So the big deal is mashups and the massive amounts of data collected by the services being mashed. And this is becoming known as ‘Megadata‘. Lots and lots you can do when you have all this attention data, the activities of your users, and then when you combine that with what they do on other servers… Wow! The things you [...]
In his book The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander states that people should work where they live. I had some trouble with this at first as it’s pretty difficult to achieve. There aren’t all that many good jobs, and the chances of already living in the same area as the job are pretty low; what are you supposed to [...]
One word that always causes me to shudder: ‘Content.’ This is now apparently the standard word that people in the software industry use to refer to that which is created and owned by their users.
To me it’s just the latest horrible, bland, meaningless MBA word. Except it’s not. Like all words, ‘content’ implies something about that which it refers [...]
Why bother reading long posts about esoteric language features that your language doesn’t provide, or even if it does, it’s not a good idea to use too often?
Two and a half reasons really.
Understanding your language is important. This is not magic we’re doing here. It’s engineering, one of the purest and most mathematically oriented branches of engineering you’re likely [...]
I don’t believe in the Internet. It’s a conspiracy of network engineers… with a lot of pigeons.
I was a private IT contractor when I lived in Canberra where the vast majority of the work was for government departments. At the time of writing this, I was working on a team called Revenue Re-engineering at the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service. A friend asked me what ‘Revenue Re-engineering’ did, and the below was my response.
Before you [...]
An e-mail conversation I had recently:
I’m becoming concerned with the ethics of free and open source software.
Why is that?
I think the entire aim of the GNU project is a bad idea. Here’s my current thinking, you know most of this already, I’m still thinking it through so I want to spell it out:
Copyright (not patents) [...]
There is a federal election coming this year in Australia. I’ll vote, I have to, we’re blessed with compulsory voting in Australia, a system that 70% of the country supports. Including all the major and minor political parties.
Why? Why do we have to vote? At least everyone knows why the political parties support compulsory voting: they don’t have to work to encourage [...]