Nik Silver tells the truth about quick and dirty development. I was particularly interested in a couple of the points he makes: If you’re my customer and I’m your techie, then there’s a significant and unfortunate thing about quick and dirty that I need to tell you: You get the quick, but I get stuck… Continue reading Quick and Dirty Development
Category: tech
Geeks Pulling Together
A heart-warming tale from Ben Goldacre, author of the Guardian‘s Bad Science column (and also a forthcoming book on the same subject). It seems that his web site had rather outgrown the limits placed on it by his current hosting plan and his hosting providers didn’t like that. At one point they pulled the plug… Continue reading Geeks Pulling Together
Broken Apple Updates (Update)
A couple of months ago, I wrote about some problems I was having with Apple software updates that were stopping my MacBook connecting to my wireless network. That problem has just got far worse. Since having the problems, we’ve learned to avoid Apple Airport updates. Whenever the software updater tells us that there’s an airport… Continue reading Broken Apple Updates (Update)
iPlayer Announcement
It looks like the BBC are ramping up to make an announcement about the iPlayer later today. I’ll link to the press release just as soon as I can find it on their site. Update: Here it is. Looks like the iPlayer officially launches today. Update: I can’t read properly. It doesn’t launch today. It… Continue reading iPlayer Announcement
Breaking (And Then Fixing) Planets
I’ll write more about Hack Day over the next few days. But I should point out that most of yesterday was spent updating the version of Plagger on this web server. This had the unfortunate side-effect of breaking all of the Plagger-run planets on this server. So today was largely spent fixing them again. Everything… Continue reading Breaking (And Then Fixing) Planets
Hack Day Weirdness
Wow. Pretty weird start to Hack Day. We were in the West Hall of Alexandra Palace. A talk had just finished and there was lots of general milling about going on. All of a sudden there was an almighty bang followed by some loud crackling. It sounded like it was coming from the roof. Then… Continue reading Hack Day Weirdness
Hack Day
The BBC/Yahoo! Hack Day (actually two days) is this weekend. If you’re coming then please feel free to link with me on the back network. Now, here are the most pressing questions that need to be answered. Will there be a television showing Doctor Who on Saturday night? And, if there isn’t, will the network… Continue reading Hack Day
BBC and DRM
I was going to write a bit of a rant about the depressingly familiar DRM discussions that have blown up (again!) on the BBC Backstage mailing list over the last couple of days. But I find that Martin has already done it. So I don’t have to. Which is nice.
Another Country
A week ago I was really rather excited about Fedora 7. I’m less excited now. There seems to be a problem with the DVD drive in my laptop. Or, at least, an incompatitbility between it and the ISO images of the new version of Fedora. Over the last week, I’ve burnt several disks to us… Continue reading Another Country
Turning S5 into PDF
For the last couple of years I’ve been using Eric Meyer’s S5 for creating and presenting slides. It uses a combination of CSS and Javascript to create nice-looking slides which can be viewed in any decent web browser (see, for example, the slides from last Saturday’s Perl Teach-In). As an extra bonus, there is BooK’s… Continue reading Turning S5 into PDF