Regular readers will know that I dislike pop-up ads on web sites. But I hate the new breed of pop-up ads that go to the effort of breaking through pop-up blockers and insist on showing me pop-ups even though I have explicitly said that I don’t want to see them. You’ll also know that I… Continue reading Nasty Pop-ups
Category: tech
Searching The Guardian
Looks like The Guardian have taken their new search engine out of beta and are now linking to it from the main site. It all looks very nice.
Sony Takes DRM Too Far
Here’s an interesting story from a Windows user who found a rootkit on his system. Further investigation revealed that it had been installed by Sony when he had played the digitally protected music on a CD he had bought (Get Right With The Man bu Van Zant). Sony is apparently so concerned about protecting its… Continue reading Sony Takes DRM Too Far
BBC Programme Catalogue
When I saw him in Amsterdam, Matt was talking about a secret project he was doing for the BBC. And now he has revealed what it is. He’s putting a web front end on the BBC Programme Catalogue. That’s a database that contains details of almost a million programmes that the BBC have broadcast over… Continue reading BBC Programme Catalogue
EuroOSCON Day 3
Late, but I thought it was worth recording what I did on the final day of EuroOSCON. As always, we started with the keynotes. Marc Heglund talked about privacy issues and the possibility of an “open data” movement. David Heinemeier Hansson talked about the secrets of Ruby on Rails and MySQL’s Kaj Arnö showed us… Continue reading EuroOSCON Day 3
EuroOSCON Day 2
Very late, but here’s a summary of what I did at EuroOSCON on the second day (Wednesday). The keynotes started with Rael Dornfest talking about how “Annenuation is the new Aggregation”. He was followed by Red Hat’s Michael Tiemann talking about quality management. We then had Jason Matusow from Microsoft nicely illustrating how, hard as… Continue reading EuroOSCON Day 2
London Web Frameworks Night
November is shaping up to be an interesting month in London. Not only is there the London Perl Workshop that I mentioned yesterday, but Dean Wilson has organised a London Web Frameworks Night on November 17th. Three experts will be discussing the major MVC frameworks for Perl (Catalyst), Python (Django) and Ruby (Rails). And it’s… Continue reading London Web Frameworks Night
London Perl Workshop
Those nice people from the London Perl Mongers have announced the 2005 London Perl Workshop. It’ll be on Saturday 26th November at The City University. More details from the web site. I expect I’ll be giving some kind of talk. Hope to see some of you there. Update: 2005. It’s 2005!
Flatterer
From an interview with Gregory Wilson where he talks about his recent book Data Crunching. I was also inspired by David Cross’s excellent book “Data Munging with Perl“, which taught me most of what I know about how to actually use the language. If he’d written a cross-language version of that book, I probably wouldn’t… Continue reading Flatterer
ActiveRecord Does It Wrong
I’m listening to the keynotes on the final day of EuroOSCON and David Heinemeier Hansson is talking about the secrets of Ruby on Rails. He talks about how they promote “convention over configuration” and how that means that you don’t have to describe the same object attribute multiple times. This is a great idea, but… Continue reading ActiveRecord Does It Wrong