Blog — Page 9

These are some pretty old posts! I don't blog that much any more, but if they are of interest, feel free to browse. Alternatively, you can go back to the homepage to see some more recent stuff.

State of the Whale Address

Written on Wednesday 30 Apr 2014

It’s no secret that the current state of my SuccessWhale social network client is not a good one. It currently exists in three forms: The main server runs SuccessWhale version 2.0.3. It’s not been updated in nearly a year, and the only changes within the last three years have been...

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Raspberry Jammin'

Written on Friday 11 Apr 2014

Last Saturday was the Linux User & Developer Raspberry Jam event at Poole RNLI college. I took the tank, of course, and the child too — worrying all the while that they’d be the youngest kid there by about ten years, and would get bored within half an hour. How...

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Cyberpunk

Written on Thursday 27 Mar 2014

The early years of the twenty-first century. The boundaries between the real world and the cyber world grow thinner with each passing day. Megacorporations vie for our attention, our clicks, our hearts and minds; their walled gardens are their own private networks in which they suck up our data and...

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The Lego of Tomorrow

Written on Sunday 9 Feb 2014

“All I’m doing is building stuff,” they say. “That’s what Minecraft is good for, isn’t it?” I reply. “It’s like Lego with infinite pieces.” “Yeah,” they say, and turns back to the computer screen; back to the childhood task of creating the new. I turn back to the washing up...

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By Distant Shores

Written on Thursday 6 Feb 2014

We sit and eat lunch by the sea, our cars parked up on the sand, engines running, air-con on. In front of us, waves roll into the shore bearing an ocean’s worth of hydrocarbon flotsam. A nylon rope from a Malaysian yacht, perhaps; a Madagascan trawler’s fishing floats, or a...

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And So Into 2014

Written on Wednesday 1 Jan 2014

I could tell, as we headed back to our old haunts in our university town and the car stereo decided to play VNV Nation’s “Beloved”, that it was going to be a reminiscent sort of New Year. For the first time in many years, I spent at least part of...

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NaNoGenMo: A 50,000 Word Target I can Meet

Written on Sunday 1 Dec 2013

One of the ways in which a number of my friends spend November is participating in National Novel Writing Month, or “NaNoWriMo”. This is its 15th year, in which some 300,000 amateur novelists signed up to write their hearts out over the course of 30 days. It’s ten years since...

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Whatever Happened to the Generic PC?

Written on Friday 29 Nov 2013

It doesn’t seem that long ago, perhaps only five or ten years, that you could buy or build your own computer and do whatever you liked with it. If you bought it, it would probably come with an operating system, but if you didn’t like it you could download another...

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Google for your Dinner

Written on Tuesday 26 Nov 2013

I run Google Analytics code on a number of my websites, as I like to know what’s popular—and maybe deserving of attention—compared to those sites and pages that languish unvisited. But while Analytics is handy for confirming the obvious and pointing out a few unexpectedly popular pages, it’s at its...

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Lost in Translation

Written on Tuesday 5 Nov 2013

This morning, a friend of mine linked to a great article on why “If you’re going to live in this country, learn to speak the language” is pretty insensitive. It struck a particular resonance in me, because aside from her emigration, my experience of languages over the last few years...

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