Cthulhu

My software is more or less like Cthulhu. Normally dead and at the bottom of the sea, but occasionally stirring and throwing out a languid tentacle to drive men’s minds insane. (Or at least perturb a couple of more recklessly adventurous users.) However there’s been a bit more bubbling agitation down in R’lyeh recently. The …

Google's New Email Tabs

There’s a lot of discussion going on around them. Eg. on Quora. I started writing a comment on a comment where Tim Bushell asks : why shouldn’t they be “red”, “green”, “blue”? ie. user-defined or neutral. But then felt it would be better here : Probably because Google have a database of thousands of email …

Modules In Time : Synthesizing GitHub and Skyrim

Thanks to Bill Seitz I picked up on a Giles Bowkett post I’d missed a couple of months ago which compares the loosely coupled asynchronous style of development that companies like GitHub both promote and live, with the intensely coupled synchronous raids that occur in online game-worlds. Bowkett seems confused by the apparent contradictions between …

Quora Scraper

I love Quora. It’s a great site and community. But I started getting a bit concerned how much writing I was doing there which was (potentially) disappearing inside their garden and not part of the body of thinking I’m building up on ThoughtStorms (or even my blogs). Fortunately, I discovered Quora has an RSS feed …

Restraining Bolts

Today I’m being driven crazy trying to print out FiloFax pages on an HP printer. Although I’ve created a PDF file of the right size, I have the right size piece of paper, and I’ve set up the paper-size in the print-driver, the printer is refusing to print because it detects a “paper size mismatch”. …

Fargo and Google

Couple of quick notes : 1) I’m too dependent on Google. Unlike the case of Facebook, I can’t just cancel my account. Google is too deeply entwined with my life. But I am taking steps to disengage if not 100% at least a significant chunk. 2) I’m playing around a bit more with Dave Winer’s …