December 20 2008
Though I'm clearly not a fan of link whoring "best of" or "top 10" posts, I wanted to take a quick look back at the most amazing ideas and incisive commentary that exploded through my RSS reader this…
December 8 2008
This is the full text of my submission to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Trade regarding the proposed free trade agreement with the United States. Much of this draws from the precedent set…
November 16 2008
How Do Committees Invent? is a 1968 paper by Melvin Conway, where he describes a social phenomenon later transliterated into the Conway's Law adage by Fred Brooks in the Mythical Man Month. The essence…
November 3 2008
Apologies for the recent silence on this channel. The pipeline is rather choked at present, and I haven't completed any interesting content for a while. Recent work has been fairly frustrating and…
September 19 2008
The world wide web has led to a massive day-to-day proliferation of crap jokes that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago, and the programming culture is no exception. Interestingly enough though,…
September 1 2008
In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or…
August 26 2008
Dog Bites Man Month. Or does it? The criticism is sharp, but I'm not sure how deep it cuts. Anecdotal evidence is no less valid than statistical reasoning if it is widely understood to be advice that…
August 19 2008
This is an introductory guide to the theory and praxis of parsing and lexical analysis. All this material is a necessary basic foundation to the study of parsing.
August 3 2008
The meme of PHP's deeper language problems and possible extinction has bubbled to the surface again from various recent discussions, but my views on this are very different to what they used to be.…
July 20 2008
Y-Combinator has published a list of ideas they'd like to see new startups tackle. Aside from obvious criticisms (we're already well familar with Paul Graham's penchant for proselytizing certain forms…
June 21 2008
How can we close the perceptional gap that lies between two dimensional maps and the surrounding three dimensional reality? Enkin is a technology aimed at the Google Android platform that…
May 26 2008
Personal branding - building online equity through ones own internet identity - has become a prime movement in the recent trend towards renegotiating the conventional relations between employer…
May 19 2008
Well, we did it... after an incredible series of mishaps (like this) and failures to source essential equipment (like this), things actually started going really well. Our assigned genre was Crime,…
March 16 2008
What does time to market really mean? Beyond face value, Time to Twitter sets up a grotesque caricature of the real evolution of Twitter as an idea. Going by the original sketches, Twitter was conceived…
February 23 2008
Tantek is fighting an uphill battle in his quest to rid the world of email. Email is ingrained, ubiquitous, and everywhere. Every person that regularly logs on to Hotmail or Gmail contributes to this…
February 20 2008
The carpet has been pulled out from under our feet and the new web is a very different place to what we were used to. On Friday morning at Webstock, eager conference goers were subjected to several…
February 18 2008
So I've started another website, a kind of ongoing accident, with the idea echoing so intensely during Webstock as I culled together my 8x5 presentation, it just seemed to burst out of my brain and…
February 3 2008
So I have joined SilverStripe in a full time role as a core developer. It's a fantastic opportunity for me to apply my programming and design skills to a mature open source software project with a…
January 23 2008
As languages change, so do typefaces. These changes are not radical; they are subtle evolutions that address culture and technology. Modern typography requires modern typefaces, designed by the…
January 11 2008
The implications of Pig City by MVRDV are a sensory and ethical challenge - architecture that tests the fine line between social criticism and gritty realism. If meat consumption was to stay…
January 6 2008
Learning how to forget the properties of programming languages themselves, and think about the context of what is actually written in these languages.
December 18 2008
Thanks to Mathew and Bronwyn, the Creative Freedom Foundation is here: The Creative Freedom Foundation launches today in New Zealand to unite artists who are against the removal of New Zealander's…
December 3 2008
Software development is hard. A lot of people like the idea of couching this difficulty in a form of explanation by analogy. The most common comparisons are generally the most facile and glib, and…
November 14 2008
People think that it is strange that someone like me who knows so much about programming languages chooses to program in PHP so frequently. They're probably right, and I appreciate where…
October 13 2008
Hip hop is not just a mirror of what is, it should also be a reflection of what can be. I like that Obama recognizes the problem of materialism in contemporary rap music. However, I'm not…
September 17 2008
Several friends recently introduced me to a game (which we later found out wasn't new as we thought). It's very simple to play: pick two Wikipedia articles, and try to jump from the first to the…
August 29 2008
Simpletest is quite possibly my all time favorite PHP library. The way it's put together greatly appeals to my sense of object oriented design symmetry and the high level API is absolutely fantastic…
August 25 2008
Interesting research is emerging that explores new programming models for mesh connected mobile devices. The experimental language called AmbientTalk is a prototype based object oriented language…
August 15 2008
The diaries of George Orwell are now being published in blog format by The Orwell Prize. The diaries begin in August 1938 and cover the period up until October 1942. They're being timed to appear…
July 29 2008
I always enjoy reading interviews and discussions with Larry Wall - a brilliant language designer whose unconventional wisdom and humor makes his explanations of complex and chaotic issues seem…
July 13 2008
One cannot predict what part these oils will play in the Colonies in the future. In any case, they make it certain that motor-power can still be produced from the heat of the sun, which is always…
