Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Announcing the new blog design and a refreshingly empty mind.

A quick review of 2009, and what’s in store for 2010.

In the absence of sufficient time to finish my drafts, some interesting reading: The Dice-O-Matic — guy runs games server. Players complain of pseudo-random number generation. Guy builds gigantic dice rolling machine, capable of 1.3 million rolls a day. Burnout — new A List Apart article by Scott Boms. “Know thyself, but be gentle.” The [...]

Warning: There follows an arcane debate about HTML semantics, which will be extremely tedious to some. Today has seen a minor revival of one the web’s perennial debates: whether the site header or page header is the most important. Its trivial intractability is perhaps only exceeded by the old UI chestnut of whether positive confirmation [...]

Edited highlights of recent delicious additions: The $300 Million Button – Jared Spool on some pretty impressive usability RoI. Demand a Read/Write City – “Our city is read-only. You’re free to read advertising, business signs, and city signs. But dare you write or hang anything of your own; you will be labeled as a criminal [...]

Musically, 2008 was a pipe and slippers year for me. I didn’t buy much, I didn’t play much, and I took comfort in the songs that I’d known and loved for years. To tell the truth, I was concerned that I’d lost interest in the scene altogether: the effort required to keep up seemed too [...]

The concept of “free” was, in retrospect, a little incongruous with Copenhagen. Although, according to the locals, Denmark is the cheapest of the Scandinavian nations, £6.50 for a pint is still something of a sting. Plus, of course, there was the irony of the Free Beer, released under a Creative Commons licence but which, at [...]

In the 14th century, friar William of Occam thought up a maxim that, in my opinion, should be drummed into the public from an early age. Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Or, to paraphrase: Of two equivalent theories or explanations, the simpler one is to be preferred. This is known as Occam’s Razor. [...]