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Mozilla 1.7 RC 1
There are some interesting tid-bits hidden away in the release notes for the new Mozilla 1.7 RC 1 release. The following in particular caught my eye:
[... 196 words]Python in Mathematics
Python in the Mathematics Curriculum by Kirby Urner is something of a sprawling masterpiece. It really comes in four parts: the first is a history of computer science in education, the second an appraisal of the impact of open source on education and the world at last, the third a dive in to the things that make Python so suitable for enhancing the mathematics curriculum and the fourth a discussion of how computer science and traditional mathematics are likely to play off against each other in the field of high school education.
[... 319 words]Fixing sequence problems in PostgreSQL
This one’s mainly for my own future reference. The following error message in PostgreSQL:
[... 77 words]AntiRSI for OS X
OK, so I have to admit I gave up on WorkRave after about two weeks—it got on my nerves. Onne Gorter just dropped me an email about his free AntiRSI program for OS X and I’ve decided to give it a go. It draws a pretty icon in the Dock with a live updated timer for how long until your next rest break, and the source code is freely available. Let’s see if this one lasts longer than WorkRave did.
Bookmarklet request
Anyone know if it would be possible to create a bookmarklet that emulates an EyeDropper style application: as you move it around the page it shows you the hex colour code for the pixel directly under the mouse pointer? I’m pretty sure it can’t be done but I’d love to be proved wrong.
McGraw Hill sold me out
Like everyone else on the internet, I get a fair amount of spam. I tend to keep my main work as clean as possible, while skipping over the spam in my lower-traffic personal account and cleaning it up every week or so.
[... 587 words]A myriad of markup systems
It’s hard to avoid the legions of custom markup systems out there these days. Every Wiki has it’s own syntactical quirks, while packages like Markdown, Textile, BBCode (in dozens of variants), reStructuredText offer easy ways of hooking markup conversion in to existing applications. When it comes to being totally over-implemented and infuratingly inconsistent, markup systems are rapidly catching up with template packages. Never one to miss out on an opportunity to reinvent the wheel, I’ve worked on several of each ;)
[... 614 words]Missed opportunity
Apple are missing out on a huge opportunity. I’ve bought 198 songs through the iTunes music store now, and iTunes has access to the other music that I’ve imported from my own CD collection. I want to discover new music—why doesn’t iTunes look at what I listen to, match it against buying habits tracked through the store and give me an Amazon style “people who like the music you listen to also liked...”. Privacy concerns could be avoided by having the recommendation feature off by default—I’d turn it on in a heart-beat.
Glastonbury screw-up
I went last year, I went the year before, I’m pretty sure I went the year before that, but this year I’m staying home. The muppets running the online ordering system apparently decided that a couple of Windows 2000 servers could handle 130,000 ticket sales in 24 hours. They got hit by 2,000,000 hits in the first five minutes. Admitedly, that’s going to be tough for anything to handle (maybe it’s a job for Google’s super-platform) but after last year’s 23 hour sell out anyone could have told them this year was going to be a whole lot tougher.
[... 201 words]What is Google?
Via John Battelle, Rick Skrenta’s remarkable piece on what Google have actually built. They don’t just have the world’s best search engine, they have the world’s largest and most scalable platform for developing huge web-based applications.
[... 172 words]Personalisation? We’ve already got it
Vin Crosbie, a highly respected commentator on the online news industry, recently published his long awaited essay What Newspapers and Their Web Sites Must Do to Survive. It’s long but captivating and well researched; if you have any interest in the role of traditional newspapers on the web you should take the time to read it.
[... 350 words]Microsoft “get” blogging
Who would have thought a year ago that Microsoft would be the company that took corporate blogging to the next level? Say what you like about the company itself, you can’t fault the quality and quantity of bloggers coming out of Redmond at the moment. Yesterday I stumbled across this fascinating blog that provides an insight in to Microsoft’s recruitment techniques. If you’re looking for a job at a high-tech company you can’t afford not to read this—they already have a bunch of resume advice, tips on what to wear to interviews and posts on subjects such as employee referrals, international recriting, phone screening and more.
