Archive for the 'Rants & Raves' Category

Comments Going Away

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

At over 400 spam comment attempts per day, it’s just too much work, especially given I post here
so infrequently that the number of legitimate comments is so low anyway. So I’m disabling comments
for now. If you really want to get in touch with me or comment on anything I’ve written, feel free to
send me an [...]

2007 Predictions

Sunday, February 11th, 2007

yeah yeah, so it’s not 1st January, but I spend summer hiding from the world so don’t do much thinking about this kind of thing.
These are mainly so I can look back in a year and see what I was thinking.

Programmers will finally realize that WS-* is a pile of stinking rubbish designed to kill [...]

Freedom of Speech

Wednesday, December 27th, 2006

If the spammers had their way, there’d be roughly twelve spam posts a day on this blog. I hate to think what it’d be like on the blogs that are actually read.
The couple I bothered to try tracking down appear to have come from compromised Windows XP machines.
This (dollar) cost of lax security in our [...]

Simple

Saturday, November 18th, 2006

The S Stands for Simple says what I’ve been thinking about the whole SOAP/WS- thing much more eloquently than I could have imagined.
I’m glad I’m not alone.
- Colin

Cellphones in Movies

Friday, November 25th, 2005

Like many people my age I’ve been getting really irritated by
the people who insist on using their cellphones during a movie.
The number of people who talk on the phone is fortunately
fairly small, but there are enough who insist on using SMS messaging
that at any point during any movie, there will be three or four
glowing cellphone [...]

Workflow

Sunday, November 6th, 2005

I’m just processing a bunch of job applications at the moment - we were expecting about 5 applicants
and got nearly 40.
It’s made me realise that my office desktop setup is really not suitable for this kind of thing. The department run Linux system does not have the tools (OpenOffice 2 mainly) to handle random .DOC [...]

microfavours

Saturday, November 5th, 2005

Well, thinking more about the microfavour concept, I’ve decided I really like the term and intend to do more with it.
Google tells me the term has never been used, so I guess I’ve invented a term.
So if it’s the basis of the New Altruistic Economy in the future, you’re all owe me lunch.
- Colin

Mechanical Turk

Saturday, November 5th, 2005

As more people come up with ideas for Amazons Mechanical Turk, (Top Ten Web 2.0 Problems Amazon Mechanical Turk Can Solve For Me) it occurs to me that maybe a useful form of Micropayments will be that of Microfavours.
No need to figure out how to pay someone 3c when you can do them a [...]

Getting It

Thursday, November 3rd, 2005

Ok, someone at Microsoft “gets it”
I generally disagree with him but I think Scoble is spot on on this one, it’s really hard for large traditional corporates to understand why Goodle is winning, and why Apple still exists with a comfortable niche.
the-new-robert-scoble-services-agenda
You have to get your stuff used by the people who others go [...]