January 2012
7 posts
GK Chesterton, Heretics (1905)
Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If...
No comment
Matt Gemmell’s conclusion regarding the comments on/comments off debate isn’t surprising: where you stand is (or should be) informed by the purpose of your blog.
As far as Backstrip goes, this is my publicly-shared commonplace book. I want to move you as fast as possible to the destination, whether that’s a point I’m trying to make or a link somewhere else. Comments would...
December 2011
1 post
November 2011
1 post
September 2011
1 post
You're on the wrong high horse
Google Plus doesn’t have to accept anonyms, mononyms or pseudonyms. The service is evidently not for everyone, it’s not a monopoly, you’re not entitled to customer service - you’d have to be an actual customer to get that - and it doesn’t have to be nice about it. So get off your damn high horse…
…and climb up on this one. The critical issue with Google Plus...
August 2011
1 post
June 2011
8 posts
Provenance and Wikipedia
I’ve been thinking a lot about provenance. In fact we all think about provenance to some degree - it’s why we’ll happily ignore that guy on the street shouting about the end of the world, but we’ll panic if Barack Obama interrupts our regular viewing to tell us that asteroid is heading toward Earth.
But trust - or authority - isn’t just about the author, it’s...
Tombstones
I need a way to read tombstones. Let’s not get bogged down in why - there’s more to come on that shortly, I hope — so just nod along when I say every tombstone in the world should be recorded and analysed.
The biggest hurdle is that OCR technology is rubbish. We can’t even figure out a way to read books, and they have relatively uniform fonts, grammar, structure and,...
May 2011
3 posts
April 2011
5 posts
Software progress outpaces hardware
From the New York Times:
A report [pdf] by an independent group of science and technology advisers to the White House, published last December, cited research showing that performance gains in doing computing tasks that result from improvements in software algorithms often far outpace the gains attributable to faster processors.
Blogs to ebooks
So, I’ve been experimenting with ebooks. Specifically, I’ve been sneaking around other people’s websites, nicking their content, and then sticking it on my Kindle.
For example, I just grabbed all the articles from Tim Rogers’ very excellent Action Button:
Action Button is a good candidate because the images are black and white, the articles are long (some are many...
March 2011
10 posts
February 2011
3 posts
January 2011
1 post
December 2010
1 post
Open source: it's not that hard
When I hear someone spouting nonsense about open source, I tend to let it slide. About ten years ago I’d kick against the pricks — and loudly, courtesy of a regular opinion column in a magazine — but it was a different time then. For starters, open source software was (at least in the eyes of detractors) still untested, and with billion dollar proprietary software stalwarts...
November 2010
4 posts
October 2010
3 posts
Those poor, crippled atheists: Glee does religion
Glee isn’t bad television. It’s good for what it is — a singing and dancing show about American teenagers, and it has a hard and funny edge at times. But that recent episode about religion? Awful.
(Spoilers coming up.)
So the jock discovers the face of Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich (what is it about America and orange-coloured cheese?) and starts praying to it. This...
September 2010
2 posts
