May 2012
4 tags
WTFWG →
Whenever anyone tells me that Wikipedia has a toxic community, I just think about the WHATWG/HTML WG.
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Why Pinterest matters
I saw on Hacker News today this story about Pinterest raising $100m. And subsequently lots of comments from mostly male geeks not understanding how Pinterest ought to be valued at a billion dollars (as standard VC maths puts it, because of the risk, VCs expect companies to have a tenfold return on investment).
Here’s why.
In the United States, the cosmetics industry is worth around $58...
1 tag
“Marshall, the Family Foundation of Virginia and others who raised concerns about...”
– Laura Vozzella, House of Delegates rejects gay judge Tracy Thorne-Begland, Washington Post
Yeah, what is it with all these uppity queens who are outspoken on the subject of their basic civil rights and equality?
1 tag
Sexism-in-tech: how to be an entitled prick
Oh god. You know how it is. You are sitting there, reading Hacker News or Reddit or Twitter and suddenly those crazy barmy feminazis are whining again about someone saying something mean. You know what you can do: expose yourself as a massive entitled prick by putting them back in their place.
Not sure how to do this? Here’s a handy guide.
Claim that because you’ve never seen any...
3 tags
Hackdiary: MediaWiki API noodling in Ruby with...
I’ve been noodling with MediaWiki::Gateway today. It’s a not particularly feature-rich, but otherwise awesome Ruby library for talking to MediaWiki. The not particularly feature-rich part is important: there are other libraries which do a much better job at abstracting away the complexities of MediaWiki. For instance, there’s PyWikipediabot and the excellent .NET library...
2 tags
Filtering the Internet and being a teenager
Looks like the government are going to be consulting on the opt-in filter. This is good. I hope to respond. There’s lots to respond about: obviously there are civil libertarian objections to this, which are all very well, but there are some pragmatic objections too, mostly centered around the fact that blocking software sucks.
By having a government-sponsored filter, parents will be lulled...
April 2012
2 tags
Trawling the archives with the ghost of dial-up...
I’ve just been chatting to someone about the sad departing of Ceefax and Teletext, and the various memories we have of these centralized, TV-based Internet forerunners. I had a look at the Wikipedia article on Ceefax, and it’s got sourcing problems. Having recently been given access to HighBeam, I had a quick check to find articles about Ceefax, preferably old ones.
And of course I...
2 tags
“A radio personality in Cleveland is facing tremendous backlash after telling a...”
– Rape Away The Gay? Radio Personality Tells Father To Get A Man To Rape His Daughter Until She Turns Straight
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Single man seeking illiteracy fetishist
Listen up. I don’t care whether you are gay or straight or bi, looking for someone to date, someone to marry (or, err, form a civil partnership with1), someone to fuck, someone to have kids with, someone to be your sugar daddy, whatever. I’ve edited, picked over, rejigged and furiously deleted more shit prose than you can ever imagine. Bad writing is universal in every field.
...
1 tag
Learning to code
I’m writing this because I’ve been asked a lot of these questions a fair few times before by different people. I feel I need to try and answer them comprehensively and without any bullshit in one place so I can just refer people to this post rather than say the same things over and over again.
Should I learn to code?
I’m guessing if you are reading this post, you probably are...
1 tag
4 tags
You've got enough equality already
The same day The Guardian has an article about gay Tories, we get this little shocker from Karl McCartney, Conservative MP for Lincoln.
He told his constituent gay people have “exhausted the cause of equal rights and have now picked on an issue which would possibly only affect a few thousand people every year, whilst also uprooting thousands of years of Christian tradition.”
Exhausted? For...
2 tags
What difference does twenty years make in...
I found an interesting little thing today with metadata from Google Books. I was looking for the earliest use of the word “ontic”.
So I trot off to Google Books, tap it in and do some fiddling with the search settings. Lots from the 1940s, a few from the 1930s. But then I get very excited: a use in the English language purportedly from 1907. Where? In the Proceedings of the American...
3 tags
Your 'team' loves you as much as any other...
I was reading the BBC News site today and came across this story.
A 17-year-old Norwich City fan has angered the club he supports by leaking pictures of its new kit 12 hours before the official launch.
The teenager, from Norwich, managed to obtain the pictures from the Canaries’ website as it was being updated.
He did not hack into the website, but was able to take the images...
