Year: 2003

Categories
Random

Wow, that hit a bit close to home…

Celebrating the 30,000 word point, Cory posts a 2,000 excerpt from his upcoming book /usr/bin/god (thanks to The Link Machine]:

“You’re the kind of sneering, creative, self-important ‘consultant’ that sucked the economy dry. You’re a carpetbagger, Mason. You’re a phony. You have a Humanities degree. You know the gag-lines from last night’s South Park, but you can’t write code from stubs. Wherever there’s an entrepreneur with a great idea and a little money, there you are, like a tapeworm, eating the company out from the inside. I’ve seen a thousand of you, Mason, and there’s no more place for you in the Valley. Go find another industry to pick on, and get the fuck out of mine.” He delivered this all with a wet smile and a charming crinkle in his eye and only the veins standing out in his neck mirrored the hostility of his words.

Categories
Design

On Camden's tube redevelopment…

The plans for Camden Town’s proposed tube redevelopment have been around since the end of last year, and I imagine debate has raged in the area. I’ve only just stumbled upon them though. My only real issue with them is that I wish they’d found a way to incorporate some of the current facade into the new building. Parts of London already feel characterless and inhuman – I can’t help feeling that those early twentieth century tube station designs are almost iconic now, and that their loss would be a terrible shame…

camden_station.jpg

What do you guys think? Is it more important to preserve the identity of a city or to look to the future? Is Camden moving in the right direction?

Categories
Random

Tom Coates' Family Fun Hour…

Having been woken up from my post-unblocking-drains late-Friday-night sofa-doze by a bored Los Angelene, I shall pass time by casting a few web-pebbles into the memetic voting urn. I will make the links fun and not all about work stuff. I promise.

Categories
Personal Publishing

Other people's RSS feeds…

A few things that drive me insane about some other people’s RSS feeds which make the experience of reading their posts via a newsreader like NetNewsWire less simple, pleasant and consistent:

  1. Excerpt-only RSS-feeds…
    Now before I start, yes I know that RSS feeds were originally designed to simply place site headlines on other people’s sites. I think we can also hold as axiomatic that there are probably problems with the large-scale delivery of RSS feeds. And yes – I do appreciate that there are problems in tracking the number of meaningful times a page has been viewed via an RSS reader and that there are consequences in ripping blocks of writing unceremoniously from their individual design contexts. Even know all of this, I think I can say with reasonable authority that providing full entries in your RSS feed has become a de facto standard (and those places that haven’t done that unilaterally are increasingly supplying multiple feeds). Providing full feeds makes it possible for people to easily sync your most recent content to their computer (if they’re using a desktop app) and read it in completely different places – like on the train or in the bus). More importantly, for those of us who read most of our regular sites through a newsreader, it’s just profoundly annoying.
  2. Not linking to comments (if enabled)…
    Not everyone can have comments on their sites. Not everyone wants comments on their sites. If they can and do want comments on their sites, they might not want them on every entry. Help us out! If there are going to be comments on your entry, then find a way to show us through your RSS feed. The code I use to include a link to the comments in my 0.91 RSS feed (for example) is: <description><$MTEntryBody encode_xml=”1″$> <MTEntryIfAllowComments><![CDATA[<p><a href=”<$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml=”1″$>#comments”>Read the comments</a></p>]]> </MTEntryIfAllowComments></description>
  3. Citing the number of comments after each entry…
    This may seem counter-intuitive, but think about it. Every time your entry changes, my newsreader picks up those changes and marks ‘read’ entries as ‘unread’. This is really useful if there’s been an update to that entry, but less useful if it’s going to happen every single time someone posts a new comment. Particularly if you subscribe to a number of different sites (or you’re tracking something like Jason’s Matrix Reloaded thread
  4. Only putting in two or three recent entries…
    I may only get the opportunity to catch up with my subscriptions once a day or maybe even once every couple of days. If you’re only going to show me the most recent two or three entries on your RSS feed, then it’s more than possible that I’d come to my reader to discover that every article on your feed remains unread. But what about the ones that have already dropped off? How will I ever know they exist unless I make a special effort to come to your site to check? And if that’s your hope, then give it up – more likely I’ll just never know that post existed.
  5. Making the link attribute refer to the site you’re talking about rather than the permalink for your entry…
    Again – I don’t care which is right and which is wrong. The de facto standard for the link attribute in your RSS entry should be its permalink on your site (if at all possible), otherwise an internal anchor to the specific post on your site’s front-page. If you take this second option could you please make sure that the front-page of your site has the same number (or more) of entries on it as your RSS feed…

