More on an Ubuntu Component Store
After yesterday’s musings on a “component store” for Ubuntu developers, a few people said “hm that sounds interesting, how would it work?” So I’ve thrown together a little demo.I should be clear: this...
View ArticleThere WILL be only one Ubuntu
Michael Hall declares that there is no “Touch”, only “Ubuntu”. And he’s absolutely correct. Sadly for the rest of us, though, he’s writing that post from the future. There will be One Ubuntu, but we’re...
View ArticleI bought a new computer
In the most recent episode of Bad Voltage I reviewed my new computer, but we diverged mainly into a discussion of why anyone should buy laptops at all, in which I was right and everyone else in the...
View ArticleWriting a simple desktop widget for Ubuntu
I needed a way to display the contents of an HTML file on my desktop, in such a way that it looks like it’s part of the wallpaper. Fortunately, most of the answer was in How can I make my own custom...
View ArticleNomad CHARGEKEY/CHARGECARD review
Recently I received a gift from Nomad, one each of their CHARGEKEY and CHARGECARD products. So I’ve been trying them out. They’re both similar in concept, so I’ll speak of them as one item for now....
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Some thoughts on soonsnap and little big details
I built a thing called soonsnap, and various people said that I should write up how and why.First, what it’s for.Here’s the use case. You’re there in the pub, Friday night, and there’s a group of...
View ArticleMozilla add HTML5 DRM, sadly but inevitably
“If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?”“Oh jeez. Probably.”“What!? Why!?”“Because all my friends did.”— xkcd, BridgeMozilla have decided to implement the HTML5EMEDRM for videos....
View ArticleThrottling or slowing down network interfaces on Ubuntu
Michael Mahemoff, on Google Plus, points out an idea from the Rails people to slow down your network connection to your local machine in order to simulate the experience of using the web, where slow...
View ArticleFacebook and the button of happiness
Recently, Facebook published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (warning: PDF) about how they intentionally manipulated over half a million FB users’ news feeds to exclude...
View ArticleReverse SSH tunnels
My dad’s got a computer. Infrequently, it goes wrong and I need to fix it. Slightly more frequently, it doesn’t go wrong but it does something which is confusing, and I need to try to fix it until I...
View ArticleDo you do it anyway?
Let us imagine that you are a designer, designing a thing. Doesn’t matter here what the thing is; it might be a piece of software or a phone or a car or a coffee machine or a tea cup. Further imagine...
View ArticleDevelopers are users too
When you talk about the “user experience” of the thing you’re building, remember that developers who use your APIs are users too. And you need to think about their experience.We seem to have created a...
View ArticleBrum Tech Scene interviews
Today I released the first of the Brum Tech Scene interviews, with me talking to Simon Jenner of Silicon Canal and Oxygen Startups. There’s a video on the site from me explaining why I’m doing this,...
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Responsive Dummies
After Remy “Remington” Sharp and Bruce “Bruce” Lawson published Introducing HTML5 in 2010, the web development community have been eager to see what they’ll turn their talents to next.1 Now their new...
View ArticleFundamentally connected
Aaron Gustafson recently wrote a very interesting monograph bemoaning a recent trend to view JavaScript as “a virtual machine in the browser”. I’ll quote fairly extensively, because Aaron makes some...
View ArticleReconnecting
After I took issue with some thoughts of Aaron Gustafson regarding JavaScript, Aaron has clarified his thoughts elegantly.His key issue here is summed up by one sentence from his post: “The fact is...
View ArticleThe next big thing is privacy
The way you beat an incumbent is by coming up with a thing that people want, that you do, and that your competitors can’t do.Not won’t. Can’t.How did Apple beat Microsoft? Not by making a better...
View ArticleEsquire is nothing new
You know how the higher-end men’s magazines — Esquire, GQ, that sort of thing — have feature articles where they reveal the inner secrets of the mob or what it’s like to be a black market gun dealer or...
View ArticleWhat If
I had this thought. Everyone1 wears these fitness wristband things2 now. In the Dresden Files books, Harry Dresden the wizard has a set of magical finger rings which store a little bit of kinetic...
View ArticleUbuntu Component Store, redux
A while back I proposed an “Ubuntu Component Store” and built a noddy implementation of the command line utility for it. Recently, Nekhelesh Ramanathan revived the idea and did a bunch of work to...
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