December 7 2009
Twitter as performance; Dean Allen ruminates on the end of an experiment.
November 30 2009
Welcoming the Winter with an alternative to Glüwine. Ever so nasty, but in a good way.
November 20 2009
“If you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good?”
October 25 2009
Jon Udell’s literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database is flush with small details that will delight history geeks.
October 24 2009
ditaa is a small command-line utility written in Java, that can convert diagrams drawn using ascii art into proper bitmap graphics.
October 8 2009
I feel like my web skills have been swept out from underneath me. You go away for a few months, and come back, and everything has changed so much.
September 17 2009
Why do we call programming languages “languages”? What is missing from the literary traditions of programming?
September 3 2009
Beau from one of the top Berlin crews, Urban Idiots, explains the difference between Parkour and Freerunning.
August 31 2009
Results of a survey of over 3000 developers, regarding their approach to OO software design.
August 26 2009
This rather large fellow is floating across the side of a building in central Kreuzberg, visible from the U-Bahn approaching Kottbusser Tor.
August 22 2009
The result of the Smacking Referendum is really disappointing. I know of many people who refused to vote because they felt that the question misrepresented the actual law and the intent of the policy.
August 8 2009
I made it to Berlin in one piece, and I've been lucky enough to land directly in the middle of a period of amazing summer weather.
July 8 2009
FOA requests by the National Security Archive have led to the release of documents detailing interviews and conversations with Saddam Hussein in 2004 before he was executed.
July 4 2009
Humans lack cohesive understanding of the cultural and environmental flow-on effects of industrial and consumerist technology.
June 26 2009
How an indie musician can make $19,000 in 10 hours using Twitter says it all.
June 19 2009
The world of Alice and Kev is an experiment by Robin Burkinshaw, playing a homeless family in The Sims 3.
June 16 2009
Software industry zealots focus far too much effort on debating methodology for methodologies sake.
June 7 2009
After recently discussing the widely underestimated importance of visual programming, it’s great to see research like Visual Programming Environments For Kids.
May 31 2009
Narrow-minded fools who are unable to face the wider social problems of their society will always look to externalize the issue in an object.
March 10 2009
I recently heard of a situation where a project was completed ahead of schedule, on time and under budget. Much of this was that the person running it didn't bother waiting for pointless meetings…
January 30 2009
Man the lifeboats... Rowan explains why you shouldn't underestimate being in the right place at the right time - and he of all people would know from experience. Great Entrepreneurs are PASSIONATE…
January 20 2009
Five percent of malformed data packets on the internet cannot be explained - they cannot be traced to tampering or software and hardware glitches. Is this evidence that the internet is evolving…
December 2 2009
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
November 24 2009
We can only learn through crisis and disruption to existing assumptions and patterns of knowledge.
October 28 2009
“Every time we went down the ‘wrong’ path, we learned something concrete — if not about software than at least about people”
October 25 2009
To commemorate 20 Jahre Mauerfall – the 20th anniversary since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city has launched the Berlin Twitter Wall.
October 16 2009
The moon belongs to no one – yet.
October 8 2009
Watch the cascade from Ruby is Unix to Python is Unix to Perl is Unix.
September 15 2009
What do people actually mean when they define their content as “noncommercial”, and release it under a NC license?
September 1 2009
Lay down these words before your mind like rocks.
August 30 2009
How to make short text messages more effective.
August 23 2009
Snapshots of the epic wall art at Schlesische Straße, East of Berlin’s Wrangelkiez.
August 21 2009
A quote from Raganwald: “The correct response is not calling arbitrary features ‘magic’. It’s programming. That’s all.”
July 16 2009
Ich komme nach Berlin.
July 8 2009
Brand New on the MTV Redesign.
July 3 2009
Innovation means a new way of doing something. At least, it used to mean that. Now, it apparently means a different way of doing something.
June 25 2009
‘Respecting Creativity’ encourages teachers to introduce the concept of intellectual property and the debate surrounding copyright issues to a classroom discussion.
