Entries in Dec, 2004
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Some notes on Wikipedia
I’ve been driving myself crazy with coursework over the past couple of weeks, and since it’s always good to have something to take your mind off things I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time lurking around the beautiful Wikipedia. Here are a few things about Wikipedia you may have missed:
[... 509 words]Google Print
I’m probably late to the party on this one, but I just noticed that Google Print results are now included in any Google search that starts with “books on”. I can’t say I like the lousy discoverability of the interface much—a search box at print.google.com would be a welcome addition—but the results are pretty impressive. It’s also a shame that they’re using a nasty obfuscation technique to disable copying and printing (based on serving book pages up as background images), if only because it will fuel yet more questions from newbie web developers asking how to do exactly that. Still, with today’s announcement that Google are to team up with five leading libraries to scan more books this service is going to get a whole lot more important over the next few years.
[... 153 words]Casting out getters and setters
Python Is Not Java by Phillip J. Eby (via Ned) is the most useful article on programming I’ve read in ages. If you have any interest at all in either language, go and read it. It’s all good, but the part that really struck a nerve for me was this:
[... 221 words]Blogmarks on del.icio.us
I’m horribly ill again: having defeated the mumps I now seem to have come down with some kind of ’flu thing. Lovely. In between whinging about my state of health and watching episodes of Frasier I’ve been playing with del.icio.us as part of my research in to web annotation. The connection between the two isn’t particularly strong but it’s clear that something very exciting is happening over there.
[... 276 words]