Right – sorry there’s been no news of late: I broke a bone in my foot, which means I have been out of action for a week. Doctors say it will take at least 6 weeks, but in the developer tradition, I have decided that I should aim to make it a week early just […]
Mac Based Till System – The First Big Problem
So, not long into the problem and we have our first problem. The issue is how we print and open the till drawer.By default the till drawer does not open when you print something. There seems to be no way of altering the preferences to open till drawer by default. There’s also another little niggle […]
Mac Based Till System – The Hardware
So, first thing to consider for me was – is this possible? Is there any hardware out there that is mac supported? I did a bit of digging and found that there are a wealth of barcode scanners and till drawers, but the only manufacturer of mac compatible POS printers is Star Micronics. So what […]
Building a Mac Web Based Till System
My wife owns a toy shop in Hackney, London and uses a regular Casio till. Recently, she has begun to get annoyed with the lack of reportage in her life – What are my best sellers? What am I running low on? Where are my goddam bar charts? Whats the solution to this? Easy, I […]
My Transdot is 9 years old
These days, there’s not much call for the dear old transdot (transparent gif), but I was making a newsletter template today and realised I missed my transdot’s ninth birthday. Rather than make one each time, I clone the old one. Asexual reproduction if you will, like an amoeba. So the original one was created on […]
Will history look back on developers as 21st Century coalminers?
I’m in the backroom right now, handcoding some HTML for my wife’s website. The kids are going to sleep in their room down the hall. I suddenly get the feeling that the future may not look on developers as shining guardians of morality and common sense, whose hard work and openness shone a beacon for […]
Language, Timothy
I like to spice up my business communication with a bit of analogy now and then. I think that adding the odd fruity turn of phrase helps deliver your message in a convenient package for the end user. In the age of digital communication, conveying your meaning to a stranger without picking up a telephone […]
BBEdit tips and tricks
Found a great tip today for BBEdit BBEdit has a great markup library, but it’s so hidden that I rarely use it. Today I had a big text document from word that I needed to transcribe to a web page. Following tips are great. 1. Use my tidyword applescript to strip any word doc nasties […]
Amazon S3, CSS, Gzip and Safari
We use a Amazon S3 a lot. It’s a great service that can get expensive if you have a lot of traffic, or a lot of bandwidth. With this in mind (and also trying to keep page weight down on what is fast becoming a bloaty homepage), I set about trying to serve the CSS […]