hard-core
« Previous EntriesRemembering 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 [...]
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 [...]
Governance and Goodness
Friday, March 18th, 2011I’ll say this again, in all sincerity: A principled man who’s willing to walk that muddy road is a better man than I, because I would always take that principled stand, keep my conscience clear, and fail entirely as a politician.
That may sound back-handed to some. It’s not. Life is a complex and messy thing; there are no simple answers. And sometimes staying pure and principled means staying powerless.
For my part I’m willing to abdicate that power, because once in a while things need to be said at any cost.
It’s easy for me to say this, but I don’t say it lightly. I say it because others can’t:
If a Government Minister resorts to political violence and coercion and the government takes no action to remedy this, that government deserves to fall.
Forget Fear
Thursday, March 10th, 2011[Originally published in the weekend edition of the Vanuatu Daily Post] My name is Dan McGarry. I’ve been using the nom de plume of Graham Crumb since 1995, but today I have decided to draw aside the literary veil. I do so in solidarity with Marc Neil-Jones, publisher of the Daily Post, in order to [...]
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 [...]
Pavlov's Light Bulb
Tuesday, December 28th, 2010In a discussion about using small frequency changes in LED light bulbs to transmit data, someone mentioned that companies are already using this technology in supermarkets and other large stores to dynamically change prices on their products. Which led me to a little though experiment: What if retailers could change the price of a product [...]
What Necessity?
Saturday, December 11th, 2010If indeed, the threat of force was used to bar the public and press from a session of Parliament in which a change of government took place, and there was no compelling reason for this action, then Vanuatu’s politicians, no matter how inspired or high-minded their intentions, have led the country away from its roots.
Transparency is not just the name of a local political gadfly. It is a real thing. It is crucial to the country’s well-being. And it is not possible to like it on Monday, ignore it on a Tuesday and promise to be back Wednesday.
As the recent WikiLeaks controversy has shown us, a shining light can be discomforting, even embarrassing at times. It can actually make it more difficult to get things done. But –and here’s the key– it makes it more difficult for us to do wrong, too.
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