maetl

Archive for 2010

Retrospective

Endnote to a year of massive change.

Wrangelkiez Walking Tour

An exploration of the Wrangelkiez neighborhood in Kreuzberg.

Fun is no longer a priority

What US Game Developers Need to Know about Free-to-Play in China.

Why I No Longer Work for the Man

Positive life changes can only happen when I am able to choose when and how I work, what I work on, and who I work with.

Black or White

The real reason why nobody is right, even when they are.

We Made You

Inside the mind of an English speaking machine.

Creative Space

“There’s a tyranny of the machine that seems to interfere with big-picture thought”

Andy Warhol paints Debbie Harry on an Amiga

The Amiga line of computers had a significant influence on many graphic artists and musicians moving into digital production.

Clusters and Flows of Data: The Twitter Way

The playing-field of Twitter annotations and the challenge to the developer community.

Changing The Future of Reading

Understanding the Google Books Settlement.

Complexity and Unit Testing

“Lots of unit tests are a symptom of an architecture with complex and highly stateful abstractions, which, in turn, are a sign of a low quality architecture.”

All Your Apps Are Belong To Us

The EFF examines the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, and concludes that Apple is acting as a jealous and arbitrary feudal lord.

The worst condition

Did Saddam unconsciously model aspects of his regime on science fiction from Western popular culture?

Social Traction

The explosion of conversation-driven web applications in today’s world is a sign of technology beginning to fold in upon itself.

The Recovery Approach

Interview with a Nigerian email scammer.

To Be a Philosopher

Celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy causes an existential crisis by quoting a hoax author.

Apostrophes Illustrate Changing Language

As the English language evolves and morphs, there is considerable tension between retaining the humble apostrophe and getting rid of it altogether.

Supremely Corporate

As America flails ever closer to becoming an all-out corporate controlled polity, it's perhaps inevitable that a corporation will try to run for congress.

The Case of the Midnight Note

My friends have created a noir themed game, raising funds to help sponsor people to attend Webstock.

What is Missing from Modern Programming Languages?

There’s still a lot of important dialogue about the standard features of modern programming languages that hasn’t happened yet.

Random Textmate Buffer

Found this waiting in a Textmate buffer...

The Bay

How many roads we take that lead to Nowhere, The alley overgrown, no meaning now but loss: Not that veritable garden where everything comes easy.

Social Signaling in Connective Words

Structural words and turns of phrase are used as social signals that carry key information about the relationship between the parties involved in a discussion.

On Editing

A quote by Vladimir Nabokov.

Most Programmers Are Stupid

“The only thing that everyone seems to agree upon is how stupid all the other programmers are.”

Cheek By Jowl

“The Metamorphosis of Our Town ... It Happened Cheek By Jowl”

Our Emergent Panopticon

A slide down the slippery slope towards a totalitarian surveillance state.

Privacy is a Distraction

Concerns about privacy are a subset of what we should be concerned about.

The Shock of the Now

Are Google and Facebook obliterating the web?

Our New Feudal Overlords

Not everyone understands scaling for the masses.

Reconsuming Ideals

Portigal Consulting talk about the analog human and the digital machine.

Disintegrating Digg

Fragments, factions, and turf warfare may force Digg to accomodate greater personalization of content.

Experiment Driven Development

A new skillset for interactive designers, who must now take direct evidence into account with every design variation that affects user flows.

Fundamentally inconsistent

"Copyright law is fundamentally inconsistent with the nature of networks, which seek to replicate any information presented to them."

On The Shoulders of Giants

New research finds that the historical background of Google’s PageRank algorithm is richer than previously suspected.

Incentives Invite Abuse

Rethink the expectation that people will use a service for that which it is intended.

Gross Domestic Pathologies

I have decided that John Key has wholly entered into hyper-reality, becoming little more than a holographic-psychic protective shell created by the minds of stress affective New Zealand taxpayers.

Waking Dreams

Charles Limb and Allen R. Braun have been observing the brains of jazz musicians when they improvise.

Programming Again

It’s hard to explain the collision of forces and events that has occurred over the past several months.

Picture-driven programming

Treating the entire visual interface of a program as data input to another program that modifies the original behavior.

Mapping the Global Shipping Network

Surprisingly, the global shipping network has never been mapped, despite estimates that 90% of the world's trade travels across the oceans.

Counting Accented Vowels

The Twitter API Wiki has one of the most practical explanations I’ve seen of some of the issues involving Unicode normalization.

A Stop Motion Story

Graffiti artist Blu has released his biggest and most ambitious film to date.

Floating Farms on Inner City Waterways

A novel solution to the lack of space for food cultivation in modern cities.

Some People Say Weasel Words Are Great

Wherewithin, Wikipedia is a seemingly infinite source of hilarity from an unsurpassed synthesis of inanity and insanity.

Will Diaspora Fail?

The huge amount of public anticipation and scrutiny of their activities is not going to be particularly helpful.

A Simple Model for Sharing

How to leverage the power of personal websites to share private information with your direct personal contacts.

The City as a Whole

Holism and the case for utopian imagination in architecture.

The No Logo Decade

How the iconic summary of the anti-corporate movement became a handbook for corporate marketing.

Unsolicited Architecture

Using design to provoke public debate about the future of cities.

Prospects for Paper Architecture

The future for architects is not the future of architecture.

The Committee To Save The World

The story of Obama’s “Inside Man” and the context of the financial crisis, through decades of Washington policy.

Livecoding the musical apocalypse

Algorithms are thoughts, chainsaws are tools, and the triumph of the cyborg composer.

Mad Lib Forms

The only “right” approach is tweaking a design based on a feedback loop of observation.

One way or another

How David Bowie and the Grateful Dead predicted the arc of internet influence.

Domestic Robocop

The conflation of advertising and augmented reality.

A do-it-yourself affair

P-Money explains how creative things happen in NZ.

Both useful and meaningful?

On the frequency of Facebook redesigns, and user reactions.

Game Changing

How video games trained a generation of athletes.

Apple and America

Apple has no civic responsibility or moral obligations, but the citizens of the United States do.

“He’s like Batman”

It’s not often I would link to GQ, and can’t say I’m overly fond of this style of writing, but the story of Marvin Harrison is amazing.

Eye on Berlin

Not only the end of a decade, but the 20th anniversary of a monumental political event. Eye Magazine 74 is a focus on the graphic output from Berlin.