June 16 2008
For quite some time, I've been hearing rumors and stories about a giant Texas-sized ball of garbage floating around the Pacific Ocean. Now this story pops up in Vice Magazine, of all places, which…
May 23 2008
From Summon Monsters? Open The Door? Heal? Or Die?, which discusses the declining value of blog comments and social news sites: A funny thing about these sites is that they know about this problem.…
April 30 2008
A true intellectual is a man who, after reading a book and being convinced by its arguments, will shoot someone or, more likely, order someone shot. - John McCarthy For some reason, I found…
February 27 2008
Recently, I've been talking a lot about freeing the internet in Wellington by spreading excess bandwidth from various 'net connections across a city-wide mesh. But this is a best case scenario compared…
February 21 2008
Maybe the Discovery One really should have headed to Saturn rather than Jupiter and beyond the Infinite? The North pole of Saturn is surrounded by a massive hexagonal structure which was first…
February 20 2008
Many of us are still conditioned to think of design frameworks in terms of grid systems, Swiss graphic design, and rigid corporate identity systems. The problems with these are similar to the problems…
February 11 2008
Excitement builds... Today was the first day of Webstock workshops in Wellington, and s'all abuzz in the NZWC. At SilverStripe, more than half our office is likely to be gone over the two conference…
January 31 2008
Origami has expanded far beyond its origins in step by step folding patterns. These Crease Patterns are designed to be one-step transforms from flat paper into the finished shape. Even though the…
January 18 2008
Frameworks are the shining stars of this current era of web development and there are many benefits for designers and programmers to focus technical solutions around a given framework as a platform…
January 7 2008
I'm looking for work. If anyone knows of a good Wellington based position for an information designer slash programmer slash writer with 10 years experience building HTML and CSS websites and 6 years…
January 4 2008
Equality is a mathematical concept, not an object concept. It's contextual. So, what is the correct implementation of equals? Sometimes it's no implementation at all. On the Beautiful Code…
December 12 2008
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. - John Gilmore Interesting recent developments in the ongoing war of perception. Now, Australian ISP's are refusing to take part…
December 1 2008
We are threatened. In lieu of having the time or mental obduracy to eloquently express this stream of thoughts in essay or article form, I'll just jot down a summary of related themes. Hopefully…
November 13 2008
It's hard to step away from our assumptions and actually consider the experiences that non-technical people have using the web.
October 2 2008
Usually when I write spontaneously here, it's because a topic or idea has been percolating in my mind for a while, and I will stumble across a reference or blog post that provides the necessary…
September 1 2008
In case you hadn't noticed - it's the 4th anniversary of this website. Happy birthday maetl! Well maetl has really been around for much longer than that - it's just that it wasn't until 2004 when…
August 28 2008
Silverstripe is powering the Democratic National Convention website. The site has survived a maelstrom of traffic, peaking at well over 700 unique visitors per second, not to mention an additional…
August 24 2008
It's probably a good idea not to try and fight the law of unintended consequences. People have a natural tendency to use and recombine things in their own creative ways if the technology allows it,…
August 14 2008
Late to the party, I know, but it's worth pointing this out, as an addendum to previous ranting. hoverIntent is a jQuery plugin that replaces the standard on/off hover switch with a delay, triggering…
July 28 2008
In the last 30 years neuroscience has given us great insight into the workings of the human brain and as more information emerges, it becomes clear just how out of step with reality conventional attitudes…
July 8 2008
Living in Auckland... Well, it's all happened with such rapidity that I'm still trying to catch up with myself. Leaving Wellington feels like an intense break-up with a lover, and it hasn't been easy,…
May 30 2008
Unit testing can have productive side-effects that manifest in the emergent design of classes and API's. Testing objects in isolation from their interactions in the larger code-base pushes you to…
May 23 2008
The Italian government has reversed a 20 year policy against building nuclear power plants, and has announced that they plan to return to nuclear power. Unlike New Zealand's strange and fascinating…
April 15 2008
Somehow, I've managed to destroy two hard-drives recently, and in the process lost a small but significant collection of writing, mostly stuff that I was planning to publish here. As things fell…
February 23 2008
Still hard to believe that I actually witnessed this. One of the highlights was the band taking to the prelude from Bach's Cello Suite in free jazz fashion - completely unexpected and completely amazing,…
February 20 2008
Wow. Last week was absolutely crazy. Aside from being super busy at work and trying to keep several part-time music and design projects ticking over (!!), I attended Webstock 08 (aka The Nat Torkington…
February 20 2008
Jason Santa Maria's Good Design Ain't Easy was one of the most interesting sessions for me, digging into a topic that I've been through so many arguments over in the past. It may have been old news…
February 11 2008
The future lies in making networks happen. Last month, respected security technologist Bruce Schneier explained why you would want to share your Wi-Fi bandwidth. It's not nearly as wrong as it sounds. To…
January 30 2008
For quick and dirty programs... Paul Graham has released an early version of Arc, his ongoing project to develop a Lisp dialect suiting a minimalist taste in programming style. Never one to shirk…
January 12 2008
Dark clouds of thought were unproven examples Of the principle of doubt transforming the future They assumed the management of progress As psychic discipline for fools and thieves Readily…
January 7 2008
Refactoring reveals purpose. It sets you up to be ready for the next move.