Acts of Volition

During my recent spell as a Mac-user, a friend pointed me to an interesting talk by Apple’s VP of Software Technology and all-around Unix-guy, Bud Tribble. The talk was great, both in terms of content (the speaker was interesting) and delivery (the streaming media was smooth and of sufficient …

Based on Dean Allen’s Refer code, the new Recently Referred Visitors feature lists the last 50 visitors to Acts of Volition who have been recently referred to our site. The user’s domain/IP, the referring site/page/URL, and the destination page/URL are all displayed.  •  Warning, it can be …

Now that Acts of Volition is running off a new code-base, I’ll be making occasional tweaks and (hopefully) improvements.  •  First off, a minor design update. Comments are welcome. More changes in the weeks to come.  •  Two other fine sites are also now running on our spiffy new code-base (run by …

The internet lets school children in Mongolia work on science projects with kids from Florida, right? That’s cool and all, but it also let’s you find out what’s playing at the cinema a few blocks away.  •  The web can be local. In fact, I’m having tea with some virtual/actual neighbours this week …

Being almost as North-by-North-East as you can get on this continent, I didn't get to the South by South West conference. However, the host of the SXSW Web Awards ceremony, John Styn (this link leads to a man in pink briefs), put together a series of videos in the style of Apple's Switch campaign …

When you spend much of every day in front of a computer (which you probably do if you are reading this), you come to know the intricacies and quirks of your software much as a musician comes to know the feel of their favourite instrument. Sometimes the smallest bugs can become the biggest …

A link found from Matt Haughey's a.wholelottanothing.org lead me to a talk by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive. His organization is working a variety of projects to make public domain content available in an "internet library". Among these projects is the WayBack Machine, which archives the …

Some very smart people think that the next big leap in web technology will be on the foundation of the Semantic Web. However, some other very smart people are raising concerns that this semantic utopia may be unattainable.  •  Matthew Thomas is an interface designer from New Zealand. Yesterday on …

Today, Apple introduced a new browser, called Safari. Also today, every web designer and developer in the world let out a big sigh and said a big collective: Crap!  •  As you can see from my last post, the differences between browser rendering engines give us indigestion. That said, my first …