On Podcasting
4 min read
A number of friends have asked me of late what my take is on podcasting. It's certainly a hot new buzzword; but is it really the "next step for blogging"? It doesn't seem obvious to me....
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240 posts from 1996 to present • Page 7 of 10
2005
2004
Nobody Makes Good Cell Phones
8 min read
The cell phone market bugs me. It seems to have been taken over by marketers utterly out of touch with the reality of what people are looking for in a phone, their singular focus instead on a cheap game of one-upmanship with the competition. In recen...
Continue readingBush Won: Let’s Wake Up
4 min read
So here we are, post-election, and George Bush has won. A lot of people, Bush supporters and otherwise, are dumbfounded by the numbers. The Republican party...
Continue readingYour Blog Is Evidence
4 min read
Your blog can and will be used against you in a court of law....
Continue readingGhana Wrapup
2 min read
So I'm back from Ghana, safe and sound minus a nasty cold I picked up on some continent. I never get sick! The camp was a resounding success; sorry for not posting more here earlier, but it's been a total zoo. I got back last night at 2pm a...
Continue readingGhana Update V
4 min read
Oh, every day has such ups and downs! It's hard to compress it all here. Immediately after the last update, I think I gave the talk of my life &8211; the kids in the afternoon were a lot more jazzed up than the morning kids, which shouldn't...
Continue readingGhana Update IV
2 min read
I just got done teaching the morning session; with two classes a...
Continue readingGhana Update III
3 min read
Busy Internet strikes again. Internet here is 12,000 cedis per hour. The exchange rate is very roughly 10,000 cedis per dollar. It's actually more like 9k and change So that's around $1.25/hour, which isn't so bad and certinaly doesn&8...
Continue readingGhana Update II
3 min read
I'm at "Busy Internet" in Accra right now. We've been calling the people who did and didn't manage to make the program. It seems that instead of taking 50 kids, we're going to try and take 100 kids, doing two sessions a...
Continue readingI’m In Ghana
2 min read
So I'm writing this from a computer lab in Accra; it's nicely modern, with about 50 pentium 4-2000 machines, but it's about 1500ms to anything really interesting on the Internet backbone and the speed's not that fabulous. But it w...
Continue readingAnd Off to Ghana
2 min read
Oh boy. I'm two days away from hopping on a plane to Accra, Ghana to go teach kids about science, technology, and the Internet. Much of our planning is very last minute as we're trying to slap together a curriculum, local sponsorship, etc....
Continue readingThank You, President Bush.
3 min read
I would like to thank President Bush for his efforts to expand democracy around the world. He's done a really incredible job, but not in the way that he may have anticipated. In his efforts to found democracies on the other side of the globe, he...
Continue readingCavafy: Ithaca
3 min read
The following is the poem "Ithaca" by the famous Greek poet Cavafy, in its translation by Rae Dalven, the original Greek, and also with my own horribly-bastardized pronunciation guide for the Greek. Note that the translation is not line-bas...
Continue readingA Letter To Brian
9 min read
I wrote the following letter to my pastor Brian Emmet at Covenant Ministries1, in response to his latest newsletter2, which decried permitting homosexual marriages....
Continue reading2003
Peace In The Middle East
3 min read
The middle east is pretty damn annoying. Specifically, the whole Israel / Palestine deal. I mean, it feels like there's good evidence that there are a very large number of totally reasonable people on both sides who are being totally ignored by...
Continue readingA Simple Strategy For Spam Control
2 min read
I've recently employed a very simple mechanism for spam control. So far, it's been quite effective and required the installation of NO new software, tunable Baysian filters, or anything. So I thought I'd share it with you....
Continue readingWhy IPv6 Won’t Be Here By 2005
7 min read
This message was posted on October 27, 2003 to a mailing list in response to a post that claimed that IPv6 would be widespread by 2005 due to an IPv4 address shortage. Given that 2005 has come without IPv6 having taken off, this post feels vindicated...
Continue readingFormats
2 min read
For protocols there's Ethernet, TCP, IP, UDP, AIM in ICQ, OSCAR, and TOC flavors!, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, IRC, SOCKS5, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, POP3, FTP, Shoutcast, SSH, and Kazaa&8230;and that's just what's running on my desktop...
Continue readingLinux Unicode Support Sucks
3 min read
Unicode1 is just about the coolest thing since sliced bread. It's the kind of thing after which you wonder how things possibly worked previously. The idea is simple: one character set can represent any character in any language. There are a few...
Continue readingProfessionalism
3 min read
I've learned a lot in the last two years about what it means to be professional. Here are some of the things I've learned; I hope you can learn them without having to be the fool I am! Please note that I'm not smart enough to actually...
Continue readingOver Coffee
4 min read
DISCLAIMER...
Continue readingGoogle: A Brain Extension
4 min read
Over the last few days a subtle error on the part of our home's gateway to the Internet rendered Google1 inaccessible. I was in agony. I was unable to write reports and actually felt rather stupid without it. I then realized I had effectively un...
Continue readingThe Peril Of Using ETags In A Cluster
3 min read
Apache administrators: beware ETags if you have more than one webserver! If you only have one webserver this article will not be useful to you....
Continue readingPhilip, 2014
5 min read
Written mid-2002, this is a letter from the future....
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The Perils Of Accidental Rudeness
4 min read
Just now, I did something horribly mean. I ignored a nice person on AIM that was having a delightful chat with me. And \BAM\, I ignored them, never to see a message from them again. I rebooted my computer and any and all traces of them were removed....
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