December 12 2007
There is an interesting case for agile development of infrastructure, applying lessons learned from the software world to civil engineering projects. This is a useful metaphor, but there is an…
November 28 2007
I've had a massive pile of code and experiments sitting around for too long. It's time to move on, but I thought, why not throw it out to rot instead of just disposing of it? Who knows, the stuff…
November 21 2007
Finally... A Creative Commons License that is legally valid in Aotearoa New Zealand. There's a few links on a few sites I should start updating now. Well done to Alastair Pharo, Brian Opie, Karin…
November 18 2007
I think one thing that's kind of worth recognizing is that if somebody played a mobile game, and if they think "Orcs and Elves, that was a great game", and it's in the context of, "this was a great…
November 15 2007
"You solipsistic bastard", she said As if what she really wanted was a justification For why the earth was simply circling Her own sun, that vainglorious obsession, A swelling black hole closet Hoarding…
November 8 2007
Ruby programs can be written in unicode, meaning that you can label a real lambda. Once, when working on a school assignment to build a simple regular expression interpreter, I had a similar flash…
November 4 2007
Sometime in the next 30 days, the telecoms firms of the world will have reached a new milestone - three billion subscribers. About ten percent of that number are customers who have multiple accounts,…
October 23 2007
The Dominion Post all but ignores the local body elections for months leading up to the final vote count, but then turns around and has absolutely no problem giving Owen Scott a soapbox for hand-wringing…
October 15 2007
In a 1950 editorial the "New Zealand Design Review" identified the "horrible forces ranged against good design" as Indifference, Cheapness First, Unnecessary Novelty, Mass Production, De Luxe…
October 3 2007
Advice from the hacked (via). The raging reality of having your GMail account stolen: What matters more for your immediate concerns, entropy is out to get you and entropy is going to win.…
September 29 2007
A fascinating chronicle of introducing the One Laptop Per Child project to a small school in Peru. One particular aspect that really jumped out at me was: On the first day, we also discovered that…
September 19 2007
Trent Reznor says some things at a gig in Sydney that aren't exactly going to win him any friends on high but he is totally right. Over the last five years, I have taken great pleasure in watching…
September 14 2007
I was supposedly going to be in Auckland this weekend, but things changed. After a fascinating discussion with Callum Strong on the relativity of rates on Thursday, I spontaneously decided…
September 1 2007
Python 3.0a1 release hits the network, with significant backwards incompatible changes. The best way to describe this is a shedding of the snake's skin, sloughing off a whole bunch of weird ambiguities…
August 30 2007
Raganwald dissects the misguided metaphor from a software process perspective. I have come to believe that these kinds of problems are even more prevalent in the web development world than in…
August 24 2007
Not for the weak of heart, but the prospect of wrangling the call database with Django is a tantalizing hint of things to come...
August 17 2007
The two teams have just briefed, the rooms have been set up, the network is streaming, and we're gathering up all the final bits and pieces we're gonna need (post-it notes, and assorted bits of…
August 10 2007
A low ceiling of grey cloud and screaming 40 knot northerlies means that Spring has arrived in Wellington today. Not that this would be cause for excitement, since the Winter was so mild I hardly…
July 16 2007
John Rose talks about implementing support for tail call optimization in the JVM. I've been waiting for this one, as in my mind, it has long been one of the biggest holes in the leaky dike of…
July 12 2007
It's not a showdown between Javascript and Ruby, it's a race towards bioware. Language oriented programming is not a new idea, but it has taken a long time to become a significant influence on…
July 10 2007
Write Articles, Not Blog Postings could be one of the most arrogant and ineffably crude pieces of writing that Jacob Nielsen has ever published. He starts with reasonable and valid advice: thorough,…
May 22 2007
I've just had a massive breakdown from lack of sleep and stress. Accidentally getting tangled up in the 48hour film project was fun, but definitely didn't help. My major web project of the last couple…
April 17 2007
Russian tycoon announces to the Guardian that he is plotting the overthrow of the Russian state. Kasparov is arrested, and the Putin government orders demonstrators off the streets, and sends riot…
March 22 2007
