In two months, the third international Ada Lovelace Day will take place, on March 24th. Bloggers around the world will devote posts to writing about the achievements of women in technology and science. This is wonderful, and I highly support it, but… What about the other 364 days of the year? Setting aside one day [...]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Hummingbird Version 0.67 Released
Sunday, January 16th, 2011 – 2:13 pm
I’ve released a new version of Hummingbird. This is a bug-fix release, resolving some issues in automatic hyperlinking and in recognition of multiple hashtags in a single tweet. (Yes, this is why I did a couple of tweets hashtagged “#testing” a couple of days ago.) Downloads are available from the Hummingbird project page, or using [...]
About WikiLeaks, DDoSes, Rape, and Justice
Monday, December 27th, 2010 – 2:44 pm
Why I’m In Favor of WikiLeaks’ Professed Ideals and Aims I am not a fan of government secrecy. Maybe some things should be kept secret, but by and large? Our government has overused that excuse to the point of absurdity. We can no longer trust the government to keep its citizens informed about what it’s [...]
Hummingbird Version 0.66 Released
Sunday, November 28th, 2010 – 4:02 pm
This is largely a bug-fix release. Tom Clift, of PaperCut print management software, kindly informed me of a few installation issues that my own tests didn’t find. The profusion of configuration options in PHP can make testing everything on a single server quite difficult. This would be a good time for me to mention that [...]
Is Your Domain Name Spellable and Pronounceable?
Sunday, November 7th, 2010 – 12:41 pm
A good domain name should have the following features: When someone says it to you, you know how to spell it. This means that if my friend wants to tell me about your site at a party or a club or out on the street somewhere, she doesn’t have to spell it out for me. [...]
Motion Distraction — Worse Than the <Blink> Tag
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 – 8:46 pm
Once upon a time, Netscape invented the <blink> tag. And people saw the <blink> tag, and put it on their web pages, and thought it was good. And the rest of us saw the <blink> tags on those pages, and screamed, “No, you morons, it is bad! It distracteth the user mightily, for lo, our [...]
Initial Impressions of the Samsung Epic and Android
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 – 8:38 pm
A few nights ago, my Palm Prē got dropped, causing a hairline fracture in the touch-screen. Since it would no longer take any screen input, it was suddenly an even less useful device than usual. I’d been thinking of switching to an Android phone anyway, so I am now the (proud?) owner of a shiny, [...]
Announcing Hummingbird Version 0.65
Sunday, September 19th, 2010 – 4:03 pm
I see that I never bothered announcing the v0.61 release. That was a minor bug-fix, resolving an issue where Hummingbird would fail if the XML cache file was empty. The latest release is one that allows multiple versions of Hummingbird to run on the same machine without conflict, as long as they’re using different Twitter [...]
Blame the Men Who Are Behaving Badly
Thursday, September 9th, 2010 – 6:40 pm
Let’s organize a 10K footrace. At the end of the footrace — for, say, the last kilometer — we’re going to do whatever we can to encourage the people who are wearing blue jerseys and t-shirts and athletic clothing. There will be people standing by the sidelines to hand out bottles of refreshing sports drinks, and others [...]
What Does “Don’t Be Evil” Mean Now?
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 – 1:08 pm
It’s awfully convenient for Google that their famed corporate motto, “Don’t be evil”, doesn’t actually specify or define what counts as “evil”. And without any definition, they’re pretty much free to do anything they want, and just declare it not-evil. Now, some of the things they’ve done have just been misguided. For example, I really, [...]