Over the weekend, I read an interesting article, “Edmund Burke: How did a long-dead Irishman become the hottest thinker of 2010?“, by Amol Rajan in the Independent on the philosopher, Edmund Burke. In the past I’ve read his musings on the sublime in “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime […]
A quiet week as I’ve been having a few days off but I’ve been working on some of the tickets for Open Correspondence. The urls have changed to /letters/view/<author>/<correspondent>/<letter id> in an attempt to make them more user friendly and also to allow the user to define smaller or larger collections by altering the url. […]
Paul Carr has an excellent post on Techcrunch regarding self-publishing and being damned. I agree with him in his analysis that this is going to be certain career suicide for the less famous author. Seth Godin has a following that means he has a market and I suspect that a fair amount of the followers […]
It has been a while since the last weeknotes. I’ve finally made the move to Linux, or at least dual booting, by installing Ubuntu so I’m currently learning a little the OS and getting a development environment set up for it. I’ve nearly finsihed the ongoing accounts project at work. The framework is up and […]
Devin Coldewey has an intriguing post over on Crunchgear regarding the Google Books project. Google have digitised some books. Just one or two. Like many other people, I find the project useful for finding information and books I’d never come across or lost somewhere. Sometimes I’ll buy the book, sometimes I just need a bit […]
Given the increasingly digital nature of research, including not only websites but blogs, forums, wikis, the (in my view), beloved moleskin is becoming increasingly outdated. I’ve just finished writing my first book and had the joy of using moleskin notebooks to note down urls and make notes. I like moleskins a lot but pen and […]
I gave a talk at the Oxford Geek Nights about Open Correspondence and letters. At some point I really ought to learn how to give talks. Anyhow Russell Davies was the main speakers and he showed how you could make physical objects from data derived from social networks. (He has a marvellously sane post about […]
ReadWriteWeb have a post on NoSQL (again?) by Audrey Watters which is a brief overview of the area. The original post points the Heroku blog, where Adam Wiggins outlines the uses of NoSQL. I’m not an expert by any means but use Redis on a daily basis with the Rediska PHP library. I remember having […]
Just caught this story on ReadWrite Web about the BBC website’s use of semantic web technology during the World Cup. Jem Rayfield explains more on the BBC Internet blog about the use of technology. I’ve still got a fair amount of reading to do but this is the sort of project that makes me rethink […]
I’ve spent most of the week either trying to persuade colleagues that rewrites are needed to existing services. I’ve also finally managed to get the initial promise of working from home so hopefully I’ll be able to get the rewrite started on the “quiet” days away from the office. (Although the cat can drive me […]
