2010; 52
- A new year, no resolutions, but a strong, well rested desire to embrace writing all over again.
Posts from
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Good work, Bay Area.
Great Britain, January 7th 2010
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Song of the Day
Cross-Game, International Trading in Settlers of Catan
A draft set of rules for groups playing multiple, simultaneous games of Settlers of Catan, enabling trading of resources between games (and rewarding the establishment of trade routes.)
Re: The End of Time
A copy of my vitriolic response to James Aylett’s dissection of the Tenth Doctor’s finale, ‘The End of Time’.
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Yes, his network is called ‘comedy’, but we live in a day where Fox is called ‘news’.
Mac OSX has a pretty good window manager. Why did you write a worse one in JavaScript?
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Fuck “Auntie Beeb”, the BBC is more of a dead cool uncle. Sure it does some really shit, stupid things now and again, but it’s just too good of a thing to get really upset about.
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People love narratives. They go to the movies to indulge in someone else’s narrative, they read books to shoot narratives straight into their bloodstream. People like narratives because narratives are the lies they’re allowed to believe. So we need to stop saying that the Republicans deal in narrative. We need to be honest. We need to tell people that they deal in lies.
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Kraft have a proud record of creating entirely new substances from a range of natural ingredients such as Welshman’s foot sweat, monkey bum-grease and pheno-glyceryl tribenzoate.
“This then goes into a hot oven for 20 minutes and out pops something that they have the sheer brass nuts to attach the word ‘cheese’ to.
Unsubscribe/Unarchive
There is value in email, and that value is communication. Over years, service providers and publishers have taken advantage of email’s ubiquity to adapt it for push, notification and automation. Better solutions to those use cases are emerging (or already exist), so this is the time to reclaim the inbox, reduce your email throughput back to what the medium is really good for. I’ve already seen that a little bit of persistent effort can greatly increase the quality of email as a tool.
How to Live Without Fear In America
How important is it that my posts are on Tumblr?
Hello, dear reader.
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The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come.
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This, of course, can easily be misunderstood as some kind of scam, leaving people with the impression that we want to collect additional information. This is not the case, however, because it is merely the method Visa has chosen to upgrade their customers’ accounts, which is totally beyond our control.
To remove any suspicion regarding the need to enter part of one’s social security number when making a small payment to PlayCatan, we have decided to refrain from offering the “Verified by Visa” security detail for now.
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All I wanted was something new that absolutely made sense to me, and reflected who I am
Filibuster 2.0: How 41 Senators Control The Country Without Actually Filibustering
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I wouldn’t want to take away your joy and surprise on Wednesday when you see our latest creation.
Designing for Location: Privacy, trust, frequency, accuracy? Oh my!
Part one of my Designing for Location series. Back in 2008 I worked for Yahoo! on Fire Eagle, in 2009 I tried to present everything I’d learned to an audience at Chromatic in San Francisco, and this is the long delayed write-up of what I know.
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I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming, scientific evidence on climate change…
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Unrefined thought on the iPad closed system/open system/old world-new world/learning to programme meme: We learned to programme and it made us smarter, better, improved our brains. We fear a world in which people cannot improve their brains in the same way. We fear that simpler, more refined interfaces will close off a route to getting smart, that people will be stupider as a result, or that access to knowledge we take for granted will be accessible only to an elite.
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If root did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. In a world with only closed systems, commercial success would still be tied to the development of third party apps, but the responsibility to train developers and introduce people to programming would fall to the gatekeeper of each system, rather than it being something that can organically happen. So, Apple, or Microsoft, or whoever, would be shipping programming sandboxes for their devices; maybe scripting tools, maybe programming games, maybe cut-down versions of the professional development environment. Whatever it would be, if there was no open ecosystem to learn in, a closed system to learn would be created. The idea that people would not become programmers in 1995 because they can’t do everything to a single closed system in an otherwise open industry today is a fallacy. If the first computers had been closed, everything would be different, right down to the seeds that inspired our initial passions for software development.
On the iPad
I like the iPad; I’d like to buy one for my parents.
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We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products – as well as new Docs and Sites features – won’t work properly in older browsers.
On More Open Development Environments
Many of the restrictions around the iPhone OS are well documented and infamous. Here though, I lament the loss of a less regarded capability of open systems; the extensibility of existing applications themselves, and explore the closest alternative on the iPad: The web browser, and the web itself.
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Yes, we already had a big year planned for 2010, with several long-anticipated major product releases—but we think iPad is really important: important enough to spend some time juggling our plans to figure out how we can introduce five new iPad apps
Selective HTML5
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Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening—really listening—to what people say about your writing. This is the golden age for aspiring writers. We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and—if you can manage to get anybody’s attention—get near-instant feedback. Writers just 20 years ago would have killed for that kind of feedback loop. Killed! And you’re asking me what word processor I use? Just fucking write, then publish, then write some more.
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This was an epiphany. I publish my work in HTML, people primarily read my work in HTML, so it makes sense to write in HTML too. Writing in one format and converting it to HTML is not worth the mental and technical overhead. HTML is not just one output format among many; it is the format of our age.
