Since reading the news that Yahoo! have hired PayPal's president, I no longer want anything to do with them.

The only things I had left on my 12-year-old Yahoo! account were a few contacts from the days I used Messenger and email and the photos on my Flickr account. I exported the former easily and I'm in the process of backing up the photos and their metadata from Flickr now.

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2011 was a busy year. I had a host of speaking engagements, including presenting opening and closing keynotes on User Experience and the future of web and mobile design and development at conferences like Future of Web Design, NSConference in the UK, Fronteers in the Netherlands, Login in Lithuania. I hosted the Brand Perfect Tour for Monotype Imaging in London and Berlin, taught my iOS Development and Mobile User Experience workshops multiple times in Brighton, Oslo, and Stockholm, hosted a Geek Ninja Battle and created my own conference, Update 2011 (watch the videos here), and, as part of the steering committee, I helped realise the inaugural Brighton Digital Festival. As part of the Brighton Digital Festival, Anna Debenham from Mozilla’s Hackasaurus project and I also visited two schools in Brighton to teach the kids to code and I also gave a new talk on augmented reality at the Improving Reality conference. Additionally, I presented sessions at the Norwegian Developers Conference, The Big M, and Be Bettr, mentored designers at Design Jam London 2, was interviewed as part of the Insites Tour, wrote a few opinion pieces for .net magazine, and helped judge the .net awards.

No more eating animals

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In my quest to move away from WordPress (and PHP/MySQL, which reminds me far too much of 1999 for my comfort), I'm evaluating several static site blog solutions to migrate this blog to and to use for a couple of other blogs that I want to set up for next year. As part of the process, I wanted to give Octopress a shot. Octopress is a static site blogging solution built on mojombo/jekyll – the solution that powers GitHub Pages. The beauty of it is that you can simply deploy your blog to GitHub Pages, and even use a custom domain, simply by pushing to your repository (GitHub will pass your repository through Jekyll automatically–simples!)

The problem is that there are apparently issues with installing the dependencies on a box running Lion with Xcode 4.2. The following solution worked for me. I hacked it together from that StackOverflow thread as well as the Octopress Setup Guide:

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I was working through a tutorial on Bogart and CouchDB and decided to implement the examples in CoffeeScript instead of JavaScript as I've been meaning to play with CoffeeScript for a while now.

One of the files in the tutorial is the package.json file for managing dependencies in the (absolutely lovely) package manager npm. When I wrote the data structure out in CoffeeScript, however, the compiled data structure wasn't valid JSON according to JSONLint (it was nested between parentheses, had unquoted keys, and a trailing semi-colon, as you can see in the code snippet.) (more...)

Update: Check out New – Core Cocoa: Native iOS Development Workshop in Brighton, UK, February 22-24, 2012..

Here's your last chance to attend a native iOS workshop by me in the UK. Come to Brighton on November 23-25 to join me for three days of hands-on hacking as you learn the foundations of Objective-C, Cocoa Touch, and Xcode. We'll be covering iOS5 and Xcode 4.2 (the latest versions).

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