Never visit this page again. Really, I mean that. If you sign up for the Interconnected mail list, you'll get the latest weblog content sent to you daily in one handy-sized email. And it's a discussion group too, should you feel the need to say anything back. Here's an example mail for 5 January 2001. If you don't want to sign up now, you can always find a form to do so on the left hand side of the default skin of this page.
...I have to say, this is the most pointless project I've ever done on this page (um, with the exception of the web-accessible speech synthesiser in my room last year, that is), but maybe there's someone out there who would find this useful.
A weblog by Matt Webb, CEO of BERG.
You're probably looking for my email address or the syndication feed.
You can get updates to this blog on Twitter: follow @intrcnnctd.
I'm @genmon on Twitter. Also find me on Flickr and LinkedIn.
I signed up on CO2e.com, the "Global Hub for Carbon Commerce", to see if I could buy up carbon credits to stop people using them. That idea came to a pretty swift halt when I didn't understand even the first part about trading options and that. But flat James found me a good explanation of options and futures, so perhaps I should go back.
Two user-interface links via Camworld:
I'm also reading The Inmates Are Running The Asylum (Alan Cooper) about the danger of letting programmers control UI design and the management culture that's encouraging this behaviour. It has some hints about how to drive towards good design too (using a detailed representative user, with a name and everything, instead of just referring to "the user". It makes sense, trust me). I'm not sure I agree with all of it, and it's not the best written book I've ever read. But it's good.
A big list of dumb facts.
The Mole looks like an interesting game show: Ten people do tasks to win money, which goes into a kitty. One of the team is a mole, planted to disrupt proceedings and stop the team winning. The person who guesses which member of the team is the mole takes the entire kitty. The 'site says it's won the Golden Rose of Montreux, which apparently is the top tele award in Europe.
So I was thinking about this, and about Dares for Dollars, and then I chucked in a bit of delayed punishment (like, would you do a deal with the devil to have a rich and exciting life, but go to hell for all eternity in twenty years time) -- and I came up with a new game show. The premise is this: A number of people stand in a chest x-ray machine, and radiation blasts continually through them. The last person to leave wins the jackpot. How long will contestants stay in there given they won't have any effects of the machine until terrible illness afflicts them a decade or two down the line? Who will crumble first? It would be gripping. And only a teeny bit unethical.
Hey, you know the Museum of Bestial Art? Well, the guy who put it together has own homepage, where you can find his art, and photographs from his wedding to Elska. Elska is a horse.
Oh, sweet mercy. It's the online Museum of Bestial Art [navigation map]. I think zebras are such cute animals, don't you?
It's all very well making all these pictures, but if you want to actually participate, where would you start? Dolphinsex.org is good as a quick faq if you live by the sea, but you have to look a little further afield if you want guides to shagging most animals. Handy hint, from How to Geese: "You can seriously injure a goose if you penetrate it. The tissue inside is very thin and if it ruptures, the goose will die within 24 hours. I know from first hand experience". No, no but it's okay see, because "Geese are very cheap and can be bought for 20 dollars full grown". Yeah, and in case you've got any doubts: "Nothing is more glorious then hearing the trumpet of a goose when he orgasms!"
Omigod. This can't be right. This really, really can't be right.
Roll up, roll up for Thursday's fresh Upsideclown: "I write the headlines: 'Pope backs Ikea - gala opening planned'. Here comes the logic bit (CON-CENT-RATE)". Victor explores the world of religion and home assembly in Flat-packed furniture.
Yum, more php xmlrpc [via Scripting News]. Looks extremely simple, too. Goodgood.
Organizine is a Blogger-like tool to help produce webzines. It would be useful to produce something like Upsideclown (a 'site I'm involved in).
Premise: You create documents, and templates. Documents are simply text or html, with a title, author and summary. All information is typed into text forms through the browser. Templates pull all this information together and output html: You can choose any template for your document.
You can also choose sensible filenames and directories for your html pages (nice and flexible, yes?), which are ftp'd to your server. An archive and front page are automatically created.
Contributors to your webzine can have variable permissions -- they can edit only their own documents, not templates or overall settings.
So I like Organizine. It feels simple to use, and takes many hints from Blogger about ease of use (if you've used one, the other will be obvious). I've a feeling document management could get difficult with many files, and I'd like to see templates being editable outside the text form, but both of these are easily added features; the foundations seem sound. But would I use it? I don't think so. I know enough html and server-side processing such that it's fairly easy to set up and automate almost anything I want. I'm thinking about it though. For collaborative 'sites I imagine it could be very handy, and I certainly hope this results in an explosion of independent content and magazines in the same way Blogger et al helped with narrative.
Couple of minor changes to the default skin of this page: I've moved the links page link into the permanent links column (of course the links page needs to be updated, but that's a different story), and I've added a Skin this weblog link to the top right-hand corner.
You go out in your car, drink, ScooterMan [requires Flash] arrives on a moped, and drives you home in your car, with the moped in the boot. London, within M25 only.
Apparently (Claire here at work tells me) there's a company One for the road who do the same thing. She says the scooter's tiny and looks pretty stupid but the bloke on it was nice enough. And it costs more than a one way cab, but it's cheaper than that and also getting a cab back the next day to pick your car up. I'm told it's worth it just to see the scooter.
Some php/xml resources:
Moving to php from perl, I'm amazed at the speed, and it's opening a lot of doors that weren't open before -- especially with xml, which is where the real speed gain is.
