January 2009
11 posts
On copyright and ethics
As illustrated by this post by Matt Schwartz the uploading of copyrighted material to video sharing site Vimeo has recently become an issue. YouTube has begun cracking down on users illegally uploading copyrighted material (spoken in a pretentious voice while I watch music videos on YouTube). As a result the offending users have begun migrating to Vimeo. Vimeo is not Youtube. Vimeo users do not...
Databases
A couple of semesters ago I took a paper in information systems design (or something along those lines). The paper was mostly about database structures and involved a lot of diagrams called ERDs or Entity Relationship Diagrams. At the time I didn’t think I was learning anything important. I aced the exam and then forgot about it.
This afternoon while trying to add some more features to my...
“(1) if you love what you’re doing, why would you want to do it less? (2)...”
– Jeffrey Kalmikoff on the Four Hour Work Week
The economics of RSS
I’ve recently noticed that major blogs aren’t pushing their RSS feeds as much as they used to. A year or so ago Engadget, Gizmodo, Techcrunch etc all gave their RSS feeds substantial real estate in the page header. Not so now.
This trend is most noticable on Gizmodo, the feed link is 3000px down the left sidebar. The RSS option is more prominent on Engadget and TechCrunch as a link in...
Theme update
New theme. Don’t get confused. I didn’t make this one. I realised my old one wasn’t working properly in Firefox (of all browsers) and I never wrote code for half the post types. I’ll probably make a new theme eventually but I’m a bit distracted at the moment so here’s this one which I quite like. I’ll try and add Twitter and comments back over the next few...
Roadtrip Songs
California by Metro Station
Time to Pretend by MGMT
My Delerium by Ladyhawke
If I had a car, and somewhere to drive it to.
via Plinky
You are incorrect
Rany W: I was always under the impression that Apple doesnt comment on rumors. Its odd that Mr. Cook squashed them the way he did.
Anon: It's "quashed" not "squashed."
nick23: no its squashed you idiot
It is in fact quashed but it's easy to see how (insert Gen Y stereotype) could get confused. This is the sort of problem that can't be solved by Firefox's built in spellchecker. There's a name for this particular method of destroying the english language, anyone know it?
Regurgitation
I don’t want regurgitated information, I want a link to the source. And perhaps an opinion.
Stuff.co.nz fails at this daily. For example, this 1000 word article about a YouTube video. I’d far rather watch the video than read about it in the third person but Stuff doesn’t even link to it. Youtube is a mess and without even a hint at the title of the video there’s no way I...
Shopping list
3.5mm extension lead
Paper
RAM
New Credit Card
Domain Name
Rails server
Icecream
= New project
Online Communities
As part of the paper on online communities I’m doing at the moment students are required to write a series of blog posts. I’m not a fan of school project style work so I’m going to post these blog assignments here even if they’re a bit off topic. Not that this blog has a topic… This week I’m going to talk about three online communities I find interesting:...
December 2008
6 posts
New domain
I’ve been trying to put this here blog at www.michaeldowse.name for a while. Turns out everything was working fine but I couldn’t see it because I was accessing the local server version, long story. Anyway once I’ve published this post I will move the blog to www.michaeldowse.name and the rss feed address will change from michael.dowsemurray.co.nz/rss to michaeldowse.name/rss, so...