At the end of December there was an article by Hadley Freeman in the Guardian, characterising the past decade as a decade of fakery: fake science, fake politics and fake friendships connected only by Facebook. At the time, I criticised the article, but things I’ve learned over the past couple of weeks have put […]
Continue reading about The real value of online friendships (Hadley Freeman revisited)
Last week, Apple launched its long-awaited tablet computer, which was something of a surprise to me as I had read that Steve Jobs had earlier given an explanation, at length, as to why he thought tablet computers were not a good idea. Now that Apple have made a success of their iPhone, they’ve upscaled […]
Thunderbird 3 has been out for a few weeks now, although I’d been using it on Linux since well back in the beta days. It was actually the standard version of the software on Fedora 11, which I was using on my “big computer” (the Dell I got a year ago) and it’s blazingly […]
I’ve had my T-Mobile G2 (or HTC Hero, for anyone on any other network who might be offered one) since last Friday, and I’ve already had enough. There is a cooling-off period of seven working days, so I contacted T-Mobile and told them I wanted to send the handset back, and why. They […]
The other day I bought the January 2010 edition of Linux Format, the UK’s best-known magazine for that platform. In the letters page, there is a letter from a guy called Nick Canupp, having a go at sections of the community for opposing the inclusion of Mono (a freeware implementation of .NET) and proprietary […]
I am due a mobile phone upgrade next week, insha Allah. I have my heart set on an Android unit, the main manufacturer of which seems to be HTC; the Hero is the best known of them. My service provider is T-Mobile (which used to be One2One many years ago when I started […]
Continue reading about Under pressure: the search for an Android
For anyone setting up a new self-hosted Wordpress blog (not on wordpress.com or any similar hosting service), here’s a tip on getting your permalinks set up and getting rid of the queries in the links.
When you select a permalink pattern from the list of options (default, day and name etc.) and then select “Save changes”, […]
Yesterday I downloaded the newly-released latest version of Ubuntu, codenamed Karmic Koala (they all have an alliterative codename; the last was Jaunty Jackalope). I had been using Fedora version 11 since, well, it came out, and although it worked better than any of the other versions of Linux that were available until yesterday, there […]
Continue reading about Ubuntu ‘Karmic’: my computer is a joy to use again
Microsoft’s grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse? | Charlie Brooker | Comment is free | The Guardian
Charlie Brooker, of TVGoHome and Screenwipe fame, wrote this column for Monday’s Guardian, about how he prefers the insufferably unreliable Windows Vista to getting a Mac. His main gripe about Macs seems to […]
Deciphering Windows 7 Upgrades: The Official Chart | Walt Mossberg | Mossblog | AllThingsDigital
Linked via OSNews, Walt Mossberg explains that upgrading to Windows 7 from Windows XP will mean wiping your hard drive clean, and that if you don’t use one or two specific versions of Vista which correspond to your version of Windows 7, […]
Continue reading about Most Windows 7 upgrades will be destructive
Last Wednesday, the Guardian had a feature from “inside Twitter HQ” based on interviews with the founders of the service. The article gave potted histories of the founders, two of whom were formerly involved in Blogger, and mentions the fact that Twitter isn’t making money. The following day, they printed a selection of […]
Recently, I have been hearing over Twitter that one of my contacts has been thinking of moving one of his websites off Wordpress onto Expression Engine, a proprietary content management system. I have never tried EE, but have tried a number of the more common open source CMS’s including Textpattern, Movable Type, Wordpress and […]
Continue reading about The frustrations of switching content management systems
Today I got the new Belkin network card I ordered from Dell over the weekend. (Obviously, it being a bank holiday on Monday, and having ordered it at the weekend, it took until today to arrive.) The Dell status update wasn’t very helpful, as it told me yesterday evening that they were awaiting fulfilment […]
Eric Raymond, author of the [Computer] Jargon File, The Cathedral and The Bazaar and a number of well-used but little-known pieces of software, is working on a book, putatively titled Why C++ Is Not Our Favorite Programming Language. In his recent announcement, he lays out why he wants to “harpoon the Great White Whale of programming languages”. I will lay out why it remains mine, and more to the point, why it endures despite the existence of alternatives such as Java.
Continue reading about C++: the Ugly Useful Programming Language
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