To the list of tech stuff that I’ve been around to see both the beginning and the end of (VHS, Concorde, the Space Shuttle…), I can add something that’s a bit more personal: kink on Usenet; specifically, the Usenet group soc.sexuality.spanking (SSS), and its predecessor alt.sex.spanking (ASS). I hope ...
[An augmented version of a comment posted on Boing Boing concerning the public release of Chris Crawford’s ‘Storytron’ interactive storytelling engine. I should write something longer and more thoughtful about this endeavour, because I’ve never believed that there was anything to be gained from the ...
(Because I did the washing yesterday at my favourite place in Venice — the one with the Sav-on next door which always has Oh Henry!s at four for a dollar or some such unmissable chocolate deal — wearing my PJ bottoms with the penguins on. How very Californian I’m becoming.) A small group of what ...
In another life, I did some structural analysis of stories. For the sake of practicality, some were as simple as Grimms’ Fairy Tales (various publications insist that they’re “Grimm’s Fairy Tales”, but, dammit, there were two of them). For the sake of seeing how scalable my analysis was, I also ...
(Some odd notes, which should be a longer and more thoughtful piece.) If I ever write a (very slim) book about programming, I’ll probably call it “Pattern and Variation”, because the vast majority of what it means to effectively convert a problem into a representation using code is: first of all, the ...
It’s not the detail. We pretty soon forget all of that, and — if forced — have to go back to the manual or the text book or whoever taught us the damn thing in the first place. No, what we truly remember of things we learn consists of general principles wrapped up in phrases, ...
(‘Worse than 2000‘. Sometimes it sucks to be right, when there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.) A couple of years ago I found myself working somewhere I’d previously worked about seven years before that, and in close proximity to some software that I’d written then, which was still ...
[Update: A thoughtful and thorough piece by Bruce Schneier, which covers a great deal of the same issues as below — and some more besides — though which seems to begin from the unsupported premise that technology in voting is in the end both inevitable and desirable, so long as its inherent problems are fixed. ...
About our new dishwasher… A couple of years ago I taught a course called ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence Programming’ — largely because I was available when no-one else was. It turned out to be great fun, and not least because I’d been through the same course one year as a student, and ...
Once upon a time, DejaNews spectacularly fucked up their monopoly of Usenet archiving with some boneheaded ideas about how to turn what they had into cash. Turning words in Usenet postings into commercial hyperlinks was a PR disaster; they simply didn’t comprehend how many people would object to it on the grounds that ...