2005 May

May 23 2005
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Wists screencast tutorials

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Having finally got to meet my all time favorite tech writer, Jon Udell at the Syndicate conference last week, I said how much I enjoyed his screencast tutorials. In light of that am putting together a some screencasts of how to use Wists. This one is the most simple, showing how to add a bookmark while browsing. (A trick overlooked by most people is being able to highlight and drag text from the page being bookmarked to the bookmarklet description field). I’ll post more screencasts to the Wists blog, although we are working on redoing the Wists UI, so more on that shortly.

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May 20 2005
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Christian and Porn site filter

Posted by | technology | No Comments

One of the things that the unchristian wrong are good at is making sure that a significant portion of safe surfing products for children also block out sites which promote science or political thinking that doesn’t tally with their own medieval sense of morality. By providing free software they tailor the web to their own ideology. Hmm, time to fight back. I’d personally rather have any child of mine be able to learn about things on the web as well as block porn – so I’d be interested in creating an alternative family filter for people who want their kids to be educated. For example it could block sites such as WorldNetDaily, Jerry Falwell properties, Creationist drivel etc. etc.

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May 19 2005
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Google adds personalization – makes the front page a portal – wow.

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Google are launching a personalizable portal as their homepage later today – this post links to the mockup. This is the critical step for Google – get it right and they have jumped over the interface complexity hurdle the Yahoo passed years ago, but then Yahoo was never minimalist. with personalization people are less likely to switch from Google if another, better, search engine comes along. Get it wrong and, well, remember what happened to AltaVista when CMGI made that a portal. via Nick Aster link » tags: [google] [scoop] [news] permamark in: Wists

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May 19 2005
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Wall Street Journal Op-Ed slams the Christian Right.

Posted by | religion | No Comments

“…hundreds of thousands of young Americans are now patrolling and guarding hazardous frontiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Is there a single thinking person who does not hope that secular forces arise in both countries, and who does not realize that the success of our cause depends on a wall of separation, in Islamic society, between church and state? How can we maintain this cause abroad and subvert it at home?” The piece is by Hitchens who skillfully tears a bunch of arseholes a new bunch of arseholes. While I sometimes wonder about Hitchen’s integrity – he does seem to now be digging himself out of the pit he has created for himself over the last 2 years, by supporting secular libertarianism, which is surely the future for US politics. Hitchens is a good writer, his pen as dangerous a weapon when he was on the left as on the right….

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May 19 2005
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The ‘nuclear option’ is an indestructable meme.

Posted by | politics | No Comments

What we are seeing is a very interesting form of meme, a meme that is propagated in the exact same form, unmutated, by hosts who both support and oppose the idea coveyed by the meme itself. Republicans have tried to refer to filibuster amendment as the ‘Byrd option’ or the ‘constitutional option’. Josh Marshall points to a memo urging Republicans not to use the ‘nuclear option’ epithet. What is interesting is that both sides cannot help but use the term, despite the fact that it looks like a purely pejorative phrase. This is an unusually viral phrase because of its dual appeal. It appeals to Republicans because of its viscerally combative stance and to Democrats because of its alarmist quality. If one looks at memes such as religious ideas, they obviously transfer from one believer to another. Imagine an entire idea system as perfectly symmetrical as the ‘nuclear option’ phrase…

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May 18 2005
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Examine the numbers and the reality of the current Senate standoff looks quite different from the spin.

Posted by | politics | No Comments

The spin: On the face of it, it looks like it is the Democrats that are being stubborn by threatening to filibuster judicial nominees. The reality: The numbers show something different, the Senate agreed to approve all but 1.5% of judicial nominees, and the Republicans are threatening to change one of the fundamental checks and balances on government to have things 100% instead of 98.5% their own way. “Since Bush took office, he has made 218 judicial nominations and the Senate has confirmed 208 of them. Ten, including Owen, failed to win confirmation because of Democratic filibusters. Seven of those 10 were renominated at the start of this year. Of those seven, Democrats have indicated that they would be willing to confirm as many as four to avoid the showdown.” Neither side blinks as Senate starts debate on judicial nominees

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May 16 2005
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EVDB

Posted by | Uncategorized | No Comments

I always loved Upcoming.org, and couldnt figure out why it wasn't huge. Seems that Evan Williams has invested in Evdb – which looks compatible to something am working on for Wists with respect to events.link » tags: [tools] [wists] permamark in: Wists

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May 15 2005
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Old technologies that are new again

Posted by | technology | No Comments

It seems that everything is topsy turvy: Everything that is bad for you is good for you and everything that is old is new again. Irony aside, this is something of a web 2.0 reboot, with some lessons learned by coming full circle with technologies that are right for the web. SOAP vs CORBA, RSS vs ICE, PHP vs Some weirdo proprietary stuff. The changes: RSS hits the mainstream and is built into consumer portals – 10 years after it was a by-product of, er, a consumer portal, MyNetscape. Scripting interfaces to enterprise aps – the first web enabled version of enterprise aps were scripting language based e.g. Sybase was Perl based. Ajax, or DHTML as Flickr mercifully put it. In 94 you could navigate a 3d world on the web, in realtime with talking Avatars that made absolutely no money (The is nothing comparable to Onlive Traveller even today)….

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May 13 2005
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Desert Island Wists

Posted by | trivia | No Comments

The real reason that I wanted to build Wists, was to re-enact a long time fantasy where I would be asked to appear on Desert Island Disks, a long running radio show in the UK where you had to imagine you were stranded on a desert island with your favorite songs and had to explain why you chose them and what they meant to you. So, being a list geek, I have put together my Desert Island Wists, tagging my favorite books, movies, albums and, of course, buildings with the tags topten=buildings etc. (Desert Island Disks only allows you 8 songs and 1 book – but this is the web and I want 10 of everything). Here they are: My Top Ten Buildings My Top Ten Movies My Top Ten Books My Top Ten Albums

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May 13 2005
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Aerial view of Manhattan, Flickr

Posted by | Uncategorized | No Comments

I have finally pieced together and laminated the 25ft long aerial view of Manhattan that I have been working on. Its currently stuck to the floor of our apartment. I'm going to spend the next week or so looking for interesting places to visit and organize an architectural cycle tour.link » tags: [flickr] [architecture] permamark in: Wists

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