Miscellaneous

From time to time my Mac is doing stuff which takes quite awhile. Converting images, converting videofiles between formats or other stuff, which may take a long time (but reasonable predictable).

In those cases I run a little command in the terminal, to automatically shut down the Mac upon completion:

sudo shutdown -h +120

This command sets a timer which shutdown the machine after two hours (the 120 parameters being after 120 minutes).

I really like simple games, which you can play where ever you are - and which still has enough challenges to be interesting for quite a while. One of the best games I’ve played for a long time is Flight Control for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The game was developed by Firemint.

It’s a fairly simple game. You’re in control of an Airport and all you have to do is make sure the planes land at the runways. To do this you simply draw their designated paths on the screen. There are 4 different aircrafts - helicopters, propeller planes, small jets and large jets. As you play more planes concurrently enters the airspace - and eventually it gets quite busy and avoiding mid-air collisions a challenge.

Working with application development - either on the web, on the desktop or any other place - is often quite interesting. When making new releases features are added, changed - or in rare cases removed.

As a developer - or “software product manager” - it must be an interesting challenge to keep up with the users and the market to capture the features and changes to a product, which will make it better from release to release.

One of the hottest sites on the web for more than a year is twitter, but what is Twitter?

• I’ve tried a few times to explain it, and while it may be a fun task, it has often become quite a mess. This is an attempt to capture the most successful explanation of twitter.

The core of Twitter is a combination of three different characteristics:

• Twitter is like a blog - An author publish content. It may be personal, it may be themed, it may be interessting - there are no set rules for the contents except those set by the author.
• Twitter is like an SMS - There are a 140 character limit on each piece of content. If you need more, you need to split contents in several “twits”.
• Twitter is a network - It’s no just a website. Through build in services and APIs you can connect with twitter through SMS, desktop clients, Instant messaging and many other ways. Besides a technical network, it’s also a social network where you can follow other interesting users, communicate with other users (private or in public).

That’s pretty much the core.

At work we produce a few websites and have a few “web dashboards”. Wouldn’t it be nice, if public screens around the office could play a little loop mixing the websites and the dashboards together in a slideshow loop?

After an hour of javascript debugging, a nice little generic webpage slideshow was put together, and if you have a similar need a copy is now available in the lab. It’s simple, it should work in most browsers, and it probably has the least features of any slideshow out there.