Safari crashed again

26 March 2006

Safari crashed. Again. With lots of tabs open. And I can’t remember half of them.

I hate you, Safari.

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More photos from Etech

26 March 2006


Julian Bleecker (landscape)
Originally uploaded by Tom Armitage.

I’m slowly getting my pictures from ETech online; the last batch left will be of my time in San Diego after the conference. These ones are slightly better than the ones I uploaded first – in part, because I’ve processed them a bit more. This is one of my favourites – of Julian Bleecker – from the afternoon where we took break on the pool deck. Fun.

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The RoR hype-bandwagon mows down another cretin

23 March 2006

Now, I love Ruby on Rails. Really love it. I’m using it for business and for pleasure. And it’s now got me writing boring scripts in Ruby, just to learn the language better. And, you know, it’s a lovely language. So while advocacy and promotion of RoR as a way to develop your webapp is all well and good (because, after all, it’s one framework (albeit a pretty darn good one) amongst many), every now and then the hype bandwagon strikes. Like in this introductory article on Sitepoint, which contains the cracker:

“…without Rails, Ruby is nothing!”

Oh dear.

Rails might have brought Ruby to popularity, but seriously, that sentence is as big a pile of nonsense as any I’ve seen. It’s these kind of sentences, uttered off-hand by Rails-converts still in awe of the hype-bandwagon, that damages the Ruby community – and makes you look like an arse.

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“Is controller design killing creativity in videogames?” – UK radio edit

22 March 2006

So you may (or may not) be aware that I gave a 40-minute talk at Etech this year entitled “From Paddles to Pads: Is Controller Design Killing Creativity In Videogames?“. Well, I’m now doing a 15-minute recap of it in the UK (London, to be precise) at an event which (for one reason or another) is entitled Technology 2.0. If that sounds offputting, consider this: it’s basically ConCon 2006 (and that may still make no sense to you, so in short: people at US conferences recap them for those who couldn’t make it).

Anyhow, details of the event are linked above; it’s free, but it’s also RSVP only. Do come if it sounds interesting (or, more to the point, you want a quick yammer afterwards). I’ll be doing my best to ram an 8000-word, 67-slide extravaganza into 15 minutes, and give a rough overview of my argument (if not all the lovely evidence). There are fewer words in this version of the talk. There are, however, more slides than before, and a new joke about Larry Lessig.

Also, Yoz is talking about Ning, which should be fun (in a UK context) and there’s more promise.tv goodness from the Ludlams. And it’s all chaired by Internet Celebrity, The Dave Green (from NTK). More to the point, there’s drink later. So maybe see you then. Do say hello if we’ve not met before.

(Yes, I know I still haven’t got around to posting my Etech recap and notes. I will get around to this shortly, but it’s still percolating, which is probably a good thing).

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Revolver

21 March 2006

“Uh, well everything manifests itself in processes of three. Proton, neutron, electron. Sun, earth, moon. Masculine, feminine… child.” The Channel 4 website reviews the DVD of Revolver by listening to the commentary. Funny.

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