Notebook from 2004-2007 when I was living in Wellington.

Creative Freedom Foundation - For Fair Copyright Reform in NZ

Against the removal of rights through proposed changes in Copyright law.

Backlash Against Net Filter

Interesting recent developments in the ongoing war of perception.

The Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement

My submission to the MFAT regarding the proposed free trade agreement with the United States.

The Only Accurate Metaphor in Software Development

Debt is an extraordinarily accurate metaphor for describing the unique problems of software development.

How Do Committees Invent?

Conway's Law and New Zealand politics.

The Landscape of Computing

Accidental emergence.

Understanding Uncertainty

It's hard to step away from our assumptions and actually consider the experiences that non-technical people have using the web.

Learning to Read Code

Too many developers are used to writing code and not reading it.

Wiki Golf

The game of jumping between Wikipedia articles.

People-Power and the Mythic Man Month

The argument over whether software development is an art or a science.

Ambient Oriented Programming

Interesting research is emerging that explores new programming models for mesh connected mobile devices.

Adult Proof Messaging for Teens

It's probably a good idea not to try and fight the law of unintended consequences.

Orwell the blogger

The diaries of George Orwell in blog format.

Hovering Intently

A good building block for intuitive mouse interaction on a web application.

The problem with PHP

Behaving like assholes isn’t the way to make open source projects sustainable.

What is least surprising?

The principle of least surprise and the object/primitive value split.

Startups and the Future of Journalism

The data driven future of journalism.

Biofuel Backlash

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

Linking 2D maps and 3D reality

How can we close the perceptional gap between 2D maps and 3D reality?

Choking the Ocean: The Pacific Trash Vortex

For quite some time, I've been hearing rumors and stories about a giant Texas-sized ball of garbage floating around the Pacific Ocean.

Improving Architecture with Testable Code

Unit testing can have productive side-effects that manifest in the emergent design of classes and APIs.

Equity, Autonomy, and the Asymmetry of Attention

The wisdom of the crowd has given way to a radical asymmetry of broadcast and reception.

Bringing out the worst in people...

The declining value of blog comments and social news sites.

A True Intellectual

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 McCarthyFor some reason, I found…

How Ideas Emerge as Products

What does time to market really mean?

An Uphill Battle

Tantek is fighting an uphill battle in his quest to rid the world of email. Email is ingrained, ubiquitous, and everywhere.

Ornette Coleman, Live in Wellington

Still hard to believe that I actually witnessed this.

Unexpected Structure

The North pole of Saturn is surrounded by a massive hexagonal structure.

The Transforming Web

Notes from the Webstock talks by Simon Willison and Tom Coates.

The Age of Frameworks

Notes from the Webstock talk by Liz Danzico.

Good Design Ain't Easy

Notes from the Webstock talk by Jason Santa Maria.

Introducing Historiographica

Explaining the context of my Webstock 8x5 talk.

Freeing the Internet in Wellington

The future lies in making networks happen.

Crease Geometry

Origami has expanded far beyond its origins in step by step folding patterns.

One size doesn't fit all

As languages change, so do typefaces.

Frameworks and Seedworks

The difference between a seedwork and a framework is in the way that reuse is controlled.

A Utopia Without Ideals

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…

On Refactoring

Refactoring reveals purpose. It sets you up to be ready for the next move.

The Missing Literary Traditions of Programming

Asserting that software development and programming is in part a literary art.

Escaping the equality conundrum

How clear thinking can eradicate confusion.

Can Human Development be Agile?

Can we apply lessons learned from the software world to civil engineering projects?

Closed Social

Nascent suspicions about the nature of the XFN microformat.

Going Bedouin

Will working from anywhere work?

The True Scope is Unknowable

Verification and the balkanized cults of Agile.

Pay Me For Content

Traditionally, artists, writers and musicians have been at the mercy of publishers.

Training advice for entrepreneurs

Learn to live cheaply. Learn to live like an animal.

Carmack on positive brand experiences

Why cheap mobile games aren’t any worse than big-budget console games.

When a language is only as good as its tools

What is the point in having a language that can be written in unicode if its surrounding tools are completely agnostic to anything but ASCII?

