jra's thoughts

Category: Geeking

  • Something Interesting is Happening

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    Take a look at this article from Bunnie Hwang, reporting on the copycat industries in China. Bunnie’s nailed it, there is something interesting and important going on. Writing these guys off as copycats is exactly the wrong read on the situation. These guys are going to be a cornerstone of the foundation that science fiction…

  • Comparing Geographical Sizes

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    A long time ago I thought it would be fun to open two windows and see two things on Google Maps next to each other. That way, I could compare the sizes of them. But getting the scale set the same on both maps was not easy. Wouldn’t it be neat if the scale of…

  • Phone blogging

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    Is way too hard. But results in interesting t9 errors, like clogging instead of blogging.

  • User Hostile UI

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    I don’t really like Facebook, but I have to use it because that’s where my friends are. (Well, my fiancée is there, and she makes my friends for me. So I use it. Begrudgingly.) At first what I didn’t like about Facebook was that it is a thinly veilled CIA front, and even if that…

  • The Gopher-verse, averted

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    This is insane. At the time the web came into being, AOL was already offering a content-driven text and graphics medium. And Microsoft was hard at work making “Blackbird”, which was a content authoring technology for MSN that never saw the light of day because of HTML. Microsoft ditched it and launched MSN over PPP…

  • Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy (or a nicer country)

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    Carl Malamud + the Government Printing Office is a match made in heaven. Please, President Obama, make it happen. This guy is one of us, one of the good guys who cares about transparency, about good government, about the freedom to know, to learn, to discuss and to criticize. He’s a person who speaks not…

  • Silverlight on Linux

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    Microsoft, what’s your problem? Why are you so stupid? My current irritation is with Silverlight. First, it’s a redundant technology. Bringing .Net into browsers is not a compelling argument for redoing everything that Adobe Flash already does better than Silverlight. But fine, I’m not a shareholder anymore, you can waste their money all you want.…

  • O’Reilly Ignite, UK North

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    Tonight I am giving a talk the Old Broadcasting House at O’Reilly Ignite, UK North. Here are my slides. Update: There’s a video here.

  • Back to school

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    I was sick last week, and in my drug- and virus-induced haze of incoherence, the idea that I should write a Scheme interpreter in assembly language came to mind. I cannot explain from where, but there it was. So I started looking into it, wondering if I still had it in me to dig into…

  • Grub 2 and the Law of Software Envelopment

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    I was reading a bit about Grub 2’s modules, including this page for gfxterm, a reimplementation of VGA console mode for Grub 2 — VGA console mode isn’t good enough because it cannot display Arabic, simplified Chineese, nor Inuit glyphs. And, let’s face it, the kinds of Inuits frobbing their boot loaders can’t possibly be…