December 2007
9 posts
“Abstract statistical information does not sway us as much as the anecdote. I...”
– From The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. (The prologue warns he’ll indulge in this kind of fifth column hypocrisy, but it still reads funny.)
Before DOS learned to read
This evening, I decided I wanted to be able to carry around my little personal playground repository on a lovely monkey-shaped USB stick that I got for Christmas. So that I could access it from whatever Windows machine I might be next to, I checked in some tools and some batch files for the more fiddly tasks, such as codec of the encrypted master file I keep sundry passwords and secrets in. This...
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction
So, I had been very pleased with myself for figuring out I might be the only person in the world for whom it was worth buying Half-Life 2 Episode 2 separately rather than spending an extra $15 and getting the entire Orange Box. But subsequent reviews convinced me that I was very wrong, and so I got myself Portal as a Christmas present. Wow, I was not disappointed. Wickedly funny writing, best...
Family viewing
Over the last few months I’ve been watching eighty-six episode New Jersey mafia industry soap The Sopranos. As with much of the long arc drama I’ve enjoyed of late, I didn’t ever invest in watching it as broadcast television; much preferable to wait for a show to run its course, gather critical acclaim, and then watch it through rapidly at my convenience by renting the DVDs,...
Distant metastasis
I spent a pleasant few evenings playing through an excellent Half-Life 2 mod, MINERVA: Metastasis by Adam Foster. The maps are very pretty and their central design conceit (go a very long way down, then return) is rewarding. This kind of labour of love often ends up acting as a way into professional games design for the the author. Isn’t that kind of career/recruitment shortcut a great...
Slipping on frozen Rails
I updated most of my Rails apps to version 2.0 over the week-end. Because I run multiple apps on one box that I share with someone else, I try to follow what I understand to be best practice and for each individual app check a copy of the Rails framework itself into the code under source control. (The blessed terminology for this is “freezing the Rails gems”.) Said best practice caused...
Open I'd
I really like the approach of OpenID to decentralized identity services. (You pick an identifying URL and some trusted webserver to which you’ve probably already recently signed in - typically there’s a cookie sitting on your machine - and get other sites to ask that server to confirm as much. This effectively lets you use your account on that server as a means of single sign-on.) The...
http://anthonybailey.net →
My domain was originally registered as a permanent home for contact details (and e-mail.) Over time I’ve found I want the home page URL to represent me more generally, so I finally replaced the older static version.
Getting the old Gang back together
The podcast show formula of getting a bunch of tech luminaries together once a week, and recording them chatting for an hour or so about the current issues, is a proven one. For example, TWiT is a very successful tech podcast using this model. The archetype of the formula was The Gillmor Gang, a highly unfiltered conversation arranged by Steve Gillmor. The gang are very smart kids - some of the...