Membrane Oriented Programming

Object Oriented discourse has been far too constrained by language oriented thinking.

Hypercommunications and Free Energy

Free energy and free communication clashes with the goals of industrial civilization.

Overloading the MQL Acronym

Different approaches to domain specific query languages.

Post Facto Obsequiousness

Selective reporting, public opinion and election results.

Static Late Binding in PHP

One particularly broken aspect of the language.

Common Websense

Rowan Simpson has posted a summary of the Trade Me Manifesto, which in turn, was influenced by Google's Corporate Philosophy.

New Zealand Design Review

An archival look into the history of design in New Zealand.

Room for improvement

Making open source software more humane.

Where are the women in open source?

Deep rooted problems in open source culture.

Complacence Will Destroy You

Advice from the hacked.

Another blow to Net Neutrality

Verizon decides to act against its own economic best interests and block messages from an abortion rights group.

OLPC in Peru

What if you had never seen a computer or cellphone boot up?

Method Missing?

Good for building DSLs. Not so good for wrapping APIs.

Indie is the norm, not the exception (now)

The balance between record companies and artists.

E-Government Bar Camp Wrap

Notes from a day of workshops in Wellington.

Lessons learned from FullCodePress

What I learned from my role as programmer in the winning FullCodePress team.

Py3000

A shedding of the snake’s skin, sloughing off a whole bunch of weird ambiguities.

Software is not made of Bricks

We want software to be like Lego, but it is clearly not.

10 LET M EQ MIND ROT 20 GOTO 10

BASIC is what killed my ability to be a truly great programmer.

Underground in Canada

Spectacular images of tunnel systems and urban decay.

FullCodePress Champions

Our charity client was so blown away, she was almost in tears at the prize presentation.

Is PHP Doomed?

There's a tide of opinionsuggesting that PHP is threatened with extinction as standard hardware begins to favour wideningmulticore processors. This would be a fair argument if PHP was a general…

High Bypass Ratio Pond Scum

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…

Building a Treemap Reporter for SimpleTest

A new way of viewing unit test results.

Redefining Computing

Perhaps object oriented programming is actually fundamentally richer and more interesting than many have given it credit for.

The Myth of The Next Big Language

It's not a showdown between Javascript and Ruby, it's a race towards bioware.

Pandora's Alertbox

An argument based on quality with no objective way of measuring quality.

Human Area Networks

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…

CSS Is Unmaintainable

Reuse is not a concept that works in CSS.

Twitter The Wave

Is the popularity of Twitter best explained using the psychology of addiction and gambling?

Date-Time Handling in PHP 5.2+

Using the new object-oriented API.

Helen meets George

George Bush is a personable fellow.

The Promise of Perfect Symmetry

This could be the Mandelbrot set of our generation.

The Difference Between Programming and Software Development?

Getting things done.

Putting Women in their Place

Understanding the gender imbalance in computer science.

Rethinking Persistence

A huge subset of web applications don't need a relational data model.

Scaling for the Masses

“Only the largest enterprises will be able to justify owning and operating their own servers.”

The Greatest Story Ever Sold

How could this have happened?

March of the Straw Men and the Language Ecosystem

No programming language is appropriate for every situation.

Culture of Segregation

People often forget the September 11 attacks were planned and executed by a group based in Europe

Bubble Spike?

People are starting to wise up to the distortions of bubble math.

Xbox Live and the YouTube for Video Games

A stripped down consumer version of the Xbox 360 development tools.

A Real Knowledge Economy

The state of science education in New Zealand, is in dire need of a massive creative rejuvenation, but it can only occur to it's fullest once there is widespread knowledge of an irreconcilable crisis…

Pink's Hand Style

Has Pink ripped off a New Zealand artist?

Blue Sky Mining

It may not matter whether Australian uranium is exported from three mines or thirty.

Crying Sculpture

This crying sculpture explores the theme of communication through tears.

Still Life with Typewriter

The way that word processing software influences the creative process of writing.

The problem with CSS dropdown menus

Don't make dropdown menus more difficult to use.

