Weblog by month (April 2009)
Helping your users
I should like to draw your attention to this great post from Dmitry Fadeyev on usability:
I love this sort of thing, and it’s all about how error messages aren’t enough without guidance. Information isn’t power, information + guidance is.
Tips for IT professionals
A couple of things for IT departments everywhere:
- If your process gets in the way of delivering value to the business, you’re doing it wrong.
- Please, don’t become the tail that wags the dog.
I thank you.
On Piratebay
There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that…
Wrong.
So, who are they going after next? Google? Many of the same principles at stake.
BBC news: Court jails Pirate Bay founders.
An intellectual giant is no more
BBC news: Writer Clement Freud dies aged 84.
“Writer” doesn’t tell the half of it. Whilst Great Britain seems obsessed with the passing of people like Jade Goody, it does the soul good to take stock and ponder the passing of a true great.
Rest in peace Sir Clement.
20th April update: wonderful audio of a fine joke, well-told:
The police are terrifying
I’ve already posted about unconscionable scare-mongering by the Metropolitan Police. Now, following the Ian Tomlinson tragedy, more apparent police brutality is being unearthed:
BBC news: Police to probe ‘woman assault’. This is seriously nasty, seriously uncomfortable stuff. Combine this with the abuse of anti-terror laws, horrendous levels of closed-circuit snooping, and pre-emptive arrests to prevent peaceful dissent… Who would have thought the police state would come so soon?
iPhone programming
You may well have seen the hub-bub around Stanford University making their iPhone programming course available for free via iTunes U. Very cool. I have subscribed to the course, and was delighted to see that the first slide in the presented material is a rick-roll. Excellent!
Stanford University: iPhone Application Programming (iTunes link).
Google? Twitter? Eh?
Yet another post on Planetlotus (and elsewhere) banging on about Google buying twitter. For goodness sake, read up! The “story” came from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch infamy (and they have already changed their headline). Some friendly advice from someone who’s been caught out by this sort of thing before: take such tales with a large pinch of salt. I respectfully suggest desisting from spreading such random conjecture as fact.
(Of more interest—and true to boot—is the fact that twitter are using Amazon’s S3 service to host tweet-stream graphics. Is the Cloud helping The Whale?)
Cretinous Metropolitan Police posters, remixed
A little late with this one, but what the hell. The Metropolitan Police here in Blighty (i.e. the force responsible for Greater London) recently introduced yet another mindless poster campaign encouraging snooping, the diminution of civil and personal freedoms, and general Orwellian nonsense. Quite rightly, they have been lampooned for this poster campaign, and a number of people have produced “remixes” of said nonsense:
boingboing: Remixes of the paranoid London police “anti-terror” / suspect your neighbours posters
Regular visitors to this site will have noticed the WWII-era “Keep calm” graphic to the right. It’s there for a reason—given the hysterical scare-mongering and erosion of liberties taking place in our Big Brother state, perhaps you will understand why. The terrorists are winning.
Snatch vs. Star Wars
I know I tweeted this, but really it is just too good not to share further—Snatch vs. Star Wars:
(Contains robust language, in case you’re not familiar with the work of Guy Ritchie).
