Fiona, our head of department at work has taken up blogging.
June 2006 Archives
Do you remember the TV that could print Teletext to 4 inch thermal paper? Do you remember the device that would allow you to back up your data to VHS tape? Do you remember the Sinclair QL that had a built in phone?
Bit of a bet going with Barnaby from work here - will the Danmere Backer win, or will the Teletext printing TV reign supreme?
Continue reading just cause i’m autistic.
So, 25.
Ah, life.
So, I'm off to New York City again in a few weeks. There's something differently lovely about going to New York - from the mist and steam pouring out of the streets in the mornings to the random noises at night. I'll be there for a couple of weeks, from mid July until the end of the month, so if you want to hook up drop me a line (matt@cnuk.org) and we'll sort something out. I've already got so many things I want to do when I'm there, and so many other little things I've got organised.
Some of the things I'm doing, outside of the whole sitcom business so far are:-
- Seeing people (staying with Mike; hooking up with other 2600 folks and RMS)
- HOPE
- Visiting Fog Creek and lunch.
- Various trips to WBAI and (hopefully) WUSB.
But, as you can see, I will still have lots of time, and will be exploring things.
Stuff I'd like to do.
- Visiting the site of the 1964 World's Fair
However, that's a short list, and I'll probably add to it. Please leave comments or email me (matt@cnuk.org) and find me more places to go.
Dear Wall's,
I wish to complain about one of your products, namely Solero Orange Fresh, purchased from the Shell garage at Countess Weir roundabout in Exeter on Sunday 11th of June, 2006. The nature of my complaint is not from the flavour or quality of the ice lolly itself, which was rather nice, if somewhat marred by the following experience...
It was 14:07pm when it happened. I recall this as I stared blankly at the clock on the dashboard of the car I was travelling in, desperately seeking something which was not to be found. I badly needed a napkin, a cup - anything, something to hold the lion's share of the lolly which had without warning, sprung from its stick without hesitancy and into my lap. The ice cold demon had, without forethought brought about a sudden ending to my ice cream experience, leaving me with a sticky and somewhat unpleasant stain on my t-shirt and a chilly scramble to remove the product from my lap and dump it out of the window - something no civilised human should have to suffer on a Sunday.
I hope you are able to use this information to develop a superior stick for what is normally a superior ice cream beverage in what is typically an area of consumption in which you excel.
Yours, with love,
matt
(Yet another) Rails reference - This time, a very nice and quick (a giant “cheat sheet”) reference. In HTML and PDF.
(Yet another) Rails reference - This time, a very nice and quick (a giant “cheat sheet”) reference. In HTML and PDF.
Bruce Perens article on DRM - Is DRM Just a Consumer Rights Issue?
Is DRM just a consumer rights issue effecting your record collection? A UK board is treating it as such. But it's much more important than that.
Why the light has gone out on LAMP
PHP and MySQL are this generation's BASIC.BASIC has become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers. This is another case (like Pascal) of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer is (a) very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros. As it is, it ruins thousands of potential wizards a year.
Replace BASIC with PHP or MySQL and you've got today's most common programmer. Worse, the most common programs in existence today mix the two in a brain-freezing mixture of stupidity.
I think the success of PHP and MySQL is easily seen in systems like Wordpress. Its lead developer, Matt Mullenweg said recently in an interview that part of its success is that it can be installed on any cheap-ass hosting - something that cannot be said for systems like Zope, Django and Ruby on Rails - as time progresses, I think we'll see Rails being deployed more and more on such hosting, but for the languages that aren't tomorrow's poster children, their success will be limited not by their technical merit, but by their ease of deployment by virtually anyone on any hosting.