I should point out – there’s an arcane quality to the mechanics behind RSS feeds and RDF that I understand only gesturally. If I’ve said something profoundly stupid, then I apologise straight-away… This post was partially inspired by the release of a new RSS reader: Shrook [via Tesugen].

Categories
Random

On tiny interface imperfections…

I don’t know whether it’s because I spend time working on user interfaces or whether it’s because I’m profoundly anal, but the smallest imperfections in consistency in a UI can drive me mad. Weirdly, the large ones don’t affect me so much – I suppose because large UI problems make applications essentially unusable. But those small ones… Nnngh… They’re like specks of dust in your eyes that makes you weep with frustration, or the solitary grain of sand in your sandwich that sets your teeth on edge…

So while the debate rages around the internet about failings of iSync 1.1 – with people complaining about bugs, problems with firewalls, lost data – I’m secretly delighted. One of the most profoundly annoying (and infinitesimally tiny) design inconsistencies in the application has finally been removed. I can sleep again at last!

In Mac OSX, you can choose to have shortcuts or indicators for a variety of applications sit in your Finder menu bar. Next to the system clock you can have battery power indicators, volume indicators, iChat status indicators, Airport reception indicators… The list goes on. Each one of these indicators is (by default) a black symbol placed onto the aqua-style textured background of the bar. When you select one of them, a menu drops down from it, the background for the icon turns blue, and the icon itself turns white. Except for iSync! This one remained black – with a small aura of white around it. It drove me insane.

Now though – today – with iSync 1.1 slowly sputtering and crashing over the sheer weight of my Safari bookmarks, I’m at peace at last. They’ve fixed it! The rollover is clean and simple. It looks right! It fits! Now all I have to do is find a way of sanding off the tiny imperfection in my iBook trackpad.

Which tiny imperfections drive you insane?

Categories
Random

Cherry and Almond Cake…

For some unknown reason I spent much of yesterday evening cooking a Cherry & Almond Cake. The finished product is a little burnt around the edges, but is extremely nice. Maybe a little too sweet…

Categories
Radio & Music

In love with radio 4…

“The history of mankind in the last three hundred years has been punctuated by major upheavals in human thought that we call scientific revolutions – upheavals that have profoundly affected the way in which we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos. First there was the Copernican revolution – the notion that far from being the centre of the universe, our planet is a mere speck of dust revolving around the sun. Then there was the Darwinian revolution culminating in the view that we are not angels but merely hairless apes, as Huxley once pointed out in this very room. And third there was Freud’s discovery of the “unconscious” – the idea that even though we claim to be in charge of our destinies, most of our behaviour is governed by a cauldron of motives and emotions which we are barely conscious of. Your conscious life, in short, is nothing but an elaborate post-hoc rationalisation of things you really do for other reasons.”

So starts the BBC’s Reith lecture series for 2003 – broadcast a couple of months ago on BBC Radio 4. The topic of the lectures was “The Emerging Mind”, and they were delivered by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. They make for fascinating listening and are very much recommended.

But perhaps more impressive than the lectures themselves is that every single one of them is still available for download on Radio 4’s site. And they’re of eminently listenable quality, even if they’re in RealAudio format. And it’s not only the Reith Lectures that are online – in fact, almost every radio programme played on the station in recent months remains available. And there are a hell of a lot of those programmes covering all the major subject areas – all ready to be listened to on demand. Here’s some to be going along with: News, Drama, Comedy, Science, Religion and History…

If I sound over-excited, it’s because – bluntly – I am. I’ve never been a devoted acolyte of the station, but now I can easily cherry-pick precisely what interests me it’s becoming easier to see the appeal. For example – what other station would have a weekly programme dedicated to the history of ideas? And would that programme routinely have in such figures as Steven Pinker or Adam Philips and Malcolm Bowie for round-table debates. What other station would manage to have two separate series about interesting numbers: 5 numbers and Another 5 numbers – as presented by Simon Singh.

