Occasionally, I amuse myself by reading Not Always Right. I really shouldn’t, as it’s always bad for my opinion of humanity, but sometimes I just can’t look away. And occasionally, it clues me in to a teachable moment. Like this one, which recently appeared there: Caller: “My computer is a fire risk.” Me: “What makes you say that?” [...]
Author Archives: Kai MacTane
Say It Short
Friday, October 28th, 2011 – 7:12 pm
Remember when the movie 2010: Odyssey Two came out? There was a simple, easy way to say it: We all called it “Twenty-Ten”. And for a few decades, folks like Terence McKenna have been warning about what might happen in the year 2012, and we all thought of it as “twenty-twelve”. These things are short, [...]
Her Name is Skud
Friday, October 7th, 2011 – 7:24 am
Skud has been involved in Open Source, and in activism and advocacy, for years and years. She does a little of everything, having coded, written docs, managed developers, and spoken out on important topics. She has been, or is currently, a contributor to projects ranging from Eureka to Perl to Xen to HTML::Mason. Way back in [...]
What Are We Giving Up With E-Text?
Saturday, September 24th, 2011 – 3:19 pm
Engineering is about tradeoffs, and each technology has its advantages and drawbacks. Whenever we leave one technology behind and adopt a new one, we’re sacrificing something. We may be making a terrific trade, getting a hundred times as much cool stuff as give up — but we’re still giving up something, and we should be aware [...]
A Follow-Up on Pronounceability
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011 – 2:11 pm
Late last year, I wrote about making sure your domain name is both spellable and pronounceable. Well, I just encountered a site that technically gets it right, in that its domain name is exchangebitcoins.com. But as soon as you look at their logo, which presumably tells you what they actually want to be called? At that [...]
Google+ Doesn’t Want “Real” Names. They Want WASPonyms.
Friday, August 19th, 2011 – 7:52 pm
Google+ Doesn’t Want “Real” Names. They Want WASPonyms. Three pieces of news lately about Google+ make it clear that when Google claims they want you to use your “real” name, it’s a load of hooey. First off, a legally mononymous Australian journalist named Stilgherrian was told he couldn’t use that name — his actual, legal name — [...]
The Problem With Jamie Zawinski and Regular Expressions
Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 – 7:43 pm
Jamie Zawinski, also known simply as jwz, is famous for his quote: “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.” It’s a very amusing line, and I can totally see why people all over the world are using it in their .sig files: It [...]
How Many Identities Does a Single Person Have?
Sunday, July 17th, 2011 – 12:36 pm
(This was originally posted on Google+ itself. I’m also keeping it here, for easy reference.) A friend of mine notes that one of the problems of the current Google+ “real names policy” is that “Google is attempting to deal with (I’m assuming) manufacturing a community of 1-to-1 RL presence-to-online presence” — in particular, he says that [...]
Before You Can Talk About the Singularity, You Must Define It
Wednesday, July 13th, 2011 – 8:56 am
If you think about technology, and where it may be taking us, it’s impossible to ignore the idea of the Singularity. But if you’re going to talk about it at all, it’s best to start off by defining just what it is you mean. Different people are using the term for a few different concepts [...]
The Difference One Site Can Make
Wednesday, June 29th, 2011 – 8:16 am
Only a year ago, I was against infinite scroll. In design meetings, I’d point out the way it breaks various aspects of the scroll bar. (You can’t tell how far through the full data-set you are; dragging the “thumb” down causes it to suddenly change place, etc.) But now, I almost expect it when I’m scrolling [...]