Algorithmic efficiency in the face of inelegance

Saturday, March 1st, 2008

Seed magazine published a wonderful crossover article between the worlds of biology and engineering "Algorithmic Inelegance" The complexity of developmental regulation isn't a product of design at all, and it's the antithesis of what human designers would consider good planning or an elegant algorithm. It is, however, exactly what you'd expect ...

The Web as operating system

Friday, October 19th, 2007

Alistair, who has been writing recently at GigaOM, puts together the most lucid synthesis I have seen on the topic of the "Web OS." Big Internet companies are making themselves the OS of the web 2.0 world. In addition to the fundamentals — operating a web application, storing data, handling logins ...

Can code be bad for the planet?

Sunday, October 14th, 2007

Alistair has an interesting post on Earth2Tech, the thesis of which is that inefficient coding practices can lead to environmental harm. I almost misled myself into thinking AC is blaming virtualization and SaaS/IaaS (infrastructure as a service) on creating such inefficiencies. Rather, he skipped past the obvious environmental benefits of server ...

Getting real about security

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

Adam (crypto nerd extraordinaire, former evil-genius at Zero Knowledge) from the Emergent Chaos "jazz combo" throws us a reference and ties it in with an amusing story about misguided security concepts. The Emporer's New Computer Affixing a Mac logo to my PC was, after all, motivated by a combination of personal amusement ...

Gettin’ Real Yo

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

Last week I attended the 37Signals "Getting Real" workshop where they indoctrinated the attendees on their parsimonious approach to building and running web applications. Getting Real is an exciting approach to software development currently largely practiced by Mac-toting revolutionaries. But rumours of folks building really useful applications and economically sustainable ...

The Wild Kingdom of “Spore”

Monday, March 20th, 2006

Spore looks to be a truly amazing game in the works from the original creators of Simcity. It seems to combine elements of some other classic simulation strategy games such as Populous and Civilization, crossed with the more modern "god" games such as Impossible Creatures and Black and White. One ...

Adding Adwords

Monday, February 27th, 2006

So I opened a Google "Adwords" account, mainly to figure out how it works and whether the links really are relevant to the content I post. Basically the idea is Google gets to advertise on my site, and will dynamically display ads which are relevant to whatever content is on ...

Protect your Windows PC for free

Sunday, January 29th, 2006

First in a series of articles about useful things: how to protect your personal computer running Windows when it hooked up to the internet, and do it for free! A combination of Anti-Virus, Firewall and Anti-Spyware is essential for any general purpose internet user running a windows PC, here are my ...

Put on your safety googles: a trip to Google’s Labs

Monday, May 30th, 2005

Just a suggestion... Check out the simultaneously useful and distracting Google Suggest: as you type the search field expands into a drop down list providing anticipatory or alternative searches and allowing you to see the difference in the size of the result sets for each of them. A great way of ...

The Genius of Gmail

Friday, November 19th, 2004

Gmail: The stickiest of Google's many substances? (updated) Gmail is a truly innovative webmail service. The interface is incredibly fast and clean, mail is usefully sorted into threads, the targeted ads are inobtrusive, and the features are second to none. I should mention they are in beta now so ...