Via Infosthetics, this exceptionally simple Lie group could be the Mandelbrot set of our generation. The tie-ins to abstract physics are astounding - it forms a picture of what is generally thought…
March 20 2007
This will be of no interest to most people but it's useful to note for future reference. The various click-installer solutions to set up Apache and PHP under Windows such as WAMP don't seem to automate…
December 10 2007
Antisocial Networking couldn't have popped up at a better time for me, as I was actually sitting here, struggling with nascent suspicions about the nature of the XFN microformat. I've been designing…
November 27 2007
Apologies to my readers who couldn't access the site last night. My ISP botched a routine maintenance job on their fileserver cluster, leading to the site being down for more than 6 hours. Very…
November 21 2007
Really? I expected better from such a radical thinker as Jaron Lanier. His recent op-ed in the NYT is just not making any sense at all. Traditionally, artists, writers, musicians have been at…
November 17 2007
As the dust settles, it is clear that the unrest is far from over. Wikipedia has detailed and thorough coverage which is currently the best starting point for exploring the issue, as grandstanding…
November 8 2007
Y-Combinator just released some new anti-procrastination features on their Hacker News site. The fact that I am currently reading this (and posting a blog entry about it) is direct evidence of the…
November 7 2007
I found people remarkably free in talking about politics. Mostly I talked to geeks, of course; they laughed at the Great Firewall (finding a proxy to get around it is no big deal) but were livid…
November 3 2007
Check out this footage of my old mate Bryce in the ring with Shane Cameron, shot not long before the brutal fight in Auckland where Cameron ended up ahead on points but had his forehead beaten to…
October 19 2007
PHP is flawed. Deeply, immensely so. I first discovered this over a year ago, when I made the naive assumption that PHP 5.1 had fixed a lot of the language level failings of its predecessor. Because…
October 9 2007
It just wouldn't be fair to ask where are the women in open source and criticize open source usability without providing some kind of summary of how we can do something about it. Humanized…
October 2 2007
Despite the fact that we may be just shambling toward a messy repeat of last time, I would urge all you Wellington residents out there to get out and vote in the local body elections. So far,…
September 24 2007
Builder is a completely declarative library which makes it easy to generate XML from a cascade of Ruby method calls. But it's not completely smooth sending: working on an Atom feed, I ran into a…
September 18 2007
Wellington based startup Ponoko went public today, in conjunction with the TechCrunch event in San Francisco. Some of you may have seen bits and pieces at the Dowse recently, or even come across…
September 12 2007
Since Ali posted 20 things I learned at FullCodePress, I thought I'd chime in with my own observations from the perspective of being programmer for the Code Blacks.
August 31 2007
Why is one person who cares about children learning to program, if Cut Holes In Shoes And Get A Mask is anything to go by. Many people would think this is completely insane, or merely reinventing…
August 29 2007
I hate to agree with grouchy old Dijkstra, but unfortunately now it's impossible to deny: BASIC is what killed my ability to be a truly great programmer. Dijkstra was right, GOTO completely rots your…
August 22 2007
This week I've got an interesting side project, working as a mentor with a group of MCS students who are learning agile methods the useful way - by actually working on a real project. Our team…
August 17 2007
We're safe and sound in balmy Sydney,
July 20 2007
The process is just as straightforward on OS X as it is on Windows - if you do things manually. The catch for me was that I needed to set up a script to automate the process. Normally, OS X expects…
July 13 2007
Treemaps emerged in the mid 90's as a method of visualizing heirachies, and have since been widely used throughout the software design community. But very little work is out there exploring visualizations…
July 11 2007
Finally, the announcement that everyone's been waiting for: Rasmus and the Zend team have agreed to make an official announcement to discontinue support for PHP4. I've been using PHP5 almost exclusively…
July 5 2007
Finalists for the New Zealand FullCodePress team have been selected, and I'm one of them! Final selection is tomorrow. Good luck to everyone who has been nominated, especially the other two selected…
April 27 2007
There's a lot that could be said about emerging products like RedTacton: Using a new super-sensitive photonic electric field sensor, RedTacton can achieve duplex communication over the human…
April 11 2007
Is the popularity of Twitter best explained using the psychology of addiction and gambling?
