In which a five-minute hack to put the current working directory in the title bar of the Terminal descends into hours learning the surprising arcanities of BASH.

Like most developers, I spend a lot of time at my computer living in Terminal (and the rest Xcode)*. I have what might be a strange tendency to open a new Terminal window for each new task, I think so that I don’t have to lose the context in my current window. This means that after I’ve finished doing something (or in the middle, when I look at the screen and my obsessive-compulsive ...

Taken when I opened my laptop in an Edinburgh coffee shop. I would guess that BT’s broadband people are pretty happy.

Probably should get some work done before then.

Easter’s just past, and Cadbury’s Creme Eggs are cheap. I’m a sucker for cheap things, so I couldn’t help buying some. The problem is that a whole Creme Egg is rather intense, especially when there’s not the excuse of Easter to egg me on (ha-ha, egg me on. I crack me up...).

Recently, we’ve been watching “Willie’s Wonky Chocolate Factory” on TV. In the programme, Wille Harcourt-Cooze evangelises his “100% cacao” (grown on his own small plantation in Venezuela) chocolate bars for cookery (I think that Creme Eggs are probably about as far as you can get from ...

I found this fascinating. Amongst other interpretations,

“[The Hawthorne effect is] an experimental effect in the direction expected but not for the reason expected; i.e., a significant positive effect that turns out to have no causal basis in the theoretical motivation for the intervention, but is apparently due to the effect on the participants of knowing themselves to be studied in connection with the outcomes measured.”

I’m often sceptical of surveys and the like (especially of the “X% of children surveyed said they carried a knife!” type) because I suspect that people lie to pollsters more than they like to ...