Archive for August, 2008

I enjoyed Lloyd Davis’s post Stick your five-year plan, in which he argues the futility of long-term planning when it comes to one’s own life. I think in some respects he’s absolutely right. While it’s useful to have some structure, some framework to life, anything beyond a couple of years is likely to be wildly [...]

It should come as no surprise that, as both an IA and a music snob, I keep my ID3 tags pretty much immaculate. Correct spellings, title case throughout, even proper diacritics, until they were ruined by the iTunes v7.7 update. As part of my curatorial approach, I classify for optimal findability – which means, since [...]

I have a policy of muting TV adverts due to their inherent idiocy, but here’s one I actually unmuted. I’m a sucker for under-appreciated nick nacks. See also: 10 Perfectly Pure Gadgets.

It occurs to me that the reason people (myself included) are pissed at Twitter’s removal of UK SMS service is that it discards information and nullifies coping strategies we’ve built up over time. Text messaging is one of the highest priority communication methods, superceded probably only by a ringing telephone. It tells users directly, wherever [...]

One of the difficulties of working in the internet industry is we sometimes feel like we’re fighting a losing battle against regulation. Despite the new horizons the digital age offers: state databases of our information are growing, yet our access to public information is being eroded, copyright is becoming more restrictive, making a criminal out [...]

The 1960s saw the first ideological skirmish in computer chess programming (and by extension much of the nascent field of AI) between two schools of thought: ‘brute force’ and ‘selective search’. Brute force methods involved looking at every possible position on the board, whereas selective search advocated pruning the game tree by ignoring moves that [...]

The South By Southwest session picker has just gone online and I’m not too proud to shamelessly solicit votes for my session: Divorce / Retry / Fail: Keeping Users Infatuated We know all about lust. Our websites pose, preen and seduce, and it works – those users just can’t keep their hands off our bits. [...]