November 2007
16 posts
Environmentalism
The current dichotomy is not sustainable (ha!), and nor is the system which generates it. Environmentalism prolongs the existence of this system.
— http://interconnected.org/home/2007/11/11/i_read_the_space
Is this UTF-16 in a twitter?
Paul Mison pointed me at this very odd twitter. It’s from a phone, so it seems unlikely that is was supposed to look like this. It contains ‘@s@t@r@a@ @e’ - that was supposed to be ‘Straße’? So this is probably a Windows Mobile phone falling back to UTF-16 / UCS-2 to send non-ascii. Every other phone I’ve ever see falls back to UTF-8 to do this.
Don’t...
Language choice
Why do people writing server-side code, where limited CPU and memory resources much be shared between hundreds of users, use ‘high-level’ scripting language, whereas those writing client-side code, running on a machine where CPU and memory are much cheaper, use C and other lower-level languages?
“In 1999, Germany sold some mobile-phone spectrum by auction, with one rule...”
– http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/11/deregulation-an.html
..the document-centric model was never allowed to bloom as we had hoped, to the point where it would differentiate the Mac user experience.
— Greg Maletic - OpenDoc
Personally, I feel that nowadays the Mac’s obviously application-centric interface (the dock, application-global menus, etc) is the thing that sets it apart from (and above) Windows’ more fluffy ‘some...
mod_perlite →
Another ‘embed Perl in Apache’ module, this one trying to get rid of the thing that makes mod_perl so great and awful at the same time - the persistent run-time. It seems to be that this is an odd time to produce such a thing - the recent trend seems to be towards even small projects having a lightweight front-end server like lighttpd or nginx, and a specialised back-end server like...
Hell - population 968 →
via Mr Hammond.
The iPhone 2
Assume that the iPhone is sim-locked to AT&T (or O2 in this country). When the iPhone 2 arrives, can I move my SIM into one and avoid another 18-month lock-in? Or are Apple going to move beyond mere provider-level locking on this one?
photos
back when nerds were in charge of the internet, you couldn’t use it to find childhood pictures of us.
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Silicon Valley's... →
‘Web 2.0’ is the new ‘dot com’ - the term people nail to things to make them sound hip. Hurrah for easily-hijacked meaningless words!
Requisite OpenSocial post
Facebook invented, and Google have just generalized, an entirely new class of application. Take Dopplr. It’s a social network that does trip tracking and coincidences. This is completely backwards - the social network stuff is overhead that we have to implement so that we can keep trips private and restrict the list of coincidences that you have to manage. Dopplr should really only be about...
Clocks
My house contains many clocks. Most of them are attached to computers and tend to sort themselves out when the clocks go back. A couple are manual and need poking at by hand, which isn’t really a chore till you have a house full of them. But the wall clock in the kitchen is Magic - it just needs a battery, then it’ll go pick up the time from Rugby and set itself. It’ll...
rails annoyances
Grrr. If you require, in your application_helper, a gem that isn’t installed, then that helper doesn’t get compiled or included. And no error message is printed. It just silently isn’t made available to your templates.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/02/first-opensoci... →
I wish people would understand that these hacks, and the many, many Facebook application hacks, are not faults of the platform. They’re faults in the application. Every time you lower the bar to producing web applications, you get a barrage of apps written by people who haven’t thought about security.
