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Good fucking grief. Insert Orwell references here. Is there any English speaking nation I can get into that isn’t getting increasingly fucking Big Brother, please?
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A senior government official says: “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated.” This may be as many as 8 million people.
Category: Digitalia
Links For Monday 19th May 2008
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Interesting map showing the most popular social networks around the world. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of some of them.
Links For Wednesday 14th May 2008
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It looks like these people now deliver to my place, which rather expands my options in a takeaway. Result!
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I can’t decide if this would be hell or something I could cope with quite well.
Links For Tuesday 13th May 2008
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I own a dozen or so of them, and if I can get them of emusic, I might start working my way through some of the others – I tend to listen to jazz in the summer, and this might be a fun way to find some new stuff.
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I appear to have been mugged by a musical toy. Still, this ought to be fun.
Links For Friday 9th May 2008
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I don’t really care, except that there’s a line there at the end that says “European dates to be announced shortly”. All digital extremeties firmly crossed…
Links For Thursday 8th May 2008
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Can’t do this at the moment, since I’m not using one of these routers, but in the event that I need to replace mine at some point, it might be worth bearing in mind.
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In a similar vein, despite the fact that I loved my finepix, this will probably ensure that the next point-and-shoot I buy will be a Canon. Ace.
Links For Tuesday 6th May 2008
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Previously unreleased photos taken in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. Hugely moving photos that convey the human cost of the atomic bomb. Should be in every history textbook, under the heading “there can be no excuse”.
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“Not even twelve pygmies have the strength of a single Boris Johnson.”
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Well, that’s half my evenings this week gone. Some of these sound fascinating. (The other half, like total waffle-shop bilge, but let’s focus on the positive, shall we?)
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Given away at the MTV Europe Music Awards in 1995, the postcards with text by Moore, and art by a number of utterly splendid illustrators now change hands for absurd sums. Or you could just read them on-line.
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A really compelling account of the effect that his battle with mouth cancer, the experimental treatment he got, and the effect it has had on his life, and his cooking.
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Interview with the guy that came up with the designs for the UKs new coins. Insteresting insight into the design process, and how some of the initial ideas were refined and improved (or even just unworkable).
On Frameworks
I start to understand why there are so bloody many web application frameworks out there. I need to get a really basic website up and running fast. I have two choices: spend some time evaluating various frameworks that are actually about 70 times more complex than I need, learning how they work, and getting really pissed off at their various quirks, or run up my own really stripped down basic framework just as part of coding this custom app.
On the one hand, my own app isn’t going to do fancy scaffolding, or take much of the grunt work out. Hell, it doesn’t even do nice URLs yet. It’s not a lot more than an really basic ORM class that still needs work to make sure it does proper escaping of inputs. (Another couple of hours over the weekend, and it will do both those things, mind you.)
But on the other: it’s light, it does exactly what I need, and after 90 mins work, is already shaping up into things that will be included in the finished app. 90 mins into trying to use Cake, the off-the-shelf PHP framework I know best, I gave up, because I couldn’t get the fucking scaffolding to work even close to right. The sheer feature-completeness of it defeated me. Yeah, if I was planning a six week project, I’d probably use it. But I want this thing coded up in under 35 hours of work, if I possibly can, so 90 mins starts to be a significant chunk of time.
Anyone want to bet me that once I’ve done this site, I’ll turn to the same tools the next time I need a quick custom app? Anyone want to be that that I’ll improve them again and again? Anyone want to take part in a sweepstake about how long it’ll be before there’s yet another framework on the market?
OK, it’s unlikely I’d ever release it, because there are loads of other out there, and I have no interest in supporting something like that. But still, it’s pretty obvious how these things start.
Links For Wednesday 30th April 2008
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Nice job of being ultra, ultra minimalist, while still clearly having thought given to the layout and typography. I really like this one.
Links For Sunday 27th April 2008
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And what gin and sitcoms have in common. Fascinating thinking.
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The 2nd supreme director of Chile. Bookmarked for superb name zombie purposes. Don’t ask.