A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
Craig Munro: “Richard Dawkins launched his scathing, unrelentless, and completely justified attack on Religion… I can’t see anything wrong with a single thing he said”
Is Technorati completely incompent? I’ve just put a Technorati search box on my page. If I search all blogs for “Dawkins”, my entries appear. If I search my blog for “Dawkins”, nothing appears. So, I’ve switched to Google. I may programme it so that if you Google on “this blog”, it’ll take you to Google Blog Search rather an just ordinary Google.
Dave Winer: “To me, god is the box where I put the answer to mysteries I don’t understand.” More people should. It makes the phrase “God knows” far more meaningful.
Either Friday or Saturday is gonna be “search day” - I’ll release some code to make it easy for fellow OPMLers to put Google boxes on their blogs.
I’ve got some cheeky new feeds thanks to Google Blog Search: RSS and Atom. What’s the point? Well, it illustrates two principles. Firstly, that opml.org RSS feeds only give you today’s content. And secondly, if you find a site with only one syndication format (or a feed that’s not quite to your liking), just going to Google BlogSearch and searching for blogurl:blogs.opml.org/tommorris (for instance) will not only let you see the blog, but also give you RSS and Atom feeds for it. This is especially useful if you have a reader that only supports RSS and the blog only turns out Atom (or vice versa; I don’t condone this behaviour - aggregators should be neutral, blogging tools should give out both).
The iPod Radio Remote is a fairly good idea. Here’s why I won’t buy one. Firstly, I get my entertainment from podcasts. If you don’t do podcasts, I don’t do you. The reason I listen to podcasts is because FM radio sucks. Secondly, I’ve already got my lanyard headphones. The point of the lanyard is that it keeps the device close to you. You don’t need a remote control for a Nano, because it’s Damn Small already. No, I don’t need it. But who does need it? My dad’s generation. I guess the solution is for me to get one, take it apart, and rebuild it so it fits on my lanyard. That would be a job.
Another thing with Google Blog Search: don’t do trendy things like write “GPRSfilter”. When you then search for GPRS, it doesn’t come up. Which is correct really. Google should reward being not-dumb. I must say, the more I use Google Blog Search, the more I like it over Technorati, which annoys the hell out of me.
I want to go to the Darwin Festival in Shrewsbury.
The Grauniad are reporting that GCSE and A-level results (and some vocational shit) are going to be delivered online. Why not RSS? We have so many exams in schools these days, it’s worth just giving students an RSS feed when they join school.
Make Magazine have a Skype payphone. Cool or what?
Amyloo’s HTML close encounter. Wanna know why that is? Because the OPML Editor has an HTML bit underneath it, which is what’s being served in the Windows version - that’s what gives you the frame with the Truman picture. Mac users can get it by clicking here.
Basement.org has a review of AJAX-based ‘desktops’ (or start pages, really). They all suck, in my opinion. I have a 1600x1200 screen, and using the AJAX start page idea, they can have about ten feeds maximum. Why would I want to use this compared to an RSS reader which can easily eat my 300-400 RSS feeds?
P. Z. Myers beats up a sad, sad attempt by Casey Luskin at refuting Ken Miller. “;->”
I’m going to a debate tonight at the LSE on globalisation (see upcoming.org). It’s between David Held, author of numerous books on economics including Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus, and Martin Wolf, author of Why Globalization Works. I’ll be liveblogging the event via GPRS. Keep your eyes peeled from 6.30pm onwards, and if you see a guy with an iBook, come on over! Again, if you enjoy the frequent posts, please consider making a donation towards my GPRS costs.
Techdirt are reporting on how MySpace are breaking the “don’t treat your users like morons” principle. Do you blame them for trying? Based on their page designs, most MySpace users are morons. This kind of fiddling justifies me in leaving my MySpace account unused. MySpace users with brains and readable web pages will take their custom to another (more open) place. It’s also a pigs ear to look at. There’s no real way to see who’s doing what on MySpace - it’s the ultimate non-entity website in that it has everything, but doesn’t do anything.
