this year
2006
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
Diggory, Andrew, and Matt R.
why I like 802.11
senate committee letter
oscon2003
ms and free software
ubiquity
webolodeon
wat
tagling
haiku
August 2002
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<<Jul Sep>> NTK has now moved to its new, ultra fast server! Yay for the all-powerful Flirble Organisation!
(Actually, the old server wasn't bad at all, but there was something very awry and skewiff and borken with the Perl installation. Still unresolved, much to the confusion of the *BSD Perl porters involved.)
Ten Thousand Statistically Grammar-Average Fake Band Names, including:
Unsent
Absentee
Injection Hourglass
Hole <--- aha!
Bran Enchantment
Each Pinks
Bill Inducer
Swimmer Reign
Penitent Pioneer
Coachman Amongst
Landslide
Heliocentric Minus Another Redhead Peripherals
Base
Regulator Thugs
AOL subscribers using AOL's new MacOS X client will see the Web through Mozilla's rendering engine. I'm guessing that's a tiny subset of the online population right now, but it's a sign that we're moving towards slightly more diversity - both in operating systems and browsers.
A bad brew. Stayed up all last night trying to crank the UK Patent Office's draft EUCD legislation into my brain, then relaxed today by learning Squeak the small mammal language left over after the Xerox dinosaur swallowed the meteor. Now my brain's all broken.
Squeak's a mess, which surprised me. Its developers are on an ongoing voyage between two paradigms - from the old Model-View-Controller idea that SmallTalk pioneered, and this new Morphic ideal, which seems to be visual programming on steroids (lots of dragging of boxes which represent methods next to boxes that represent numbers, then throwing them into buckets that represent data, etc). This trip has been going on since around 1998 as far as I can work out, and, in true SmallTalk fashion, they've been rewriting their whole environment as they went. Squeak now looks like this bastard hybrid of a Disney Children's Constructor Kit and an explosion in an object factory.
I understand now that Extreme Programming is a response to the awful temptations of power that come with a SmallTalkish environment. Fiddle with code forever! Redefine everything, every day! SmallTalk (and Squeak) is a bit like having a development environment based on the same instincts that make you fiddle with your screensaver settings all afternoon. It's the sort of environment Jack from "Heat Vision and Jack" would code in. Viewed like that, XP is an Zen Monklike act of profound discipline, rather than the anarchic disruptor that everyone seems to think it is.
Anyway, after traipsing a bit depressingly through haphazard Swikis and online Squeak Foundation manifestos from 1999, I finally found out where all the Squeakers hide out. As always during major upheavals, the true believers hunker down on the the mailing lists. So if you're interested in playing around with Squeak yourself (and it is fun), I think that's the first stop after the obligatory Squeak FAQs
Dave Eggers talks about his latest book. I'm glad he's living in San Francisco. Seth took me to the Pirate Supply Store a while back. There were these extremely McSweeneyesque-style signs all over the place - on lard, and scurvy, and the use of eyeglasses. I'd be a bit afraid if anyone else was aping Eggers quite that precisely. Turns out it's Eggers and the McSweeney's Permanent Staff all along, and just a the flimsy front for his children's writing lab out the back. Apparently it's all funded from the pirate lard sales.