I’m delighted to see Mark Thomas new book “The People’s Manifesto” is now available from the publisher as a traditional paperback and an ebook. It’s as razor sharp as any of his previous books & TV shows, and stunningly diverse because each policy was suggested and voted on by the general public in shows all [...]

Having tried several solutions for publishing delicious bookmarks on WordPress I came to the conclusion that nothing did what I wanted. What I wanted was each link on the front page, interspersed with any articles I write, so that the time-line of links and articles becomes apparent and the main page is a more dynamic [...]

In an attempt to rescue a couple of files I fired up the “old” PC today. It’s about 3 years old now, so not what you’d call obsolete by any stretch of the imagination, and when it was new no OS would recognize the Gigabyte SATA RAID drivers. I tried Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Suse, Redhat, [...]

I’m using Postalicious to pull my links from Delicious.com and republish them here, however, several times lately it’s published server errors such as those below. I’ve dropped the author a line so maybe we’ll get to the bottom of it “real soon now”. These are my links for August 22nd through August 24th: 500 Internal [...]

There’s been a lot of talk about bankers bonuses and whether they’re right or wrong. There appear to be 2 main problems. 1. They’re too large 2. They’re paid regardless of overall bank performance. Here’s an alternative: use a bonus-malus system that is regulated and applies across the European banking sector. If a banker / [...]

Did TFL just get cheesed or is it a genius viral move?

I got three messages in a row from an (almost) anonymous reader today. The first message was startling. The second corrected the first, and the third asked that none of the messages be published. I was pondering the first two, and thus had held back from publishing them, when the third message arrived. Since I [...]

BBC News has a front page story about a petition to the government to phase out the use of IE6. Historically, ceasing to use IE has always been a good idea in my book, and IE6 is now very outdated (it’ll be nine years old in August). What caught my eye, however, was the following [...]

Wow, my iPad article from 5 years back is having a bit of a friendship day, and as a result the server is having its busiest day ever.

A simple hint for email administrators everywhere. If you have a large number of users with unique sequential ID numbers, it may be tempting to use that ID as a primary email address, or an alias, but don’t do it. It’s an open invitation to spammers to target your users with the minimum of effort. [...]

I just watched a nice presentation by Yahoo evangelist Christian Heilmann who opened the show at FF09 yesterday. Whilst there’s a lot of good ideas throughout regarding the maintainability of JavaScript code, one nugget stood out about code tutorials. Christian Suggests a four pronged presentation strategy when writing tutorials for designers – it is equally [...]

“A conference on ECMA-262” doesn’t sound particularly exciting, so I can understand the organisers of Full Frontal 2009 wanting to pick a name that was perhaps more attention grabbing. I’m heading along there tomorrow, and depending on the format (& facilities at my disposal) I’ll hopefully be able to blog and tweet throughout.

I wondered how hard it would be to get this site fully compliant with the as-yet unpublished HTML5 spec. Please excuse the dust. Most things are in and working. Still to tweak are nested comments and a few CSS niceties.

The idea of twitoaster is that it allows twitter users to reply to posts using tweets, so the discussion can live in many places. Nice. Fellow twitter users, I’d be most grateful if you could try this out to let me see if does what it says on the tin. Tweet comments are moderated, so [...]

Right now, there’s limited information on reputable news sites regarding the earthquake/tsunami that occurred south of Samoa yesterday. To find more, I turned to Twitter (and its open source equivalent identi.ca). Disseminating live news from witnesses, moments after a major event, is the most compelling feature of such services, but both failed me. Not in [...]

OpenID server software needs to be able to detect when it is being used to proxy an attack on another server.

After a year with the iPhone 3G, I upgraded to the 3GS. The upgrade cost me money and as a result, the original iPhone now belongs to me. Consequently I now “own” 2 iPhones – the original one which is mine outright and the 3GS which is in contract for another 12 months, when it [...]

I was tickled to read in Teaching by Lecture of what N. Whitman calls the four levels of competency. The levels advance thus (my paraphrasing in parenthesis): Unconscious incompetence (you don’t know you can’t do it) Conscious incompetence (you know you can’t do it) Conscious competence (you know how to do it) Unconscious competence (you [...]

Last year’s WordCamp UK was a huge success. Around sixty people turned up to the Birmingham gig with backgrounds as diverse as one might hope for and expect, given that WordPress is used by all kinds of people for all sorts of things: bloggers, developers, hackers, journalists, authors, academics, idealists and dreamers were all there, [...]

It was time for a re-jig. Normal content will return shortly. has returned, albeit with a slightly modified look. Shout if you’re missing anything, anyone. There’s still bits and bobs to do, specifically: switch wp-super-cache back on (it’s tending to give me white-screen-of-death) [DONE] integrate the bb-press and wordpress logins clean up the theme crossover [...]