Archives for March 2004
Paint the whole 'lith with a rainbow... (March 29, 2004) Right. That's it. Enough already! I'm just going to go and launch the damn thing and let everyone else find all the bugs and the crappy bits of code and the hacked together bits of shit and I'll fix em...
As Pooh once read: Busy Backson... (March 28, 2004) And projects just go on and on and there's no resolution to them whatsoever and it's quite normal for them to take every working hour of the day and it's just as normal for you to have no real sense...
Tiny trackback explanation... (March 24, 2004) Another friend asked me what Trackback was today and I showed them my old guide to it and to be honest it wasn't very helpful for them. But I found a way to say it more simply even than that....
Questions for Dave Winer... (March 22, 2004) Dear Mr Winer, Will the API for radiocomments be public and clonable? If so, will the API for radiocomments be published before the initial deployment of the radiocomments system? Will it be possible for Radio users to plug into a...
On Belle de Jour... (March 20, 2004) I know I'm being obtuse, but I'm really not getting the whole Belle De Jour obsessiveness that's spiralling its way across the web and into the print media. The latest incarnation of this particular ludicrousness comes from the Independent newspaper...
Tom Coates, bored defender of weblogs... (March 18, 2004) I don't know whether it's articles like these (on why people give up weblogs) that I get annoyed by or responses like this from 2lmc, but either way I'm pissed. I don't know how obvious it has to be before...
A statistical head-rush... (March 17, 2004) Wow. That was a bit of a head-rush. The busiest day of traffic ever on both plasticbag.org and Barbelith. Between the two of them a meaty 25,000 page impressions logged up in 24 hours. If I include Everything in Moderation...
I'd like to thank the Academy... (March 16, 2004) I'd like to thank everyone who voted for plasticbag.org at the Bloggies, where I've accidentally picked up Best British or Irish weblog. I'm particularly surprised given given the quality of the other candidates: Going Underground's Blog, A Teenager Blogs, Greenfairy.com...
From pirate dwarves to ninja elves... (March 15, 2004) I have always considered the profound distinction between ninjas and pirates to be an absolute one. One was either ninja or pirate - there were no inbetweens. One personality type was skilled and proficient, elegant and silent, contained and constrained,...
On faltering footsteps with PHP... (March 14, 2004) Wow. What a frustrating few days. I've been working on a project in the background (not too exciting - don't get your hopes up) that vaguely involves PHP and I know nothing about PHP. I'm a programming weenie. You know...
Why does my Apple laptop beep at me? (March 13, 2004) Ok. It's driving me so mad that I'm forced in the end to appeal to the general public. My laptop appears to be beeping at me. Every so often - no more than once a day, for some reason which...
Why do bloggers kill kittens? (March 7, 2004) A couple of days ago I posted a rather aggressive link through to 2lmc the other day complaining about their post Most read blogs least original which cited an article from Wired News called Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious (itself...
Some pictures from the periphery of ETCon... (March 5, 2004) Very late - here are a selection of pictures from the periphery of ETCon, pictures about arriving, seeing things unfold, being repacked and then finally departing. There are no pictures of the events themselves. They are in roughly chronological order:...
A critical mass of photograph swappers... (March 5, 2004) Everyone at ETCon had a Mac. Or at least pretty much everyone at ETCon had a Mac. And pretty much everyone was using the wifi network in the conference rooms. And - much like last time - loads of people...
A few customised toolbars... (March 5, 2004) So it occurs to me that UI design for applications isn't easy at the best of times, and that one key area of UI design is the toolbar filled with icons that sits at the top of most applications. It...
On e-mail as a means of exchange... (March 5, 2004) I've had lots of conversations over the last few years about ways in which rising marginal cost could deal with grotesque abuses of online services. There are probably a dozen posts in this blog about that subject alone. Now the...
On shopping with MacUser... (March 5, 2004) This is the second time it's happened and it's as weird as the first. On the bus this morning I was reading the latest issue of MacUser (nice magazine redesign, shame about the old-style Mac typeface in the logo) when...
On the "Air Ministry"... (March 5, 2004) There are many organisations in my working life that I have decided - retroactively - to refer to as the Air Ministry: "You can have any combination of features the Air Ministry desires, so long as you do not also...
On a difference between wonks and geeks... (March 1, 2004) Here's a suggested difference between geeks and policy wonks that might go some distance towards making the two groups get on with one another better. It is my contention that the two groups simply have radically different registers and types...
The problems of visualising social networks... (March 1, 2004) From a pithy and somehow true post by Stewart Butterfield on the problems of creating visualisations of social networks: Artist/curator friend Mark Soo did a piece for one of the Infest openings where he visualized the curators' social network using...
What is the future of typing in public? (March 1, 2004) ETCon is a conference like no other. This is not because of the quality of the speakers but because of the type of audience it gets and the culture that has self-generated around it. One of the most notable features...
Festering in my head... (March 1, 2004) The secret of successful weblogging is - it seems - never to pause for a moment. Never let the fact that you're kind of not in the mood for a few days to stop you putting some old crap up...
On DowningStreetSays.com... (March 1, 2004) So here's a useful and interesting application of weblog-style publishing using Movable Type: downingstreetsays.org - yet again demonstrating how useful it is to have a relatively standard format for publishing date-organised sites. The site contains transcripts of the daily briefings...
