December 16 2005
Frederic Jameson, author of Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism gave a lecture at Vic yesterday about Representations of Globalisation. Jameson's project can perhaps be summed…
November 10 2005
Opinions have been flowing in local media, regarding the intersect between exploding urban situations in France and some of the serious problems in South Auckland at the moment. One thing I'm noticing…
October 18 2005
Too busy and preoccupied to write anything coherent for a while, I've finally been plunging headlong into Ruby and for the first time, doing programming work and experiments that are not directly…
September 25 2005
Without exception, programmers espouse separation of logic and display as an ideal principle. In practice, however, programmers and template engine producers are loath to enforce separation, fearing…
September 20 2005
Well, now the election's over, and there's not much left to do but wait til the coalition is announced (and perhaps look at some visualizations of the results), I have a bit of personal news to relay... As…
September 8 2005
A new TV3/TNS poll puts the Labour party back in front... Projected number of seats in the House on the basis of the latest poll results: * Labour 57 National 45 NZ First 6 Green Party 8 Maori…
September 1 2005
That outré architecture the clouds! I came out dog tired my eyes smeared with words & saw them. I had to laugh. Nature exceeds me in everything including folly. That's truth enough…
August 27 2005
Why and MenTaLguY show how to upwink javascript into web requests - is this a replacement for Greasemonkey, or just total insanity?
August 21 2005
This is a prototype of a language modelling tool, created for the purpose of helping designers, information architects, and developers collaborate better. If you want to check it out, and have access…
August 9 2005
I can't believe they're still arguing about this... it's the year 2005, can we really take the idea of investment and competition in copper wires that seriously? As if theres going to be incentive…
July 23 2005
Why do I always notice shit like this? (via 43 Things)
July 20 2005
Or I'm a complete and total dumbarse... Uploaded some random experiments via FTP, and accidentally overwrote some of the core libraries without realising it. The good thing is that it forced me…
July 3 2005
There is a story about a senior England player who was asked to speak at a corporate seminar soon after the 2003 World Cup. He spoke the day after Woodward had spoken to the same audience and was…
June 15 2005
The web design class that I've been teaching in the Fashion and Textiles Department at Massey is finally finished, and what's more, we've put the portfolios online for all to see at crafty.coretxt.net.nz These…
June 8 2005
Yep, the cat couldn't stay in the bag any longer... I know of at least two implementations that are wingling their way out of development - Trixie and now Turnabout Of course, an Internet Explorer…
June 4 2005
AJAX is not new(s). Previously, I've been critical of the nomenclature, perhaps more for aesthetic reasons than anything else, but I have to agree with Simon Willison, who…
May 12 2005
It's good in Wellington at the moment. I'm just glad that I am going to be able to sleep this weekend (unlike those about to unleash the 48 Hours!). But there's a lot going…
April 30 2005
In the communities of the Paleolithic, archeologists often find a single dwelling, isolated from the others, at the boundary between the community and the wilds of the world beyond; this is…
March 28 2005
Entries from the Dictionary of Human Geography Abbreviation of "biological diversity"... conservation of patterns and complexity... Generally understood as persistance…
February 16 2005
Thinking more about Wikipedia, and the kind of content disputes that seem to demarcate in terms of specialist/expert vs non-specialist/layman, led me to wonder whether there…
December 8 2005
Our formal attempts at understanding language tend to be hierachically structured, but when it comes to actually organizing language, it is well known that meaning is relational and constantly fluctuates.…
November 7 2005
Just got back from a few days chilling in Auckland (pleasantly free of internet technology, thank you very much). Touched down in Welli on Saturday night, to be greeted with the amazing sight of a…
October 4 2005
If you are a young, idealistic person, don’t get involved in organised politics. Contribute to your community, your neighbourhood, your immediate circle of trust and support. This is the best…
September 25 2005
In response to More Thoughts on How Microformats are Different, I'm starting to wonder if maybe there is room for another proper noun that describes "a specific compound of semantic XHTML units",…
September 11 2005
Labour: wipe interest on all student loans. National: cut petrol tax. Vroom vroom... Let's treat the NZ public like a boisterous toddler. If they don't listen to us, we'll just stuff their…
September 6 2005
Physical/Mental side-effects include howling arrays of wolves that cannot be popped out;
August 31 2005
As much as Web 2.0 ideas are about openness and freedom, they indicate an increasing emphasis towards power and heirachy. You can see this directly manifesting in the present situation of Yahoo! swallowing…
August 27 2005
The last few days I've been locked into a frustrating negative and consuming frame of mind where writing and programming clash together, which unfortunately caused a few headaches. Just one of those…
August 11 2005
KiwiMP is an open source project aimed at opening up the information available about New Zealand's government and political processes: For all its faults and foibles, our democracy is a profound…
August 5 2005
Having slogged through the trenches on some pretty large scale HTML and CSS builds, I tend to have a somewhat jaundiced view of declarative syntax. There’s only so many hundreds of hours you…
July 23 2005
Are stories like this ineviatable? It looks like things are starting to get out of control again...