Russell Beattie has a post with lots of interesting stuff about mobile Internet. Yes, mobile companies, you are beginning to get it. The Internet shouldn’t be charged by the minute. That model sucked in 1994 and it sucks now. Why do I use web mail? Attention and sychronization. I use two machines on my desktop and at least 2 public terminals. Gmail handles all that, and keeps my attention data and address book all synced up when I access it on my mobile. It is also easier. On my V3, I can hit menu-9 and get to my Gmail in twenty seconds. Usual gripe about charges though, though they are at least better than public wifi. £1 a day for GPRS is doable - just. £10 a day for wifi isn’t something you do too often unless you’ve got an expense account (and how many people with expense accounts that support a heavy Starbucks wifi habit have anybody with a clue on the other end of them?). The Internet blossoms when it becomes as available as tap water. And the mobile Internet has yet to reach the price when it is like tap water.
Terry Heaton has a post on Murdoch, MySpace and (gasp) the possibility that MySpace could be a portal. It is already a portal: to mundane, user-generated non-content. It’s LiveJournal for talentless people. The idea that this ColdFusion-based social networking monstrosity could become a Google-killer is one of the most ridiculous I have heard to date. And I follow the madness of creationists, FFS.
So you think the Government are beginning to get it - that they are getting big and unwieldy and bureaucratic? They want to cut the proverbial pork. So they pass a law and set up a bureaucracy-slaughtering czar, or have anti-bureaucracy behaviour orders. Oh, wacky, wacky Westminster.
All-Natural Cynaide. Get your all-natural cyanide supplements!
Clay Shirky has some class notes up online. Take a peeky peeky.
Things That Make You Go Hmm has a post with privacy tips. Read and learn.
Ask MetaFilter has a post on when one should use the word ‘one’.
John Lynch has a post about the El Tejon and Sharon Lemburg malarkey, and some information about his course in “Origins, Evolution and Creation” (which sounds great - if I’m ever near Arizona State U, Dr. Lynch, I’ll be sitting at the back and taking notes).
Gordon Brown on Make Poverty History. Notice the six uses of the word ‘empower’ or ‘empowering’ (etc). This proves that Brown isn’t fit for PM - he hasn’t read the latest motto: it’s “respect” you gotta push! I know they’ve done it before, but if we just pretend, maybe they won’t notice.
Dave Winer has a post on the history of desktop web servers (all of the UserLand software - Radio, Manila and Frontier - and the dear OPML Editor on which I am writing this - build these principles in).
Richard Evans Lee on Islamists and the tsunami. It’s not just gays who cause disasters, apparently, it’s women too! That narrows it down to the trannies and the straight guys.
I’m not wildly impressed by Nick Robinson’s blog, despite it being fairly hyped up. He’s mainlining on two posts per day, and providing very few links. That said, the comments are a little bit more intelligent than the usual Have Your Say stuff which are a mixture of a sprinkling of sensible people in with the usual horde of nutjobs in social workers’ clothing.
BBC News Magazine have an article on the Respect Agenda: “Tony Blair was reportedly aghast in a session with head teachers when he discovered that pupils had phones in schools.” Sorry, has this guy lost it? Our economy is up to no great shakes, and Iraq isn’t going anywhere quickly, and he’s worried about kids with mobiles? Good to see the article makes mention of the social contract. I still humbly request that the government show me a social contract that I signed, and, until then, shut up. This respect stuff is just a nice drizzle of Westminster humour, the gravy of silliness poured on the turkey of incompetence.
As usual, when it comes to government and technology, they don’t seem to have understood the point of it. The whole point of tagging is to get away from the structured taxonomies and experts and automatic generation of metadata and produce something different by overlaying one on top of the other.
Ed Brayton has a post on El Tejon and Sharon Lemburg, and the inability by the Discovery Institute to actually state what they think (guess ID does destroy ability for critical thought…)
Austin Cline is talking about James Dobson. Someone’s got to, I suppose.
Media Watch Watch on John Beyer who believes in, oh, state censorship of all television because some of it offends him. His whole belief, it seems, is predicated upon a logical fallacy.
Paolo Valdemarin responds to Dave’s post on desktop web servers.
Patrick Scoble is using WordPress. Perhaps someone could show him the OPML Editor’s wordPress.root.
John C. Dvorak is pointing to a story of a marijuana dealer who has just been sentenced for 55 years in jail.
Boing Boing are linking to a Lessig presentation. If you’ve never seen one, you really should. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing one in the flesh, and they’re very exciting.
Didn’t get to go to the talk. No liveblogging. Damn public transport foiled my plans again.