I know I’m coming into this late. I know that everyone else in the UK is going to look at me funny and point out that I should have been paying more attention several months ago. But dammit! I’m as impressed by this as when Pathe News put all its archives online.

P.S. If anyone can remember which writer it was that first described Galileo, Darwin and Freud as thinkers who decentred man from his view first of cosmology, biology and finally from his view of his own mind, then can you let me know. It’s driving me mad…

Categories
Random

The FCC, Weblogs and Inequality…

I can very much recommend Clay’s latest piece: FCC, Weblogs and Inequality to anyone who’s even vaguely interested in either FCC regulation of the airwaves or the nature of inequalities in webloggia. I’m afraid I’m going to spoil the ending for you, because I think it’s particularly pertinent to some of the recent discussions we’ve been having:

The one incoherent view is the belief that a free and diverse media will naturally tend towards equality. The development of weblogs in their first five years demonstrates that is not always true, and gives us reason to suspect it may never be true. Equality can only be guaranteed by limiting either diversity or freedom. The best thing that could come from the lesson of weblog popularity would be an abandoning of the idea that there will ever be an unconstrained but egalitarian media utopia, a realization ideally followed by a more pragmatic discussion between the “diverse and free” and “diverse and equal” camps.

My only issue with the piece is that the concept of equality is reduced to equality of audience/readership/influence and only briefly alludes to equality of opportunity.

Categories
Journalism Personal Publishing

Stop bitching. Make it better…

The main problem I have with the weblog-related positions of professional writers like Bill Thompson and professional trolls like Andrew Orlowski is that we’ve had all these debates so many times before. Debate around A-list cliques has existed for years – as have comments that weblogs are ultimately trivial. It was over three years ago now that A List Apart published Fame Fatale – and that wasn’t the first article along those lines. Some of the pieces had more justification than others. Some had little or no justification at all. Mostly, in time, people just changed their minds. We’ve walked around these particular avenues and alleyways several times now, each time accompanied by a new group of people who consider themselves slightly higher up the food chain.

It would be different if they accomplished anything. If Orlowski was working to improve weblog culture or pull it in a positive direction, then there would be value in that. If Bill’s work was trying to rectify inappropriate imbalances in the social system that has emerged, then we might actually be getting somewhere. I don’t think there’s a single weblogger who thinks that there’s absolutely no scope for improvement. But instead what happens is that legitimate concerns get pushed aside by florid rhetoric and high dudgeon, debate gets polarised, until eventually everyone gets bored and weblogging continues pretty much as it did before. Only this time with permalinks! Or comments! Or automated blog-rolling!

And the steady take-up of weblogging seems undeterred by these debates. People still continue to start weblogs faster than people stop writing them – there are now (by conservative estimates) hundreds of thousands of regularly updated sites. And with AOL and Microsoft rumoured to be getting in on the act, along with new ventures by Blogger, Movable Type, 20six (etc.) it looks like there’s going to be a hell of a lot more weblogs started in the next few years.

I think it’s now time that people started to face this fact. That whether or not they like it (whether or not any of us like it), weblogging is not something that’s going away in the next couple of years. Having an ‘anti-weblogging position’ is no longer even vaguely a ‘real-world antidote’ to unfathomable and unwarranted ‘weblog hysteria’. It’s just really unhelpful. It doesn’t accomplish anything. So you want my advice? Work to make it better or sod off. If you think there’s really a legitimate problem in the way that weblogs operate between each other then try and suggest a solution, try and suggest some things that are likely to be taken up and worked with by the extended community. Or think of something better than weblogs! That’s got to be a more creative, positive and useful way of interacting with the world than sitting on the sidelines and bitching… Surely?

This piece was grumpily forged in the comments of the iSociety‘s weblog.

Categories
Random

The Mind Palace…

A few things that I’m taking the time to place inside my mind palace – as ever mostly culled from my favourite weblogs and news sources (see the Weblogs panel on the right):