July 16 2005
Brilliant: tardme.co.nz... complete with threats of legal action.
June 24 2005
G8Reboot wants to make poverty history... But what about global climate change or the impending end of the world?(*2)
June 13 2005
Sometimes, things happen that are just totally impossible to explain. Like this... Ok, so that border on the feature object box is set to 1px dotted #D4E5FF. Now, we…
June 6 2005
Microformats make sense to me immediately, in a way that RDF never has. By focusing on visible data, the markup retains a high degree of interoperability with existing…
June 2 2005
Wireframes or schematics (also known as "paper prototypes") are a common way to create a mock up of a user interface. In the best case, they can function in a similar…
May 3 2005
Gecko support for CSS3 multicolumn layouts looks interesting... I know next to nothing about CSS3 in Mozilla, but this is something that I have wanted to use on a…
April 14 2005
So stood the young man On the verge of never holding back, But never still yet Oblivious to praise, He could only focus on the chinks in his armour Small steps in a search…
March 9 2005
A few weeks after the Indian Ocean tsunami, and it comes to the attention of the UN that a whole lot of people living on the coast of Somalia have started to show signs of…
February 15 2005
So Te Ara is finally live, and I'm immensely proud of having been involved in the design process, primarily the development of the CSS/Javascript system, the lower level content pages and the…
November 27 2005
Google is based on the concept of the web as a gigantic directed graph. Edges in this graph are determined by directional hyperlinks between web pages. How many of us understand how the usage of rel…
October 28 2005
Francis Till comes down full fist slinging on Governments & Open Source, which turns out to be little more than another thinly veiled attack on the Green Party. Beyond the hot air and apparent…
October 3 2005
The key concept that underlies the modern web is the separation of presentation and structure, and recently, there has been a lot of interest in documenting the synthesis of human friendly and…
September 22 2005
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning…
September 8 2005
One of the worrying things about this National Party under Brash, is the noticeable lack of clearly planned policies and strategies. In terms of fiscal objectives, these well documented tax cuts are…
September 5 2005
The situation in New Orleans painfully illustrates a totality of social disintegration, a powder keg of anger and anarchy primed by the greatest oppressive capitalist state this world has ever seen.…
August 31 2005
Make a National billboard... a few people have taken this for a spin with the most obvious tax joke ever, looking after US interests, the Green Party, authority, and facism and socialism.
August 23 2005
But it's not... Yet the author of this new RSS 3 spec has made a more-than-insignificant oversight: he's missed the fact that RSS 3 already exists and it's a f**king joke... Aaron Swartz certainly…
August 9 2005
This piece landed in my inbox twice today, and immediately caught my attention. It's well written, and makes some excellent points that I think are exactly on the mark. Paul Graham has elaborated…
August 3 2005
Spring is beginning here, as evidenced by the tiny yellow blossoms sticking to my shoes these last couple of days... It seems a very fertile time for open source collaboration at the moment, and…
July 20 2005
Any users of Greasemonkey who aren't on the mailing list, and didn't see the latest round of security discussions should immediately read this and follow the requisite steps... Update: Simon has…
July 10 2005
Of all the places my parents could have been on the 7th July, they just happened to be travelling on the underground in London that morning. It took me nearly a whole day to get hold of them, a fairly…
June 18 2005
In Remote Tagging: A Richer Social Model, Stowe Boyd describes an addition to the RelTag microformat that allows shared tags themselves to be embedded in the link.…
June 12 2005
I've started a simple repository of Greasemonkey User Scripts. Mostly experiments I've been playing with in my spare time, and occasional annoyances with sites that I feel compelled to fix. The most…
June 5 2005
Managing RESTful AJAX operations is an open problem. While I say that aspects of managing HTTP requests, and designing UI feedback cannot be understood in isolation and must…
May 18 2005
So the Associate Minister of Education shoved a sawn-off tennis ball into a students mouth back in the early 80's at a Dunedin Secondary School - ye olde "mute puppet"…
May 1 2005
Some things keep going, a little bit at a time... Just a collection of random notes at the moment, but I've made some big changes recently, that should start to make the core features easier to…
March 31 2005
Why you would choose PHP over Java on your next major CMS development project: You want to write anywhere, run once. You want to work directly with classes,…
February 21 2005
Amongst those of the user experience and information architecture persuasion, there seems to be a growing trend that involves taking interesting new technological and interactive…
February 14 2005
I have started reorganizing this site to be better able to document the ongoing research projects I'm working on.