Scary looking maths for doing user-ratings based ranking that doesn't fall into a couple of common traps.

Insight into why password security may be a flawed model for websites.

How to take a simple sentence, and turn it into something that reads like David Foster Wallace.

Very pretty means of searching Flickr.

Sit down, shut up, and listen to the greatest living Englishman.

I think I may have to get along to this.

A little slice of the future that will be incomprehensible/irrelevant to most of you. It's an app hosting environment for RoR developers that pushes the apps out into a computing cloud rather than relying on single/multiple servers. If there was a PHP version, that was as easy to set up, I'd be signing up right now.

Yes, it's true. Newspapers are fucked. Hardly radical thinking, but a very cogent summary of exactly why they're fucked, and what we might, maybe, get instead. But here's the key bit: "When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution." You could replace "newspapers" with "the music business", "the TV industry" or even just plain old "copyright" and still be on the money.

Programmable coffee maker *with a built-in grinder*. Gimmegimmegimme.

Not driectly realted to this link, but I was chatting with a friend whose job places him firmly on the side of the PRS in the Youtube/PRS debate, and I find myself wondering: for how long will the notion of musicians getting paid for re-uses of their recordings last? I mean, the basis of my employment is that I continue to create new code and assign the copyright in a manner that allows others to use it. I am not paid based on the number of people that use my code, except in an indirect sense. But when the need for new code runs out, so does my job and the money. What's the argument for treating musicians as a special case?

Iain Sinclair talks with typical eloquence about living in Hackney over the last 40 years. It strikes me that I would be entirely happy if I were in a position to do this about Tooting.

"Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is 'Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who did this with our IP?' instead of, 'Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,' it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page."

Spot on.

Everyone's already blogged this pile of ace. I'm blogging it as context for another link. If you've been under a rock, and haven't seen it, this guy has created something truly astonishing by editing together loads of other people's youtube videos.

Everyone and their dog is linking to this today. And do you know why? Because it's *fucking awesome*.

Everyone and their dog is linking to this today. And do you know why? Because it's *fucking awesome*.

PHP code of no interest to anyone but me. Move along. This is just so I can find it another time

"We have failed in our duty to open up alternate forums for technology to express itself and touch our lives beyond productivity and efficiency. Blinded by our quest for 'smart technologies' we have forgotten to contemplate the design of technologies to inspire us to be smarter, more curious, and more inquisitive."

Michael Moorcock's essay in which he makes the strong case that Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and their contemporaries were basically writing Winnie-the-Pooh on a grand scale, and that broadly speaking, This Is Not Good Enough.

Different wallpapers for different Spaces in Leopard.

I want one of these. A lot of her other work is worth a look too, but I really want one of these.