andyvanee

As a sideline to one of my bigger projects, I decided to build a little webapp that would search Twitter for a hashtag. Fairly basic, but it’s got a few interesting little features:...

I keep discovering new uses for Automator. I’m not sure when the “Services” option became available, but it’s worth checking out. I had previously wrote a text-to-markdown action, which converted the clipboard contents from markdown to HTML....

I am a Quartz Composer junky. I love tinkering with ideas and hacking together logic gates within this kind of visual programming environment. I think this it’s the best way to teach core CS techniques that are often obscured in text-based code....

I’m a command-line guy at heart when it comes to programming. It seems much more organic to know what every project file is doing and how each one contributes to the whole....

I’ve just picked up Gene Wolfe’s collection of short stories, “Endangered Species” for a second read. I stopped after the introduction to think about it for a while. It’s that good....

It’s been bugging me for a while that I didn’t understand the method behind jQuery’s function chaining. So I built the smallest functional version of it. I call it aQuery (for andy, or awesome)....

Developing native apps is a pain. Yes, you have the luxury of fixed screen dimensions and access to hardware features that may not be available elsewhere, but when you’re done, you have an app that only works on one platform....

School has started and I’ve been very busy with projects, but haven’t had time to write. And in fact there’s not a lot to write about. Sure, I’ve been working on a lot of cool stuff, but the big picture hasn’t come into focus....

Backups and Archives are two different things. Ideally you should have a good archiving system, and your backup would be a redundant copy of that. In photography, a robust archiving system has between two and four copies of any file....

I’ve been blogging a fair bit lately about metadata, archiving and dealing with the masses of information that we produce and consume today. It all comes from an idea that has been alternatively percolating and distilling in my mind....