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{ Monthly Archives } March 2006

Proof that digg has jumped the shark.

This article has 649 diggs at time of writing. I re-assert my oft-stated theory that a lot of people are idiots.

2006 03 28 Uncategorized Comments (1)

Java still shakin’ it up with the young folks…

Seems like Sun and co. are happily joining the good days(TM) of programming. Check out jpackage.org for a CPAN-like repository of java libraries. Building something that sounds like it might be generically useful? Chances are, jpackage has an open source implementation of it already. RIFE is doing extremely cool java tricks to bring you a [...]

2006 03 25 programming Comments Off

Macs aren’t overpriced anymore…

Turns out initial research appears to show that apple’s new notebook is fast, very fast. the MacBook Pro is actually the fastest notebook out there. Especially at the higher end, mac hardware is actually cheaper. I guess at the lower end apple can’t cut costs by delivering substandard design and quality.

2006 03 23 apple Comments Off

bomberman technology preview

To some this may be old news, but a while back I was just playing around a bit with javascript and canvas. I built closeline, a simple two player game which is surprisingly addicting (I think I’ve spent at least 24 hours of my life playing closeline, and probably about that much time developing it [...]

2006 03 22 programming Comments (7)

New java puzzler

Oliver, a friend of mine, decided to upgrade his java knowledge from java1.4 to java1.5. He managed to stumble into a neat java puzzler* almost immediatly. What does the following code print, when compiled and run with java 1.5? import java.util.Arrays; public class Puzzler { public static void main(String… args) { test1(); test2(); } public [...]

2006 03 22 programming Comments (4)

The Early Vote

I’ve noticed an interesting and disturbing side-effect of today’s connected society: Early votes have significantly more impact compared to later votes, sometimes exponentially so. ‘votes’, here, applies to almost anything. Reviews, popularity, memes, political parties, blog articles, etcetera. This hypothesis is a bit hard to prove, but I’ll try anyway. On ‘aggregator’ websites such as [...]

2006 03 19 politics Comments (2)

Evangelising Open Courseware

While we’ve left the concepts of education made easy behind, apparently the educational world is (slowly) picking up on the economy of scale effect inherent in digital media. Of course, The UK and The US are leading the way in innovation, again.

2006 03 17 education Comments Off

Tipjar in PHP…

Spent last night learning PHP. A decidedly unsexy language in that it doesn’t introduce any new concepts whatsoever, it’s proven to be even easier to pick up compared to python or even javascript. Fortunately a lot of features introduced in PHP5 allows pushing the language quite far before you hit the unmaintainable dregs usually contributed [...]

2006 03 17 programming
startup Comments Off

Tipjar – we gotta move!

Random check at the success of the tipjar idea: It’s currently the highest rated comment on an article by Shirky about how (mandatory) micropayments will always fail. I didn’t make that comment, someone else did. I’m more and more convinced that we’re “on the clock” as it were. This idea is so great, it’s really [...]

2006 03 14 programming
startup Comments (4)

Modernized java

I’m less than pleased with ruby and python so far (tried RoR and django). Yet, in pure language syntax both are miles ahead of java. It’s the enforced type-lessness of it all which really bothers me, and the reason it does so is because I keep having to resort to external documentation to figure out [...]

2006 03 11 programming Comments (1)