3 tags
Introducing awfulness.js
Is your website too boring, functional and usable? Want to make it more exciting and “responsive”? Just include awfulness.js and you can benefit from all these new features.
Badly reimplemented statefulness
In the old days of Web 1.0, long before we created Backbone.js and other client-side frameworks, you could tell what state a web page was in based on messages in the browser...
2 tags
“the passage or defeat of marriage equality isn’t just about weddings. It’s about...”
– Frank Bruni
2 tags
The Hack Day Manifesto →
A little thing I helped with: a guide on how to run hack days, hackathons and other similar events. And, yes, the anti-sexist, anti-discrimination stuff is partly my doing.
Dan did the hard work.
4 tags
x-isms in tech culture redux
What a crazy few weeks. Since my crazy, fuck you to homophobia coming out post almost a month ago, I’ve seem to have unintentionally gone into full overdrive with the social issues in technology culture posts: discussing how sexism in technology conferences insults everybody by making women and gay men invisible, and by portraying straight men as stupid, misogynistic idiots who think only...
3 tags
Brogrammers, diversity and defensiveness
After yesterday’s post on Brendan Eich and Prop 8, I told myself I wasn’t going to write about the whole geek/social/prejudice/discrimination/exclusion/political correctness clusterfuck. But here we are again.
Why? Oh, the Ryan Funduk post, which is currently doing the rounds on Twitter and Hacker News and G+ and so on, because it’s an interesting example of the same reaction...
Fuck Yeah, Disingenuous Liberal →
3 tags
Brendan Eich, Prop 8 and homophobia
Yesterday, it was revealed that JavaScript creator and Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich gave $1,000 to the Proposition 8 campaign. Go read the Hacker News post.
My response was very simple: disappointment.
Now, as always, we have the counter-reaction.
@flyosity @sco Why isn’t @BrendanEich allowed to take a stance without public “burning”? It seems “tolerance” is a one...
3 tags
Conservapedia announce exciting new linked data...
America’s most trusted encyclopedia, Conservapedia, have decided to launch a new wiki-based semantic data project named Conservadata. The new project will make right-wing soundbites available in machine readable form. Conservadata is being announced only days after the announcement of Wikidata a new project headed by Wikimedia Germany to create a shared, open repository of factual...
March 2012
3 tags
“If your product can’t stand proud independently – don’t get my cock to do the...”
– Terence Eden on booth babes at MWC.
4 tags
The danger of design thinking
Seyi Ogunyemi has an interesting post about writing as design. Go read it.
Now, I have a story.
When I went to secondary school, they taught us “food technology”. Not home economics. Food technology. We had two different women who taught us food technology: one was a 50-something lady who liked to say ‘scone’ to rhyme with ‘cone’ rather than to rhyme with...
3 tags
How to run an unconference →
Excellent advice on the Lanyrd blog from Cristiano Betta and Salim Virani.
3 tags
Home-schooled and illiterate →
We were convinced that it would be better for our kids not to have an education than to be educated to become humanists or atheists and to reject God.
We were told that the whole point of public school was to dumb down the children and turn them into compliant workers – to brainwash them and indoctrinate them into this godless way of thinking.
Le sigh.
2 tags
What Anscombe Intended & Other Puzzles →
An interesting interview from 3:AM Magazine with Richard Marshall discussing Elizabeth Anscombe.
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Analysis: Rowan Williams’ time as Archbishop of... →
1 tag
ASCII Is Too Intimate →
“UX” as a single person’s role strikes me as a red herring. User experience is...”
– » 23 March 2012, baked by Frances Berriman @ The Pastry Box Project (via adactio)
5 tags
Newsflash: sexism in geek communities demeans...
There’s been a load of drama about the Boston API Jam. See Hacker News and The Guardian for more.
Let’s remember what Boston API Jam’s advertising said. As one of the features of the event, they listed…
Women: Need another beer? Let one of our friendly (female) event staff get that for you.
When friends told me about it last night, I didn’t quite grok it. I...
2 tags
Yo mamma so stupid she gonna become an SEO...
How do you know if you are a search engine optimization expert? Well, you look at this Wikipedia article and this eHow article and sit and wonder why exactly people might prefer the former over the latter. I mean, it doesn’t have any adverts or ‘share this’ links and it doesn’t target key niche keyword verticals, or whatever the bollocks is this week.
As Philippe points...
