geek
« Previous EntriesSelling Democracy (Slight Return)
Thursday, November 17th, 2011Writing about the influence of the Internet on pro-democracy movements earlier this year, I observed: As individual control over the flow of information rises, central control wanes. And this, obviously, is the crux of the dilemma facing businesses and governments across North Africa and throughout the world. They are belatedly coming to realise that they [...]
Mystery & Wonder
Sunday, November 6th, 2011According to Andrew Sullivan, Alexis Madrigal claims that flocking behaviour is “… a beautiful phenomenon to behold. And neither biologists nor anyone else can yet explain how starlings seem to process information and act on it so quickly.” That second sentence is just false, as even a quick visit to wikipedia is sufficient to discover: [...]
Remembering Steve Jobs
Thursday, October 6th, 2011Okay, look: Gallows humour aside (for the moment), Steve Jobs doesn’t deserve our reverence. He deserves our respect, yes, for being one of the only people in the industry to actually think about how people used hardware. He was a great hardware designer in part because of his obsession with detail and his absolute inability [...]
Find Duplicate File Names in CouchDB
Wednesday, October 5th, 2011I was stumped for a bit, trying to figure out how to help my editorial staff avoid uploading the same file twice. In a repository spanning tens of thousands of titles in over a hundred different collections, our staff can’t easily tell whether a document is already in a collection or not. Turns out that [...]
On Pseudonymity
Wednesday, July 27th, 2011My friend Skud (yes, Skud) recently had her Google+ account suspended, apparently for not using her ‘real’ name. The section of Google’s privacy policy dealing with the issue of names says only this: To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if [...]
Canonical is Failing
Wednesday, May 18th, 2011A word of advice to FOSS geeks: If you must recommend Ubuntu Linux to others, recommend nothing later than 10.04, the last LTS release. 10.10 saw a number of minor but irritating bugs creep in that show a significant shortage of testing and forethought. There were countless small things like context menus no longer working [...]
The Wealthy Programmer
Sunday, March 27th, 2011In discussion today about programming for money – as opposed to programming for the love of it, or helping to change the shape of modern technology – someone made the following point: I’d have thought striving to be independently wealthy would be an admirable goal – it’s a lot easier to be a philanthropist when [...]
Why China Will Soon Dominate the World
Monday, March 7th, 2011Because nobody can stand in the way of their Superior Blur Ray Designde MP5 technology with capacities Up To 1 Tera Gig!!!
A Novel in Three Links
Friday, February 11th, 2011This + this + this = an opportunity to change the way we communicate, and history as well.
The freedom that we experienced on the Internet of the ’90s is waning. Governments and commercial interests take ever-increasing steps to circumscribe people’s ability to communicate digitally. The only way to change this tide from ebb to flood is to fulfill a promise that was first made in the ’90s.
We need to disintermediate the network. It’s an ugly duckling of a word, but cutting out the middle man matters more now than ever.
The Internet ≠ the Network
Monday, February 7th, 2011Douglas Rushkoff just posted a piece with which I largely agree, but which indulges in some remarkably lazy language in the process: “Some of us might like to believe that the genie is out of the bottle and that we all have access to an unstoppable decentralized network. In reality, the internet is entirely controlled [...]
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