Multimathematical Immaterialities

The relationship between Finnegans Wake and quantum physics.

Narrative Action

The games industry ignores literature at its own peril.

Error Correction and Scientific Progress

Dogmatic worldviews seek to challenge the boundary between science and non-science.

The Architecture of Happiness

Alain de Botton was in Wellington this week, speaking to a packed auditorium at Wellington Girls College.

Obsessive Geometric Abstraction

Many of us in Te Aro already knew that Marty was an artistic genius.

Thinking Beyond Java

A review of current industry trends.

A Pattern Language for Moderation

“Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy”

Passive Consumers?

What is Yahoo! doing?

Resource Dissonance Format

Recently, I've been looking for good case studies of the practical benefits of RDF adoption.

Quantum People

What error correcting code could cross the much vaunted gapOf people as particles, or functions of an ever fluctuating wave?Attraction and repulsion are forces, of matter, they don't,At least…

Google Web Authoring Survey

Analysing how web authors use HTML at a large scale.

OGLE

A graphics extractor that captures and saves 3D data dumps.

Tag-a-long

Allowing navigation and classification systems to evolve from experience.

Google and Link Relationships

Embedding human relationships

Youth Gangs and Assumptions About Culture

There are no easy answers.

Ignorance of Open Source

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…

The Politics of Personal Destruction

“If you are a young, idealistic person, don’t get involved in organised politics.”

XHTML Design Patterns

A general approach to finding reusable solutions.

How Microformats are Different

What language should we use to describe semantic HTML?

Zen and the Art of Template Engines

The problem is not how to separate logic and display. It is how best to capture this entanglement.

Baldfaced Election Bribes

If they don't listen to us, we'll just stuff their face full of candy.

Howling arrays of wolves

Physical/Mental side-effects of the Java programming language.

Louisiana flies

The situation in New Orleans painfully illustrates a totality of social disintegration.

Clouds

That outré architecture the clouds! I came out dog tiredmy eyes smeared with words& saw them. I had to laugh. Nature exceeds me in everything including folly. That's truth enough

Web Deux Pointe Zero

The increasing homogenity of web platform innovation.

I really thought it was over

There is no reason for RSS 3. But here it is.

Entity Relational Diagrams in HTML

Prototype of a language modelling tool.

You Get What You Pay For

Enterprise software doesn't need to work.

On Semantic HTML

First and foremost, the web is about the visual display of information

The sound of the wheel turning full circle

The Lions tour failure is first and foremost, a failure of management.

Accidental Enhancement in IE

Sometimes, things happen in browsers that are just totally impossible to explain.

Mixing Semantic Vocabularies and Basic English

Why understanding is more important than linguistic consistency.

Only Send What You Need

REST, AJAX and generic data transfer for user interfaces.

Asynchronous Representational State Transfer

This is an area where more collaboration between developers and designers is desparately needed.

Wireframes of Reference

The overlap between wireframes and rapid prototyping.

Multicolumn Layouts in CSS

CSS3 offers direct support for multicolumn layouts.

Bifurcation and Biodiversity

Entries from the Dictionary of Human Geography.

Who has poisoned the sea?

Humans take beaches, fishing grounds and ocean ecosystems for granted.

Ajax and UX

A growing trend that involves taking interesting new technological and interactive concepts, and coming up with inaccessable and weird terms to describe them.

Disputing Anomalies

The ideal point of view is not objective truth.

How many words is a picture worth?

Critics of Te Ara are demonstrating a very poor understanding of its true value.

Patterns of Flow and Responsive UI Design

Staying in the flow of interfaces.

Whos' America?

What do these Americans wanting to flee expect from New Zealand?

How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

The matter of the reality based community.

Back to the Ark?

The local body elections are obviously not taken seriously by the majority of the population.

Nuclear Weapons are Morally Indefensible

The first published transcript of David Lange's speech from the Oxford Union debate, 1985

Style Object Stew

Think you understand the basics of HTML and the Document Object Model?

Ethical Implosion

It's not a lie if you believe it to be true

Extracting Tabular Data from HTML Tables

A lightweight format for encoding and extracting data using HTML class attributes.