March 22 2007
He's a personable fellow, George, greeting our Prime Minister with a cheery "Hey, here's Helen!" upon her arrival. But he's not the sharpest tack in the pack, it must be said. I noticed he had some…
March 16 2007
This site is my playground, a whirlwind of ideas, projects, tutorials, and information, a mental mind map. Warning: this site is undergoing a major transformation in public motion. Aspects…
December 6 2007
Lately, I've adopted a new strategy to stem the flow of procrastination, and have been experimenting with the Bedouin worker lifestyle. I've been doing freelance design work from home for the…
November 23 2007
"Agile" has balkanized, and the individual cults have - in some cases - become religions that are just as bad as the things they intended to replace. But at the outset, the interesting thing about…
November 19 2007
Learn to live cheaply. Learn to live like an animal. One thing we had going for us is we all spent a lot of time in grad school, and long periods of grad school teach you how to live well on a…
November 15 2007
I fear that I'm beginning to sound like a stuck record by now, but I can't help attempting to push back against that particular form of inertia that has infected our discipline. First I saw this,…
November 8 2007
Lockheed Martin, BAE, and Israeli defence contractor RAFAEL have launched a new product to curb growing numbers of pirate attacks worldwide. They claim these robotic gunship boats can even be adapted…
November 4 2007
For many years, Object Oriented discourse has been far too constrained by language oriented thinking.
November 3 2007
MQL must be one of the most overused acronyms in todays technology field, including (but definitely not limited to) such specificities as search/analytics, automated trading, and molecular substructure…
October 15 2007
Rowan has posted a summary of the Trade Me Manifesto, which in turn, was influenced by Google's Corporate Philosophy. Much of it should be plain common sense, except for the fact that so many…
October 9 2007
It gets tiresome when every time someone publishes an article about this issue, a stream of misogynistic trolls start babbling and complaining. You fucking assholes are just proving the point…
October 1 2007
Verizon decides to act against its own economic best interests and block messages from an abortion rights group. This kind of discrimination sets a troubling precedent.
September 19 2007
And of course, it's not just record companies on the verge of extinction. With Australia Votes, Google is flexing its capability to move into the online media space traditionally dominated by…
September 17 2007
It's been a long long time since I've participated in hours and hours of such lively and (mostly) positive discussion. I have to echo Mike's view that Wellington is one of the only places where…
September 1 2007
All of the arts of illusion are like this: even crafting the poem which steers the flat hulk of words through its narrow neck then lofts mainsails by manipulating strings, exerting influence. The…
August 31 2007
In Hearing without listening, 37Signals screws up, then admits what they did wrong and how they fixed it. In the end, it's just a matter of several weeks downtime before the application is working…
August 29 2007
BLDGBLOG talks to Michael Cook, the author and photographer behind the Vanishing Point. Michael's spectacular images of tunnel systems and urban decay are a must-see. He views the city as…
August 20 2007
What a weekend. One of the most intense storms of blogging and flickrizing that I've ever seen, and definitely the most intense all nighter I've ever experienced. Our charity client was so blown…
August 15 2007
There's a tide of opinion suggesting that PHP is threatened with extinction as standard hardware begins to favour widening multicore processors. This would be a fair argument if PHP was a general…
July 18 2007
The Independent Financial Review (via Stuff) revealed today that Air New Zealand and Boeing have a secret working agreement with Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation to test a new type of biofuel for jet…
July 12 2007
As I am now starting to discover, many of these ideas were originally considered by Alan Kay, and summarized at OOPSLA in 1997. If the true shape of object oriented programming is qualitatively…
July 11 2007
I am privileged to be a part of the first NZ FullCodePress team, to travel to Sydney in August. By luck or whatever else, I somehow find myself right in the middle of it... What is possible for…
May 31 2007
There once was a time On the banks of an Icelandic river marsh Where there lived a fisherman with his wife And they had three daughters. Then came one day When the three little daughters all…
April 19 2007
Everyone thinks that the major problems of CSS are mostly due to incompatible browser implementations but that's not quite the full story. It can be hard to see how cascading style sheets are not…
April 3 2007
Forget Everything You Ever Knew about Date-Time Handling in PHP...
March 21 2007
Grant has been doing some great stuff over at Xero, with an account balance view that enables fluid browsing of the time range by adjusting the width of the scroller control. This is a good technique …
March 15 2007
Here's an old journal which hasn't been written to in a while... What shall we do with it, precious?