I can't believe people actually buy these [via boingboing]. Here's wishing I'd found these gifts before Christmas.
Now the masses have returned to aimless interweb browsing (also known as work), it's a good time for me to remind you that we at Upsideclown published as usual during the winterval, and there are now four more articles for your delectation that you may have missed:
And of course Upsideclown will continue with articles fresh every Monday and Thursday.
Nofrontierans is good fun, if only to see what you can make out of three coloured polygons and a pair of eyes.
PageRank is the technique Google use to order their search results. Essentially, it works by ranking higher pages with many other pages linking to them, each of these pages contributing a score which is higher if they themselves are more popular. Fair enough (it explains why Google has all those cached pages available. It's a side effect of having to keep them for calculations). But what I didn't know is that instead of following every link on every page, a randomised typical usage pattern is used. From a given page, the "surfer" follows a random link, and then another random link on the new page, and so on, until they get bored (typical surfers only link click a short distance) and start with another randomly selected page. The overall ranking is the same, but much easier to calculate (there's no state information to maintain, and the ranking program that runs can be much smaller in memory and less processor intensive). The original paper by Google cofounder Larry Page is extremely interesting and has an easy-to-follow presentation: PageRank: Bringing Order to the Web.
Thought the first: This explains why weblogs rank so high in Google. The integrity of PageRank relies on the fact that you only own your own page, so you can't force much linking to your 'site to up your rank. The weblog community has several features that break this model: The tendency for links lists to be on every weblog page (and there are often many pages of archives too), and the large amount of reciprocal linking. The community appears as a very highly connected network, and this effect is magnified because of the large amount of the links on weblog pages compared to other 'sites on the web.
Thought the second: Could I use this technique with Dirk? Currently I rank objects by second degree connection. I wonder if there is a way to rank connections that would depreciate the less useful ones?
Oh, very cool. There's a Speak and Spell simulator (Windows only; slightly flakey) [via unxmaal] complete with scary robot voice and on/off buttons. I never had one myself, but my sister had a Talking Typewriter with the same kind of voice. It was a weird mix of mechanics and electronics; it meant you had to use paper to play the built in games. A product of extraordinarily modern synthesis, now I think about it. Although, at the time, we just stopped using it when the ink ribbon ran out.
The Multiple Store commissions contempory British art and sells it through their shop on Charing Cross Road, London (their catalogue is also browsable online). I'm not terribly impressed by most pieces, but "www." is stunning (from a technical and aesthetic point of view rather than an artistic one, however). A luminous network of lines, floating in three dimensions in a crystal glass cube. Beautiful.
Among the ideas Labour are considering for the manifesto is one in which £1000 is paid into a savings scheme at birth for every child. I can see how, properly managed and tied into the welfare state, this could reduce the impact of mistakes from the previous generation on those growing up. I like the idea of not automatically assuming the "family unit". And if this sum was the initial payment into an insurance policy that replaced disability allowances, unemployment benefits and so forth -- so much the better.
Have you ever thought of the things you could have done, but never did? I Could Have.
I don't feel I've made any decisions, as such. At each obvious fork in the road I thought about what to do, and did it. I couldn't have done otherwise, or I wouldn't be me. Isn't that right? As for the nonobvious forks, the Leave Five Minutes Late Miss The Bus Walk To Work And Meet The Love Of Your Life kind of forks, they're chaotic. I don't have any power over them, so they don't count. Thinking... No, there isn't anything. I don't decide, I just do what feels right. And things just turn up. Anyway, while it's fun to play What If, if you're not careful it can turn into If Only. And I try to live so If Onlys rarely occur.
It's roughly how I'm feeling in 2001.
they sentenced me to 20 years of boredom/
for trying to change the system from within/
i'm coming now/
i'm coming to reward them/
first we take Manhatten/
then we take Berlin
By Leonard Cohen (although I've been listening to the Jennifer Warnes version), First We Take Manhattan. Oh yes.
Secret Government papers at the Public Record Office (UK) from 1970 are released today under the 30-year rule. There are some good ones about Europe, Thatcher, and nuclear holocaust in Scotland.
Welcome to 2001, would you care to come in? It's Monday, and Mondays always (without fail) mean spanking fresh Upsideclown. Not only is there a new article on this the first day of the new year, but some last-minute rota shuffling meant that I got to write it. Fantastic. So in the spirit of the time, I've picked up some common predictions for the future, and pulled them to shreds. For example:
1. In the future sex is free and easy
I'd contend this isn't even a prediction, given the same is true today so long as you ask politely. And sex isn't difficult so long as either (a) you have a reasonable percentage of the full complement of limbs; or (b) your accomplice is on top.
I'm very pleased with it; I hope you'll be pleased too. So from today at Upsideclown you can read the new Six predictions for tomorrow (and why they're wrong). Enjoy.
The 8 latest posts are named
FuelBand for alpha waves, Science questions, Belief and desire, After I die, Decision fatigue, Instagram as an island economy, A slow savings account, and Peak Attention and the DuPont Equation.
Read them.
2012 May, April, March, February, January. 2011 May, March, February, January. 2010 December, January. 2009 February. 2008 December, November, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, January. 2007 December, November, October, September, July, June, May, March, February, January. 2006 December, November, October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, January. 2005 December, November, October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, January. 2004 December, November, October, September, August, July, June, May, April. 2003 December, November, October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, January. 2002 December, November, October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, January. 2001 December, November, October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, January. 2000 December, November, October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February.
Interconnected is copyright 2000—2011 Matt Webb.