June 16 2009
Donald Kunth – “I remain convinced that the patent policy most fair and most suitable for the world will regard mathematical ideas (such as algorithms) to be not subject to proprietary patent rights.”
June 9 2009
From a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users, it would seem that men follow men, and nobody tweets. As you might suspect, this is a textbook example of ‘participation inequality’.
June 6 2009
Welcome to my brushed up, newly minted web presence.
March 28 2009
Having been trained to blithely accept the time-warp of most large website projects being drawn out over months and months, it's taken a while for me to really grasp the significance of the realization…
March 8 2009
I am a pathetic procrastinating wastrel. I'm currently cleaning up my MacBook, poking through thousands of lines of articles, half finished chapters, short stories, poems, and wondering where to…
January 28 2009
Anyone who knows me, is well aware of the variegated mayhem of my creative impulses. I get swept away by so many different ideas, some days I get pretty lost in a flurry of forking paths, not knowing…
January 18 2009
Various musings of the moment. Given this general theme, one could be forgiven for thinking that I'm applying a cattle-prod to myself (or at least trying to). How to Do What You Love 50 Strategies…
November 30 2009
There was only one language that everyone in the Tower of Babel spoke... that of money.
November 24 2009
“If all you can say is ‘fresh from the wholesale market’ then you have to be cheap and open all hours”
October 26 2009
“Just as soon as we begin to hone the ability to communicate through images it is stripped away from us.”
October 24 2009
“We decided what MySpace would become. They set up a social networking platform, but we as users decided to use it as a music platform.”
October 15 2009
In the corporate zones of redevelopment, the juxtaposition of architecture stands-out because it is really the juxtaposition of utterly disparate world-views
September 19 2009
Mutually escalating aggression is more than just plain old ‘internet trolling’.
September 6 2009
How many bits does it take to kill a human? Comparing H1N1 to computer viruses.
August 31 2009
“After enduring sloppy punctuation on the street sign outside his home for more than a year, Stefan Gatward could stand it no longer.”
August 27 2009
Lest we see the fate of the Kennedy family as a singular anomaly, it’s worth contrasting the equally tragic—and most thoroughly American—story of the Von Erich wrestling dynasty.
August 22 2009
_why has gone. Left the intarwebs. And in the process, he tore down the house, and leveled the garden.
August 14 2009
A reporter from Reuters once asked Huey (Kingfisher) Long, the demagogic boss of Louisiana, if the US would ever have fascism. “Sure,” he said, “only we'll call it anti-fascism.”
July 9 2009
Many programmers and those with ears tuned in to murmurs from the dark side of the finance industry will have heard the recent story involving Goldman Sachs.
July 5 2009
Economics in its traditionally enshrined format is an awkward relic of a twisted history.
July 1 2009
A short history of rap songs that confront the nature of commercial rap and the record industry, amongst other things.
June 23 2009
Although experts and activists alike have been saying this for many years, it has taken until 2009 for the U.S. Department of Energy to admit that the era of cheap oil is over.
June 16 2009
Kiwi music legend and humorist Chris Knox has suffered a major stroke. We all hope he’s ok.
June 7 2009
Illustrations and musings on the unbuilt expressways of Manhattan, the ubiquity of Google maps and the legacy of Robert Moses.
June 1 2009
If crap code is an unavoidable problem for the software industry, maybe the solution lies in trying to change the nature of the code, rather than trying to change the people who write the code.
March 16 2009
Many people have wondered about the lack of support for nested URLs in a basic install of the SilverStripe CMS. There is a forthcoming module that will enable nested URLs as plugin functionality,…
February 23 2009
maetl.coretxt.net.nz is blacked out: Stand up against "Guilt Upon Accusation" for New Zealand Read more at creativefreedom.org.nz
January 24 2009
I have to ask this - what the fuck does social media actually mean? Given that most of the parrots harping this are probably completely unaware of basic tenets of sociology, it still doesn't seem…
January 13 2009
Last year, for the first time I decided to challenge myself by publicly posting goals/ambitions for the year. As 2009 slides in to a steady state of churn and grit, it's worth reviewing what happened…