesture away from any of the other apps you’re running in the background. Even the iPhone and iPod Touch — the smallest and least powerful of Apple’s computers — have this ability.

So: we had one-app screens, then many-app screens, and now with Lion we have one-and-many-app screens. It’s a nice Hegelian synthesis. And so I thought I’d look into exactly what’s possible with full-screen mode in Lion.

My first thoughts — and yours too, probably — were “how do I run an app full-screen?” and “which apps can I run full-screen?”. The original Lion announcement provides a simple answer to the first question (at about 1:04:00): all you have to do to switch an app into full-screen mode is click the green “maximise” button in the title bar.

Watching that announcement again earlier today, I thought that the answer to my second question was “any app”. It looked like a click of the green button would take any app on Lion into full-screen mode. But I was wrong.

Today Apple updated their Lion preview page. Here’s a quote from the full-screen section:

Systemwide support allows third-party developers to take advantage of full-screen technology to make their apps more immersive, too.

The key word there is “allows”: apps can take advantage of full-screen mode if they want to, but they have to want to. If we head down to the foot of the page, we get confirmation in the form of a footnote:

[Full-screen mode is] Available with apps that have been developed to work with Lion.

In other words, Apple’s own apps will work full-screen with Lion from day one. Third-party apps will need to be updated to use “full-screen technology”. Don’t you just hate those sneaky footnotes?

This is a shame, because I was hoping that my favourite apps would automatically take advantage of full-screen mode once they were running on Lion. But apparently I’ll need to wait for updates.

I’m not complaining though: Lion is full of good stuff and I’m just happy that I don’t have to develop on Windows. But I’m looking forward to the day when I go full-screen for real, and lose myself in my work.

Update: Frederic Lardinois has a nice review of the Lion developer preview, including details of toolbar icons you can use to take an app full-screen (and back again).

Image from fortherock on Flickr

How To Force SSH Password Authentication

Recently I had a problem SSHing into a client’s server: to fix the problem, I forced SSH to use password authentication and disabled public key authentication. Here’s how:

This one-liner won’t affect your global SSH configuration: it just tells SSH to use only password authentication for this one request

Google Moves German Border

From the BBC: Google maps shows the Netherlands’ border running right into the harbour of German border town Emden.

This is what happens when engineers at a billion-dollar company get bored. What shall we do to fill the time? I know, let’s mess with Europe.

Goodbye Gaddafi?

UK Channel 4: “Gaddafi on the brink of losing power”. Interesting, in-depth article. Most importantly, their conclusion is that Gaddafi is likely to be forced from power but that this won’t precipitate a civil war in Libya. This from Dr Imad El-Anis, a Libya specialist:

I believe we are in for a tough time, but I don’t think there will be civil war in Libya.

Let’s hope not.

Rails 3 + RSpec + Speed

Here’s a nice guide to getting RSpec tests running quickly (and automatically) on Rails 3, from Peter Cooper at Ruby Inside. I use RSpec every day and my tests already run pretty quickly, but anything that speeds things up even more is alright by me :)

As an aside, if you’re not using RSpec on Rails you really should look into it. And if you’re not running your tests automatically (and repeatedly) using something like autotest or watchr — both mentioned in Peter’s article — then I highly recommend doing doing just that to keep your code under control.