Over the weekend, the Observer published Evgeny Morozov’s essay “The rise of data and the death of politics“. It is an impassioned plea about the rise of data and technology to solve political issues and the rise of Tim O’Reilly’s coined phrase “algorithmic regulation”. I am aware of the slants on both sides: both have […]
The discussion on the future of publishing, or at least the strand that has come my way, is often about how digital is eating traditional publisher’s lunch. Techcrunch‘s John Biggs has written a few posts about this recently and the Kindle Unlimited launch and whether it is a good thing or not and Danny Crichton […]
I have been looking at the ZeroMQ zero copy pages for a project. I’ve dipped in and out of ZeroMQ over the last few months but am looking at it in a different light. I’ve been building some toy applications with it to greater or lesser success, such as File transfer system, and so on. […]
One of the projects which I have been involved in with Open Knowledge is the creation of a WordPress plug-in for the existing Textus project. To be fair, it has gone more slowly than I would like but I have finally got a test site up using Redhat’s OpenShift which makes it very easy to […]
A while ago, I looked at the ideas behind the Beautiful Trouble book at the suggestion of someone and the idea of monadic visualisation. In this post, I offer a short overview of the project and some of the issues and then an overview of the libraries used. An overview of the project I thought […]
The High Scalability blog posted a link to Facebook’s new posts search system and the Facebook Notes written about it by a member of the engineering team. One of the sections mentioned the Wormhole publish/subscribe system that they developed to push data across multiple data centres in near real time. At a very basic level, […]
The Observer’s New Review section had a short piece on the British Library’s Beautiful Science exhibition, “How visualising data has changed life … and saved lives“. That section also ran a larger article on the new wave of small press magazines and their design aesthetic. The common theme seems to be having a focus. Wondering […]
PandoDaily ran a piece called “From word games to spy games” on the encryption and the NSA’s attempts to undermine it writen by David Holmes, and Explainer Music (where he is a co-founder). Whilst the content interests me, it was the way that the piece was put together that really intrigued me. The subheadings had […]
This talk was originally given at the lightning talks session of the Oxford Accu group. The updated slides are on my account on Slideshare. These are the fleshed out notes of a talk that I gave that evening based on experiences and experiments. It does contain some responses to questions and points raised. It is […]
I put out a tweet asking for any advice on light weight blogging engines. I was looking at options to replace desktop notes. Having been told about bolt.cm and sculpin.io, I have added them to my list of software to look at. I have been using Ghost as a first experiment and am looking at […]
