Acts of Volition

I was at the Desktop Developers’ Conference in Ottawa this week. The DDC was for developers working on Linux on the desktop and it started off a week in Ottawa that also includes the Linux Kernel Summit and the Ottawa Linux Symposium (neither of which I stuck around for - both being way over my …

First of all, I should be clear. When I say “radio”, I mean music and speech, not necessarily broadcast via radio waves.  •  Since November of last year I have been occasionally putting together short (30-50 minute) radio shows comprised of music I want to share along with my nerdy voice telling …

I gave a short talk last fall at the Zap Your PRAM conference about how some of the ideas and technology that have made weblogs so successful can be applied elsewhere on the web. However, the talk was cut short due to a tight-schedule (the conference was run by amateurs - including myself). What …

A look at how Stuart Brand’s classic work of social and architectural criticism, How Buildings Learn, applies to web design and development.  •  First, if you are in any way interested in design, history, or architecture, which I assume you are by your presence here, read the book How Buildings …

Doug Bowman and Adaptive Path have done great work with the Blogger redesign. The entire system feels simpler, more mature, and generally better. It is a pleasure to watch someone with such talent apply their craft.  •  Much has been and will be written about the new design. I agree with much of …

Working in a place were the peer pressure to purchase new stuff is overwhelming, we have finally found a way to capitalize on our reluctant materialism. The silverorange stuff website is a collection of reviews of stuff that we at silverorange have owned and used.  •  As the “about silverorange …

As with many other curious webloggers today, I tried out Kinja, a new web-based RSS aggregator tool. It is intentionally simple, not offering the power of most other aggregators in favour of being more palatable to new users.  •  After trying it out, I was a bit surprised to see that my list of …

It has always bothered me that while the web has well defined standards for defining documents, much of what we do on the web isn't about documents at all. Rather, it is much more like traditional application development.  •  Ian Hixie, Mozilla hacker and Opera Software employee in Norway, is also …

I’ve long enjoyed the photos in the MSNBC feature, The Week in Pictures and The Week in Sports Pictures. However, during a recent redesign, the format and display of these features has gotten much worse.  •  Update: A reader has pointed out that though it is still Flash-based, the MSNBC Week in …