I’ve been inspired by a great lecture, The Web that Wasn’t by Alex Wright, which traces the history of precursor ideas and thinking that ether lead to the web or where ideas much greater than the Internet is right now.
Here are some of the ideas that were missed out on and I believe are sill possible with internet technology today: Read more…
Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth/dispair, wrath, envy, pride
The ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ or should I put it the ‘7, Deadly, Sins’. The seven part is merely score keeping and nothing more, but the ‘Deadly’, which we usually skip over is more than just an adjective, it is a warning. What is it warning against? What do the Seven Deadly Sins lead to other than Hell itself.
‘Sin‘ is also a much miss understood word, particularly by those who grew up in a Christian based society.
In the biblical Hebrew, the generic word for sin is het. It means to err, to miss the mark. It does not mean to do evil.
I started gathering data for a project relating to Language and did a lot of research into ISO standards and was looking for a complete list of Languages + some ISO code to id them by. This got expanded to cross referencing by Country (as languages have dialects in different countries) and then I thought it would be easy to complete this set with Locate settings and perhaps even country to IP address mappings. I got a bonus from the UNeTradeS with all sub regions for all country’s (according to the UN) and most of their Geo co-ordinates!
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The “science advisors” used on the movie Minority Report (3 stars from me coz it had Tom Snooze in it) teamed up with some techys and made the hand gesture interface real! Who needs a touch screen when you have this…
They are using some funky tech gloves there to get the motion detection but what would happen if they mixed in a simple webcam and this software…
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After the popularity of the last post I made a few years ago on living in Berlin, I’ve decided to do a follow up that article with a run down of the current state of the central areas of Berlin and their character as I see it at this time.
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iTunes is the only software I now that progressively gives you less options with each release. Things that I’m already missing are:
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This summer I hung out in the Czech Republic in the lovely town of B?ha?ov with Sonya. Tina and her boyfriend Phill dropped by and Julia so, inspired by the movie Zombie Lake (1981), we decided to make a music-video called Making Fools, which is now up on Sonya’s website. It is my first completed track (so far, and not really indicative of what I’m into but it was made in one day with on a nasty hangover).
So I just discovered that Leopard comes with a version of Ruby on Rails (RoR) pre-installed. The only problem is its a bit dated but there is a command-line one-liner to update it all no sweat with RubyGem (the Ruby package manager):
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I just stumbled across the SIMILE project form the famous MIT and, as the screen cast above proves, they have some hot stuff to play with both online for your website and software extensions for FireFox and Thunderbird. This is almost enough to switch back to Thunderbird from the tired old, doggy Mail (Mac)!
I was looking at the PHP5 (no this is not about PHP) Reflection API and came across a post talking about the “Dynamic Proxy” design pattern. As I didn’t know what it was about I did a quick search and found that the design pattern had a US Patent on it! I was disgusted and appalled that design patterns could be patented. This is like putting a patent on a certain English sentence grammar.
Obviously the guys at the US Patent office don’t understand what they are allowing to happen. Imagine if 90% of all programming was patented, which can be done fairly easily, it would completely retard innovation and an sort of progress. Fortunately is this impossible to enforce in closed source code software but Open Source [OS] is another story. This could be the biggest legal threat to OS so far. Large companies who have the budget, could have teams that sift thought their OS competition looking for patent infringements and shutting them down. An ugly thought which would gain them only hatred from the developer community. Lets hope that’s enough of a disincentive…