3 tags
2 tags
“I am bowled over by how opponents of gay marriage are willing to defy the...”
– Norman Geras
6 tags
Of marriage privatization, libertarians and...
I hope you’ve all been watching the gay marriage stuff in the media. I’ve sent off my response to the consultation. And I hope you do too.
It’s all jolly good fun and japes, having consultations and voting over whether or not to grant equal rights. And, of course, the Church and the Campaign for Marriage and so on are looking like utterly despicable fools.
Anyway, in amongst...
1 tag
Jay Kreps: Scala Macros: "Oh God Why?" →
“Some Internet piracy groups decided to implement some new regulations and...”
– BitTorrent Pirates Go Nuts After TV Release Groups Dump Xvid | TorrentFreak (via iamdanw)
5 tags
The postmodern logic of homophobia
The theologian John Milbank on gay marriage:
This can seem like a perversely contorted claim, but its logic is quite straightforward: the intended change in the definition of marriage would mean that marriage as traditionally defined no longer exists. Thus heterosexual people would no longer have the right to enter into an institution understood to be only possible for heterosexuals, as doubly...
6 tags
Oppression, identity and sexuality
Oh yeah, what a lovely, academic-ish name for a post. It’d be even better if it had a colon afterwards, then a subtitle starting with the word “towards”. Oppression, identity and sexuality: towards a poststructuralist hermeneutic of something or other.
See, I don’t like talking about who I am, I like talking about what I do and what I think. So, I was born in the county...
1 tag
““Who’s been checking in this crap code?” Bob exclaimed as he...”
– The Strong Type – The Daily WTF
People like Randy (in Boise, perhaps?) are why all developers need to be armed with a decent quality distributed version control system and a taser.
4 tags
EasyTether... is actually easy, and works
I’ve finally got USB tethering working between Mac and Android. I followed these instructions from AskDifferent (the StackExchange site for Apple and Mac related questions). You have to install a piece of software called EasyTether on your phone, and then carefully follow the instructions in the app which include installing drivers on your computer. It takes about 10 minutes.
But if you do...
5 tags
“In one of my philosophy classes, towards the end, we talked about this idea of...”
– Deborah Feldman, How I Left My Ultra-Orthodox, Ultra-Repressed Hasidic Community
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Setting up OS X Lion from fresh
I bought a new laptop today, and thought I should document everything I needed to do to get to the point of usable.
If you haven’t used Lion before, get used to Ctrl+Command+F.
If you happen to have an Android phone and want to tether it to your Mac, remember to bring a micro USB cable to the store, not a mini USB. If you are super-organised, you’ll do something like get some Tip-Ex...
2 tags
You got a fast metro, is it fast enough we can fly...
One of these days, I’m gonna follow my dream. I’m going to give up my shitty job designing social media doohickeys for corporate clients and I’ll get a real job in the city. The real raw beating sweaty crazy city, not the glass-fronted City with all those suits.
I’m going to become a true Urbanist. I will dominate the city, I’ll design arches and swings and...
February 2012
4 tags
Wikipedia and teaching game rules
As always, on Wikipedia there’s a big dust up going on about new page patrolling or NPP. Basically, the issue is something like this: when you create a page on Wikipedia, it gets listed on a page called Special:NewPages. If you are a logged in user and are confirmed, you can click on pages in that queue and mark them as patrolled. New page patrollers check through that list, usually from...
4 tags
Submission to the House of Lords Select Committee...
Below is what I sent in to the House of Lords Select Committee on Communicatons on the subject of superfast broadband.
My name is Tom Morris. I am a freelance web technologist and a Ph.D student in philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London. In my spare time, I am involved heavily in Wikimedia projects as a volunteer: I am an administrator on the English Wikipedia and Wikinews, and...
5 tags
Mini-movie-review: The Woman in Black
I watched The Woman in Black on Saturday. As you are all lazy and hate words and stuff, I’ll condense my thoughts into handy bullet point form. If it turns out that my movie reviewing is anything other than awful, I may do more in the future.
Daniel Radcliffe is still Harry Potter to me. I know, I suck.
Next time you think the city is scary, just remember: if horror movies are right,...
2 tags
“Democracy depends upon plain language. It depends upon common understanding. We...”
– Don Watson, Gobbledygook, p. 79
January 2012
“The media seems to have reinvented itself not as a source of information, but...”
– Tanya Gold