Daniel Kennett

Why crashing your car on purpose is a smart thing to do… Sometimes.

Posted in Cars, Models & Gadgets on 18. Dec, 2009 | 0 Comments

Stuck in the Snow Many people I know will tell me I’m being irresponsible for doing this myself, let alone telling others to do it. However, I saw one of those people nearly trash £55,000 worth of Porsche by simply letting go of the wheel and hitting the brakes when the back end broke loose, so what the hell do they know?

When you’re dealing with a car that’s losing control, you need to know how the car behaves in order to concentrate on getting it back in check. When you start losing control, you have seconds to react and fix it before you go past the point of no return. If you’re already compensating for your car’s tendency to pull right under heavy braking in the snow by the time it happens and putting in exactly the right amount of steering in to stabilise the car and allow stability control to do its job, you have a much better chance of coming out of it without a dented car or skull than someone who’s thinking “Shit, what’s what crunching sound?! Why is my car pulling to the left? Why has my car lost power?”

iPhone Companion Apps: New Project to App Store in Two Months

Normally, I write a “Postmortem” blog post after each product I ship. However, recently I got the chance to give a talk at CocoaHeads Swindon, and chose to talk about my trials and tribulations when writing Clarus for iPhone (iTunes Link). The other day it struck me that this actually turned out to be a great postmortem, so instead of writing a blog post I sat at my computer and recorded a video of my slides and commentary.

An Eternal Headache: Core Data, Undo and Files

Core Data is awesome. One of the most awesome things about it is that you get free undo/redo. Of course, you wouldn’t actually ship anything but the simplest of applications with the undo Core Data provides, but getting it up to scratch it pretty simple — most of my additions in Clarus are simply putting certain operations into undo groups.

PRS-505 and PRS-600 display comparison

I bought my Sony Reader PRS-505 nearly a year ago, and as a direct result the amount of books I read skyrocketed from around 1 per year to 2-3 per month. I adore this thing, and even considered importing a PRS-700 from the USA — but I was put off by the reports of a very glare prone screen. For the first time in a long time, I’d actually prefer to keep my old gadget than replace it with the “better” model. In my opinion, an eBook Reader should be like a car – provide enough technology to get the job done well, and don’t distract me with needless crap, especially if it gets in the way of the primary functionality.

KNKVC – Implementing Key-Value Coding and Key-Value Observing in C#.NET

My favourite kind of programming is framework programming. Designing a component outside of the complexities of a whole application allows you to design beautiful, clean APIs and components. In fact, every single application I write or am a part of writing ends up shipping in components. Music Rescue for Windows, for instance, has a library for talking to iPods which I wrote, a library containing user interface controls which I wrote and the application (which my colleague wrote) imports them both and assembles it all together into an application.

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Preparing for Winter Veil

Posted in General on 15. Dec, 2009 | No Comments

Winter is my favourite season, by far. Yes, summer is “warm”, but there’s nothing as great as being outside in a crisp winter’s day before coming home and sitting by the fire.

My childhood is filled with memories like these. It was pretty routine, especially in the winter, to take the dogs out with my Dad for a several miles hike before coming home, chopping up logs and burning them in the huge fireplace our countryside cottage had. When we ran out of logs, we’d take his 1930’s era truck to the local wood processing plant and fill it up with logs.

An Epiphany, Of Sorts

Posted in General on 06. Dec, 2009 | No Comments

In 1999, I discovered two bands that remain at the core of my love of music today — Counting Crows and Barenaked Ladies. I can’t actually remember how I found Barenaked Ladies, but I heard a Counting Crows track (Hangin’ Around) playing in the local branch of the now-defunct MVC and bought it there and then.

Those two bands changed the way I perceive music. Counting Crows especially is a band whose music can make you laugh, cry and everything in between if you’re in the right place. In time, I started to reject any band whose music I couldn’t ‘connect’ with, and my discography was very small.

The Devolution of Communication, Pt. Deux

Posted in General on 01. Oct, 2009 | No Comments

Since my last display of how bad our communication can be, I thought that I could try harder to not pipe random crap through the SMS app. Unfortunately, that meant most of the messages sent between us were either teasing one another or, again, status updates — hopefully with better grammar, though.

I Fought the Law?

Posted in General on 27. Jul, 2009 | 2 Comments

I first started using computers on a day-to-day basis in the late nineties, making me around thirteen. Like most thirteen year-olds, I had an active imagination and wanted to do all the cool stuff I read about in Mac magazines with Claris Homepage and Photoshop. However, also like most thirteen year-olds, I didn’t have a [...]

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