In November, 2009 I wrote…

Pictures Of Pollution In China

Monday, 30 November 2009

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Lego Matrix

Friday, 27 November 2009

LegoMatrix is a frame accurate Lego re-enactment of The Matrix Bullet Time dodge scene. 440 hours of work! Wow. It’s embedded below from YouTube.

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Ommwriter Writing Zen

Thursday, 26 November 2009

Ommwriter is a new full screen editor for the Mac. What makes this one different is that it includes ambient sounds (think new age relaxation and aromatherapy), very subtle keyboard sounds and interesting backgrounds. In my brief test, this post was written in ommwriter, it works well but I did find the ambient music to be too loud relative to the keyboard fx. It would be nice to have a control on the relative levels. But this is about minimalism (the fewer controls the better) and it’s only a beta release. It’s a very interesting project and it…

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China Flight Delays

Wednesday, 25 November 2009

If you do any flying inside of China you get used to flight delays. So you sit on uncomfortable chairs in drafty waiting halls hoping your laptop battery will last and await the coming announcement with news of your flight. With a classic piece of circular logic the announcement usually goes something like: “The flight is delayed due to an aircraft delay.” In general the question is not if the flight is delayed, it is by how much. There’s a startup called FlightCaster which, in the US at least, claims to accurately predict flight delays early. I’m planning…

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History Of The Internet By The Guardian

Tuesday, 24 November 2009

The Guardian have put together a decent Flash app illustrating the history of the internet as part of their internet is 40 series.

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Scroll Clock

Monday, 23 November 2009

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Live Deep Fried Fish

Friday, 20 November 2009

A video appeared on YouTube recently (embedded below) of diners in a restaurant discussing the dish in front of them. The diners are speaking Cantonese so I assume they are in Guangdong or somewhere down south. I don’t speak Cantonese but I can imagine what they’re saying. Now, there’s nothing unusual about diners discussing what they’re eating except that in this case what they’re eating is alive. Or at least appears to be alive. There has been the predictable wave of outrage on the net about this video. I am not going to judge. I…

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Creating Users: an illustration of the differences between PostgreSQL and MySQL

Thursday, 19 November 2009

Like many starting out in websites and databases my first experience was with MySQL. I had no choice since the hosting service I used only offered MySQL. This is still the case for a lot of hosting - you get the standard LAMP stack and nothing more. I had read on the web that everyone is using MySQL, so how bad could it be? I was forgetting the maxim that quality and popularity are inversely proportional. BTW: it’s not really popularity in this case - it’s the most users - think Windoze.

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Autumn Comes To Shanghai

Wednesday, 18 November 2009

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History Of The Internet

Tuesday, 17 November 2009

Fascinating History of the Internet post over at Six Revisions. In which we discover I am older than the Internet. Groan…

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