Archive for March, 2009

Net anonimity schmanonimity

Clicktale, crazyegg, userfly. Suppose I asked you to Google those and then come back.
If I had those sorts of things installed on my pages, I could tell who among you did indeed go and look, and whom amongst you bothered to come back at all, and how long you lingered thereafter.
And if I had forms [...]

Galactica Finale – oh what a tangled web we leave

You know, we can’t keep making excuses for the writers and producers of this show, however much we might love them for bringing us this gritty world of bot-humans, quaintly pointless octagonals and a design sensibility that I like to call ‘metal-bleak’. I have loved this show, especially when it started out… but I can [...]

Projected metadata : a new way of interfacing

A friend of mind passed on this video on a new type of wearable tech called ‘Sixth Sense’.
Built as a device cobbled together from only $350 worth of off-the-shelf components, what gives ’sixth sense’ the psychological edge is the tactile thing… After all, what could be more intuitive than manipulating things with your hands [...]

Babies : the futility and the wonder (and whether to have them or not)

Cue inner monologue:
“You’re not getting any younger… I mean, there are biological imperatives here. You can’t gad about like this forever. What, do you think you know something that all these women with snotty-nosed, dribbling bundles of joy don’t? Do you think that, as they wander about dishevelled and pajama-clad, harangued by interminable 3am cries [...]

Privacy: how to get your ‘EFF’ on… (if you can be bothered).

Whether you’re a consumer or producer of digital and web content, you should want to familiarise yourself with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
With lots of victories under the belt in their fight for technology and freedom of speech, and a terrifyingly vast scope of activity that easily bewilders the average person with a computer, they’ve recently [...]

Sites in the cloud

Configuration management, version control, backups and syncs, deployment to private, staging and live servers… all in the cloud. With real-time resource tweaking when you need it / at your finger tips. If my previous post made you worry for DBAs, you should be worried for all those server guys n’ gals who manage and deploy [...]

Databases in the cloud

Well. If their short video promo is anything to go by, FathomDB does exactly what it says on the tin: taking the hassle out of database administration.
I stumbled across this while in the middle of a regular apache/php/mysql combo install… and by the time I got to MySQL, I was like, heck… I’ve had enough [...]

Re-grown tracheas, livers and hearts? Get outta here!

OK. I’ve waffled about genomics in the past, but do please go ‘n get this stuff straight from the horse’s mouth (as it were): Hop over here and then skip the vid ahead or click on the ‘programming cells‘ link.
Have a listen. Is that not insane?! And yet awesome at the same time? Also keep [...]

Rewiring your brain with fun pattern-interrupts

Ever notice how when you come back from a vacation, you just see everything in an entirely different light?
You get antsy and want to try new things, inspired by sights and sounds during your time away. Your mind is rejuvenated and it starts to process things in an (admittedly temporary) altered fashion.
But who can afford [...]

Enoughness

[updated 2009-03-30].
We don’t seem to have an intuitive grasp of the concept of how much ‘enough’ is.

keep looking »