Yes, that Mae West wrote a novel. And it is a corker. Unabashedly sexy, druggy, provocative, and daringly modern. You can read the whole thing in West's voice: “It’s all right, Charlie,” she said. “I won’t hurt him. I only want to feel his muscles.” Every line just sizzles off the page. As with any 90 year old book, you might have to translate some of the slang: “the true story dope I’m commen…
Continue reading →
At a recent OpenUK meetup, one of the participants declared that Open Source had comprehensively won. While businesses might not always release their proprietary source code, 100% of everything they wrote used an open source programming language. I wondered how true that was. You can, perhaps, moan about the shenanigans around Java's licencing and you mutter about whether it is easy to get…
Continue reading →
Three years ago, I wrote about how you could add SIP calls to Android for free. Android had a well-integrated system which made VoIP calling a first-class citizen on its handsets. Sadly, Google killed native SIP calling in Android 12. FFS! It's relatively easy to get it set up again, although you'll need to install a separate app. Sign up for a free Sipgate account. That will get you a UK…
Continue reading →
Back in November 2020 I started studying for an MSc. And, yesterday, I got this... All done! I've got to say, it has been... an experience. I've relentlessly blogged about the process. The academic content was pretty good, but the administration by QA.com was nothing short of atrocious. Missed deadlines, unhelpful staff, incompetent tutors, and admin staff who clearly didn't care about the…
Continue reading →
I've been thinking a lot about footnotes in Markdown. I've contributed a patch to make them slightly better in WordPress. Now I'm wondering how to make them more useful by enhancing their pop-up title text. To that end, I'm writing a patch for PHP Markdown which will display the first ~200 characters of a footnote in the pop-up title text. Hover over the superscript number and you'll get a…
Continue reading →
I recently read a wonderful paper by Mar Hicks called "Hacking the Cis-tem" which is about database design in the 1960s and the nascent digital state's approach to transgender individuals. It's a short and readable paper with some jaw-dropping anecdotes. Like the man who immediately got a pay rise after his transition, despite working in exactly the same job as before; women were on a lower pay…
Continue reading →
Much like Tom Phillips' last book this is a fun and well-written look at a peculiar facet of humanity. How conspiracy theories work, and why so many people are attracted to them. The book is very now - and I do wonder how it will date. But there's something invigorating about reading a book which tracks the route of a two-hundred year old hoax to the present day. It accurately describes just…
Continue reading →
This is an anthology of modern Chinese science fiction, loosely grouped into three main themes. I'm sad to say that some of the stories are a lot of hard work. One is barely sci-fi - more like a spiritual paean to the souls of people caught in a disaster which, bizarrely, has a throwaway line about aliens in it. One is an interminable description of domesticity which, if I've understood…
Continue reading →
This is a difficult and disturbing book. It is a great read for any hacker - it's all about the way technology abuses people and how it radicalises people into fighting back. The dialogue is Socratic and the stories are a set of parables. The first asks us to consider what are the limits of protecting people? When we try to restrict technology "for your own good" it often has a degrading and…
Continue reading →
A superb book! It traces the origins of 26 facets of modern life so that you can understand the code which underpins them. There's only a smattering of actual code you need to read - most of it is constrained to gorgeous hand-drawn illustrations. Although I got a bit of a shock in the 2nd essay when I was confronted by ξ3 < exp(ΔE/τ)! Thankfully the rest of the chapter does a good job of ex…
Continue reading →
Wow! What a stunning book. It's a series of short stories - all taking place in a world where gene-editing isn't just legal; it's a sacrament. Each chapter jumps us further into the future. What starts off as an uncertain way to improve the human species gradually becomes more beautiful and more terrifying. Do you lose your virginity if you do it with a reconstructed girl? What life is there…
Continue reading →
This is a short but interesting look at the way Shakespeare's comedy was understood by his contemporaries - and how his legacy still influences modern comedians. There's a good deal of discussion about the role comedy played in society, and the interplay between actors and playwright would have worked. But, sadly, it never quite makes the leap to demonstrate the way that it changed the world. At …
Continue reading →
