Posts filed under 'Water cooler'
Tim Malbon says he’s pleased to be involved in this Web thing, but appears to conflate lack of full assimilation with brain-washing.
One can be a tiny bundle of techno-lust and not believe that successive versions of the Web will lead directly to a shiny new future.
Posting photos to Flickr (Web2.0) seems like something of a tenuous, circuitious route to finding housing for homeless children (shiny future). On the other hand, if you followed that link you’re contributing to something like a counter-argument.
It’s not that I begrudge boosterism, because some interesting things come about that way. I just find the juxtaposition of They see [the Web] as ‘work’ rather than the defining social revolution du jour
with They have the air of people who belong to a mind control cult
as, well, exquisite.
Having said all that: I quite agree with Tim’s sentiments that Small is Good, creating neat technology isn’t work, and I’d rather be passionate about what I do than uninterested (happily, I am the former).
August 25th, 2006
mikeb
Those of you with an interest in interactive fiction who’ve not yet checked out Inform 7 - run, do not walk, to your nearest mac or windows machine and have a go! (Sadly, the IDE hasn’t been ported to Linux yet.)
I spent quite a few hours over the weekend building a toy game using I7, and I really enjoyed the experience. I may yet get round to dusting off my old MUD engine and freshening up its parser a little…
June 12th, 2006
tonyg
A couple of weekends ago now I attended the first UK Smalltalk meeting. Stephen Taylor spoke about some of his experiences using XP in the financial industry, and touched on his development of a financial DSL based in APL (!). There were a couple of informal talks introducing the APL programming language - it’s got a lot going for it. Bryce Kampjes gave a demonstration of his Smalltalk compiler, Exupery, and after the main talk gave a demo of how he debugs the compiler and some of the basic-block visualisation and disassembly tools he’s built. Marcel Weiher gave a fascinating talk on Higher-Order Messaging, Objective Smalltalk (an inversion of Objective-C where the message-send syntax is the default, and escaping to C is done with a special construct), stsh, a Smalltalk shell based on his Objective Smalltalk implementation, and Arches, an experiment in multiparadigm language implementation with an interesting approach to metaprogramming and reflection.
Thanks to all who gave talks! I’m looking forward to the next meeting.
May 5th, 2006
tonyg
Travis Griggs has some interesting things to say about the similarities between Smalltalk and Linux. Of course there are huge differences as well, but it’s interesting to hear a Smalltalker’s take on the similarities.
December 20th, 2005
tonyg
Stuart ran an RF cable up from the riser downstairs so we can have the last, deciding day of the Ashes Tests shown through the projector in our meeting room.
Exciting!
September 12th, 2005
mikeb
We are trialling a new coffee machine. The old one is a percolator with two hotplates. The new one is hermetically sealed, has a fascia that coordinates well with hi-fi componentry, and makes variations on espresso that I haven’t heard of with a single button press.
There is a certain satisfaction in the fantasy that one is ‘making’ coffee by replacing the filter and grinds in the percolator; however, the inescapable truth is that this machine straight from Area 51 makes better coffee, even if we can’t see how it is doing it.
July 18th, 2005
mikeb
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