The almost annual blog migration

Posted on December 29, 2010 by darren

Finding myself once again spending the christmas-new year limbo period mucking about with a year’s worth of backlogged blog administration and semi-traditional experimentation with alternative hosting. I wouldn’t mind except it’s almost impossible to avoid reading stuff I wrote 8 years ago and cringeing. I think I knew more then than I did now. Or perhaps was just more enthusastic about broadcasting it.

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Hello world!

Posted on November 8, 2010 by darren

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

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Dear Apple

Posted on March 15, 2010 by darren

Dear Apple,

Although I love your products, as long as you continue to pursue your lawsuit against HTC, I shall no longer be buying any of them for the forseeable future.

Best regards,

Darren

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Javascript: 2010

Posted on December 23, 2009 by darren
  • nodejs.org/ – Evented I/O for V8 javascript
  • www.jaxer.org/ – Ajax server
  • narwhaljs.org/ – Cross-platform, multi-interpreter, general purpose JavaScript platform
  • commonjs.org/ – A group with a goal of building up the JavaScript ecosystem for web servers, desktop and command line apps and in the browser

The year we make contact with javascript as a platform in its own right?

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Attention deficit

Posted on December 23, 2009 by darren

Twitter has totally clobbered my ability to express any thought that requires more than 140 characters. Must get back into the blogging habi

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Road safety and an apology

Posted on May 27, 2009 by darren

To the person I overtook and had to squeeze in front of as the overtaking lane merged into the left hand lane going up that hill who was themselves held up by the queue of traffic that I was overtaking, sorry. I flashed my hazard lights at you in apology once I was safely in front of you. Hopefully you interpreted that gesture correctly. Now, does my lack of judgement make it okay for you to accelerate into my path and actively try to block my return to the line of traffic? In what way did your actions contribute to the safe and swift progress of all concerned? Would you have preferred it if I’d not seen you (and then hit my horn long and hard I admit) and just ploughed into your right hand side? My car would have been a mess, but yours would have gone into the ditch at 60 miles an hour.

I’ve just spent a week motorcycling in France and I’m left with this impression: French driving in general is significantly better than British driving. Many French people ride scooters as teenagers and it shows in their friendly and considerate attitude towards their two-wheeled friends and road safety in general. We British drivers sometimes act like we own the road and all other road users are an inconvenient obstacle. We also appear to believe ourselves invulnerable and infallible. Personally I think learning to ride a moped or motorcycle before learning to drive a car should be compulsory.

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Dammit, WordPress

Posted on February 22, 2009 by darren

Few things enrage me more than wrestling with blog software. All I want to do is fix the archive links so that outside references to popular posts imported from movable type still work. Messing about with mod-rewrite, random plugins and generally wasting my morning are not part of that agenda. All it needs is one extra field that I can manually type my own permalink into that would map to a specific post. I don’t NEED an algorithmic solution here, that’s the beauty of URLs. They’re just text! If only this blasted software would get out of the way and do the simplest thing that could possibly work.

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