January 2006

27Jan2006

Wiki, a Subversive Technology

By carlfish on

Except it is, and it does, because our poker standings page on the extranet represents, in a microcosm, every little bit of information that a company's employees think is worth writing down, if only there were a convenient place to do so. This is one half of the corporate wiki's raison d'etre, and is the reason that so many of our customers tell us how quickly "Just put it in Confluence" and its converse "Look for it in Confluence" have become almost cliché in their organisation.

26Jan2006

Quotes of the Day

By carlfish on

I'm not sure "made me walk more than any other car I've used." would be complimentary.

17Jan2006

Ha Ha Only Serious

By carlfish on

"Because written English survived quite happily for centuries without needing punctuation to delineate humour. I can almost understand why it might be necessary in back-and-forth conversational one-liners, but I don't see why we have to start corrupting honest prose just because some readers are getting too used to being spoon-fed joke-markers to work it out for themselves."

17Jan2006

Build One to Throw Away?

By carlfish on

The only novel feature I could see on Flickr when I first signed up was the 'shoebox' of images that you could upload to the site and share with other members, or paste into conversations. The way things turned out, it looks like I wasn't the only user who thought that way.

16Jan2006

Random Java Trivia

By carlfish on

When does the following code not throw a NullPointerException? MyClass obj = null; obj.doSomething();

15Jan2006

Should We Talk About the Weather?

By carlfish on

It's not raining tonight. Rain is something that starts in the sky then falls down until it hits the earth. The weather I can see outside my window is just humidity reaching its natural conclusion and becoming too heavy to stay where it is. It's not raining tonight; the mist has just discovered there's only a little way left to fall.

13Jan2006

Full of (Cold) Air

By carlfish on

I wonder, since online shopping really started taking off, how much money and effort has been expended shipping plastic bladders full of air around the world?

12Jan2006

The Sum Total of Human Experience

By carlfish on

Follow the storage performance/size/capacity/price trendline out 10 or 15 years, and we get to the hard-drive that John Gilmore's been describing: the size of a sugar-cube, costing $1-2, powered off of the occassional hard shake...

05Jan2006

This is Our City in Summer

By carlfish on

The slogan for the Festival of Sydney this year is 'This is Our City in Summer', which can lead to a certain level of signage-irony when it's pissing down with rain.