Archives for September 2006

Links for 2006-09-29 (September 29, 2006) Alan Yentob wants to know why You Tube matters to you It's weird. This couldn't look more cheap and yet simultaneously staged if it tried. I'm sort of weirded out by it. Interesting move, but at the same time,...

Evil spammers using plasticbag.org addresses... (September 25, 2006) Given the three thousand odd bounced e-mails I've received this morning purporting to have been originally sent from various names @plasticbag.org, I'm guessing that my domain has been chosen by spammers as a particularly amusing return-path address. If any of...

Links for 2006-09-25 (September 25, 2006) Hypoallergenic cats are now available for people with cat allergies This is quite smart. You don't genetically engineer the cats - you just find the ones that don't have the genetic marker and breed them as you would otherwise....

Links for 2006-09-23 (September 23, 2006) Google Mars It's just beautiful and awesome and fascinating and cool. That's all. Difficult to argue with how neat it is. Office Lendorff sells some awesome pixel art knitwear Hats, scarves, bags, lasers, explosions, rockets. I'm so going when...

Links for 2006-09-22 (September 22, 2006) This Life returns after 10 years This is going to happen every ten years for the rest of my life, I suspect. I'm going to be haunted by these actors representing my early twenties until we all drop dead...

Links for 2006-09-21 (September 21, 2006) Cameron Marlow posts Weird Al's White and Nerdy "I'm fluent in Javascript as well as Klingon" - I don't get why people think this is insulting. It's totally awesome. It's like an anthem! "Apple takes a gamble: so you...

Slides from my Future of Web Apps (SF06) talk... (September 20, 2006) Last week I talked at the Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco as detailed in my euphoric debrief on Saturday. It was not a talk that I looked forward to enormously, but I have to say that the...

Links for 2006-09-20 (September 20, 2006) Weird BBC puff piece for a new and rather unfunny Onion-rip-off I'm a bit puzzled by this one. The BBC normally takes such enormous care to not be seen to be endorsing or advertising other people's products. The Church...

Get your own tiny Flickr cards! (September 19, 2006) A few months ago I posted a picture of my new beautiful tiny little fun sort of business cards and since then I've been giving them out and every time I do so people sort of go, "Ooooh! Where can...

Links for 2006-09-18 (September 18, 2006) Anne Galloway's collated a list of prominent women working in Pervasive Computing Alongside my post from earlier in the day, I thought it would probably be a good thing to try and do my bit to make some of...

I'm the only gay in this village? (September 17, 2006) Right. I'm in a bit of a mood right now because Valleywag just called me the token gay at all-white-male conference Future of Web Apps. Apparently this was in response to Chris Messina's post the other day on the future...

Links for 2006-09-17 (September 17, 2006) Breathing Earth I'm not normally one for large Flash visualisations, but this representation of people being born, dying and the different countries of the world expelling CO2 is quite extraordinarily beautiful and informative... Metacritic has the pretty much excoriating...

An Inconvenient Truth... (September 16, 2006) My politics are pretty well known to people who read this site, I suspect - I'm basically economically centrist, believing in the the necessary efficiencies of a free market curbed from excesses and derailment by regulation at the extremes. I...

Decompressing after Future of Web Apps... (September 16, 2006) The conference is over and the reviews are in and I appear to have survived with a decent proportion of the people who wrote about it seeming to think it was a good and useful talk. I cannot tell you...

Links for 2006-09-16 (September 16, 2006) Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert at the Emmys "Good evening, godless sodomites!" Best thing that's happened on television ever. A huge fluffy planet in another star system appears to be confusing astronomers It's apparently larger than Jupiter but half...

Links for 2006-09-11 (September 11, 2006) Erik Benson is dead. Long live Buster Butterfield McLeod It's a good name. A classy name. A name that will ring through the ages. A name of someone having altogether too much fun. Architectures of Control in Design "How...

Links for 2006-09-09 (September 9, 2006) Slashdot's discussion on Facebook and its recent problems with privacy is pretty interesting I need to develop and extend some of my ideas around this territory quite bit. Kim Plowright writes up some of the sessions from today's d.construct...

Maps, Invaders, Robots & Throwies... (FOO 06) (September 8, 2006) So I thought I'd end my series of posts on FOO (which some of you may have determined was originally one grotesquely long post of approaching 5,000 words, roughly chunked to last as long as possible sometime last weekend) by...

Links for 2006-09-08 (September 8, 2006) Yahoo's having a public Hack Day which you should all attend Should be really good fun. Unfortunately I'm unlikely to be in the US otherwise I'd be totally there. A pretty good Infographics pool on Flickr Some nice stuff,...

The Evil Tree of Evolution... (September 7, 2006) Added 10.30pm: It has been pointed out to me that in fact the image below is a spoof and that I am really quite quite stupid! I will be leaving the evidence for my crapulence below in perpetuity as a...

Terahertz waves vs. Alexaholics... (FOO '06) (September 7, 2006) Wrapping up my coverage of FOO sessions, I just thought I should probably mention the two last I attended, even though I don't have so much to directly say about them. I've got one more post to come though, so...

Brain stimulation for the masses... (FOO '06) (September 7, 2006) There was one speaker at FOO this year that would literally have blown my brain away if he'd happened to have had his equipment with him. Ed Boyden talked about transcranial magnetic stimulation - basically how to use focused magnetic...

Links for 2006-09-07 (September 7, 2006) Marvel Comics will have no gay characters in its mainstream books Only books labelled 'Max' or which indicate that they are for older people will contain any gay characters. I understand why they're doing it, but it's basically selling out...

On the Politicisation of Science... (FOO '06) (September 6, 2006) One talk from FOO Camp 06 started off fascinating me and end up driving me to distraction with frustration. Chris Csikszentmihályi from the MIT Media Lab did a talk about the implicit politics that lies behind all technology. Initially I...

Links for 2006-09-06 (September 6, 2006) Chris Messina talks about, "The yin-yang of FOO and Bar" Interesting comments from Robert Scoble surrounding the contention (which I agree with) that FOO and Bar are entirely compatible parts of the same ecosystem... Islam vs. Christianity - it...

On a global AIBO consciousness... (FOO '06) (September 5, 2006) My third FOO post in a row, and I'm only just getting onto the talks themselves. This time I learned from my experience last year and made sure that I tried to steer myself towards talks that were outside my...

Links for 2006-09-05 (September 5, 2006) Stargate SG-1 to end with (cough) tenth season Stargate is one of those desperate guilty secrets that it's difficult to justify, particularly in the presence of Battlestar Galactica which frankly craps upon it from a very great height. I'm...

On Werewolf at FOO Camp 06... (September 4, 2006) I'm sure Tim actually gets quite annoyed by the amount of times that people ostensibly talk about FOO Camp but actually end up talking about Werewolf - a game that is played pretty much solidly throughout the Friday and Saturday...

Some thoughts about FOO and elitism... (September 4, 2006) I'm going to try over the next few days to capture retrospectively my FOO experience in a little detail. I didn't think I'd have enough time to do it, but it turns out that when you're trying to avoid writing...

Links for 2006-09-04 (September 4, 2006) Just over a week ago Techcrunch UK launched keeping track of the tremulous UK start-up scene I hear really good things about Techcrunch UK, but haven't yet been keeping much track of it. Nice to see that I get...