Thou shall not scheme.

I have a low tolerance for schemes and schemers; for complicated middle-ways where everyone wins and everyone loses; for negotiations and tricks; for cons and finessing; for loopholes; for scams; for getting one over on someone else. If there were an 11th commandment, I’d like to think it would read ‘thou shalt not scheme’. I [...]

Phone-locking: what a colossal waste of everyone’s time.

Why do the networks sell locked phones? Why do we allow them to do so? A colossal waste of everyone’s time for some juvenile tit-for-tat flim-flamery. The only way it’ll change if we outlaw the practice. Don’t hold your breath. I have an old (well, you know, oldish) iPhone hanging about that I wanted to [...]

Millennium

There’s an advertising hoarding, big as a bus, at London Bridge station showing the covers of the three Millennium Trilogy books. You know, the ‘Girl Who…’ books. Underneath the covers is the phrase, large-writ, ‘which girl do you want for Christmas?’ I’m confused by this ad. I think it must be a cry for help [...]

How I coach programmers.

This scheme comes from Kent Beck, and it’s an excellent technique to train yourself into writing better code. I use it to teach good programming practice. This is how I coach programmers, and it works. First, write code that you know works. Any moron can write code that works. This is called hacking, and it’s [...]

Timing out a unix command

It’s a while since I wrote a techy article here. Let’s change that. Last week I was asked how to handle running a shell command from Ruby, with the added requirement that if the command took longer than a certain time it should time out. Running commands from ruby is easy, and you should watch [...]

Short back and sides.

I took the boy for a haircut on Monday. We didn’t want him to lose an ear, so I traipsed across London to a special children’s hairdressers. It was pretty exciting – the boy got to sit in a pedal-car aeroplane and watch a bit of Cars on a small DVD player, in a room [...]

Architectures of control

We should strongly resist building architectures of control in public service. They empower the petty, and promote the bureaucratic over the human. This is why I oppose what the BBC is doing with its content protection. The humane solution is not to regulate these architectures, but to remove them. But, first up, another architecture of [...]

§calcwars twitter book.

Another week, another hack-day. And another book made from twitter feeds. I was so pleased with the hardback version of my twitter book that I knew I had to make another book. And quickly. At the Warblecamp hackday last Saturday/Sunday I set about making book from one of the twitter events I’d been following. The [...]

My twitter book-making project

In other news, I made a book. A book of all my tweets since December 2007. I’m still not sure what I think about the exercise. Twitter’s the closest thing I have to a diary. I’ve never tweeted specifically in order to make a daily record, but that’s the form I chose for the book. [...]

YQL and Scraperwiki sitting in a tree…

Scraperwiki is brilliant. YQL is brilliant. Now, they can get together and make lots of datababies. Using the simple webservice I’ve written, it’s a bit easier to use scraperwiki data in YQL queries and to mash up scraperwiki data with other YQL sources. YQL YQL presents a uniform query interface, modelled on SQL, for various [...]