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I’ve just read an interesting article in the New Yorker titled “Twilight of the Books” [1].
It started with some depressing statistics about literacy. One comment that I couldn’t figure out concerned “the panic that takes hold of humanists when the decline of reading is discussed“. The decline in literacy concerns me because I [...]

In a comment on my post about Bad Project Management [1] Don Marti [2] says “the more money you charge, the less of your time people waste, and the more seriously they take you” and “you can affect the client more, whether you’re peddling idiocy or wisdom“.
That’s a nice theory, however I don’t recall seeing [...]

The current method of carrying young children (less than 4-6 years old) in cars is to have a special car seat fitted in the back seat. This has several significant problems:

It takes significant space in the back seat. The child seat is going to add at least 10cm to the length required in [...]

In a comment on my post about apprentices [1] Don Marti pointed me to a blog post of his from 6 months ago where he mentioned a need for an apprentice [2]. I had read the post in question before but didn’t think about it when writing my previous post.
When I was about 17 [...]

I have just read a rant by Sean Middleditch about bad project management [1]. He describes his post as “personal, rather angsty, and especially whiny” but I think it’s useful and informative. He makes some interesting technical points about PHP programming (I wasn’t aware that there were so many ways of easily getting [...]

A recent news article has Doris Lessing (a Nobel prize winner for literature) claiming that the net has “created a world where people know nothing” [1].
However the Internet is a great tool for learning for people who choose to use it in that way, for example I have learned many interesting things from reading Wikipedia [...]

Christmas is billed as a family occasion and a huge amount of advertising money is spent convincing people that they need to have big expensive family events. This is good for the advertisers but not good for people who have no family to meet up with (orphans, people who live in different countries to [...]

David writes about the concept of having a central resource for arranging meetings of Debian Developers [1] (or other targetted special interest groups).
It seems that the best way to implement this is via a Wiki. The main page would have links to one page per country, and then the residents of that country could [...]

When I worked for Red Hat I joined AISA [1] (the Australian Information Security Association - formerly known as ISIG). Red Hat marketting paid for my membership so it was a good deal, I went to meetings (which often had free drinks), said good things about Red Hat security, and it cost me nothing.
I [...]

A common feature in blog software is a Blogroll, this is a list of links to blogs which are associated in some way with the blog in question - most commonly it’s a list of blogs run by friends of the blogger in question.
Now in the case of friends with very similar interests (IE same [...]