[... 266 words]Thanks a bundle, HP
I needed to scan a couple of signed documents at work, as a cheaper alternative to locating a fax machine. The office scanner is an HP scanjet 4570c. I plugged it in to the back of my PowerBook to see if it would work straight away, as pretty much everything else I’ve plugged in has. It didn’t. Fair enough, I can’t expect Apple to pre-install drivers for everything. So I headed over to HP’s site to grab the necessary software.
[... 415 words]1GB of webmail from Google
Provided this story about a new 1 GB webmail service from Google isn’t a lame early April fool, I’m really psyched about it. A decent amount of space combined with Google’s search technology could really help me keep up to date with my email. Just off the top of my head, here’s my ideal hosted webmail feature list:
[... 245 words]PHP and Apache 2.0
For as long as Apache 2 has been stable, the PHP manual has carried this strongly worded warning:
[... 274 words]Omit needless words, codified
I continue to try to improve my writing. “Omit needless words” is all well and good, but identifying needless words can be a difficult task for the untrained eye. Paul Ford’s Passivator bookmarklet highlights adverbs and passive verbs, both of which can indicate weak writing.
It’s only going to get worse
This analysis of the spread of the witty worm is fascinating for a whole bunch of different reasons.
[... 395 words]Conferences with Macs
Three reasons Macs make excellent companions to geek-centric conferences:
[... 226 words]Quicksilver
I found out about Quicksilver via Ted Leung a couple of days ago, and it’s already become an indispensable part of my OS X desktop. On the surface, Quicksilver is very similar to LaunchBar which I’d tried and liked but not enough to justify the price tag. LaunchBar lets you launch any application on your system by hitting CMD+space and typing enough of the name to highlight the application you want. Quicksilver takes the same idea but expands it to cover address book entries, iTunes playlists, documents, bookmarks and more. It’s incredibly slick, highly configurable and doesn’t cost a penny.
[... 173 words]Pydoc
Pydoc is awesome; I don’t know how I missed it for so long. Simply type the following at the command line:
[... 96 words]Zend PHP 5 Goodies
Zend have quietly released a veritable treasure trove of PHP 5 tutorials via their PHP5 InfoCenter:
[... 212 words]Democratised Namespaces
The New York Times: Get out of my Namespace (via Diego Doval)—a well-researched look at the huge problems (and frivolous lawsuits) being generated by the global quest for ownership of unique names.
[... 267 words]Avoiding protracted debates
I love Charles Miller’s Fishbowl. His latest entry introduces his rules for argument. Read them, follow them and save a truck-load of time avoiding protracted debates in the future. Heck, if everyone stuck to them the overall productivity of the internet would probably increase by a factor of ten.
Internet culture
In what could be the most significant internet cultural event of the decade, Strong Bad has answered his 100th email. Attempts to guess the URL ahead of time were futile.
[... 69 words]PHP 5 Release Candidate 1
I haven’t blogged much about PHP in a while because I’ve been up to my nose in mod_python and loving every minute of it. This news is just too important to miss: PHP 5 Release Candidate 1 has been released, bringing the first production-ready release tantilisingly close. While I doubt PHP 5 will tempt me back it’s definitely an exciting upgrade—my biggest complaint with PHP 4 is the brain-dead object model which defaults to copying whole objects rather than passing references, and this is one of the many things addressed by PHP 5. The new libxml2 powered XML features sound really powerful, and SQLite as an on-board database should be ideal for knocking out small stand-alone applications without needing to set up a mySQL database for them.
[... 173 words]SXSW 2004
SXSW 2004 was a blast: by far the geekiest weekend of my life. I was planning on writing a few updates from the conference but quickly discovered that laptops and socialising just don’t mix—there were just too many interesting people to talk to!
[... 270 words]SXSW on a shoe-string
So, in customary last-minute style I’ve decided to go to SXSW Interactive this year. I can get a student ticket on the door so all I need to sort out is transport and accomodation. The cheapest air fare I can find at this point is $700+ (Expedia quoted me $415, then at the last minute laughed in my face and told me I couldn’t book the ticket). The Greyhound is $220 and although it’s a 20 hour journey each way the timetable is actually pretty decent, getting me to the conference for Friday evening and back by early Wednesday morning. It looks like I’m going to experience America close-up!
[... 124 words]