tagged by: internet culture
An Open Letter to Pearson about SOPA/PIPA
When we leared that Pearson, our publisher, was a supporter of the controversial SOPA legislation, Jez Humble and I wrote an open letter of protest. A hundred other Pearson authors co-signed the letter after it was published.
5 January 2012
NetNastiness
The recent fracas over death threats to Kathy Sierra has been bouncing around the blogs I read. The fact that I'm writing this shows it's triggered some thoughts of my own.
4 April 2007
bliki
SoftwarePatent
I think almost everyone I know in the software development field has a deep hatred for patents and the way they've been used in our field. I've had a post on my todo list for ages about this and have finally been moved to write about it after a particularly good piece of investigative journalism by This American Life. The short form of my post is that while patents (even software patents) are a good idea in principle, in practice they have turned into an unmitigated disaster and would be better scrapped.
5 August 2011
bliki
CharityCodeJam
Over the last couple of years several of my colleagues have been organizing code jam events where developers get together to write software for charitable causes. A good example is a regular code-jam in New York that works on RapidFTR. Chris George, a ThoughtWorker based in New York, helped organize a one-off event in New York in August 2010. The group didn't get as much done on the day as they had hoped, but in a bar afterwards decided to try to get together more regularly. Since then they've been meeting every week. It's a small group, still mostly ThoughtWorkers and friends, with a core of 3-4 people rising to a dozen when we've had a big project in town.. (Chris is happy to have more people join the group, so if you are interested drop him an email.)
Many people have found these events to an enjoyable way to use our skills for purposes that we find rather more fulfilling than many day jobs, and a way both to learn new skills and learn from a different group of people. So I thought I should share our thoughts on how to set one up.
25 January 2012
bliki
SocialNetworks
I wasn't cool enough to be in the first wave of invitations, but I have now got onto Google+, the Maybe Next Big Thing in social networks. It seems somewhat appropriate to mark this Momentous Event by writing a little bit about how I've used social networks so far, and some uninformed speculation about the impact of Google+
11 July 2011
bliki
WikipediaDeath
A recent blogosphere controversy was caused by Nicholas Carr's entry claiming the "death of wikipedia" (yes I know my response is slow, but I didn't have the time to write while on the road). His initial post struck me as rather odd, saying that wikipedia was dying because 0.01% of articles had a rather mild protection. It's like saying democracy is over when a town hires a policeman.
19 June 2006
bliki
