---

July 29, 2004

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

Preparing For Emergencies - What You Need To Know

“This booklet will tell you how you can help yourself and your family in emergencies, because we’re not going to do it ourselves. First chance we get, we’ll be off to an undisclosed location, hopefully leaving Gordon Brown behind.

If you need alternative language versions or formats, get someone to translate them or LEARN TO SPEAK ENGLISH. ARE YOU UNDERSTANDING THE WORDS THAT I AM SPEAKING?”

---
Posted 11:12 am by matthew — Comments (0)

---

July 28, 2004

“You’re a right wing nut job…”

This Land staring George Bush and John Kerry

(Comedy flash animation, link care of Darren)

---
Posted 2:31 pm by matthew — Comments (0)

---

July 26, 2004

no glossy photos this time

Software Engineering for Internet Applications would appear to be an update on the really good Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing that I try to get everyone even slightly interested in server-side web development to read. Now you have two books to read.

---
Posted 11:44 am by Wrighty — Comments (0)

---

July 25, 2004

“an obsessively researched expose” -NYT

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism

“It’s unfair, it’s slanted and it’s a hit job. And I haven’t even seen it yet.” -Eric Shawn, FOX News Reporter

(via MonkeyFilter)

---
Posted 1:24 pm by matthew — Comments (0)

---

July 23, 2004

“You’ll never live… like… common people…”

Dance, drink, and screw because William Shatner says there’s nothing else to do.

---
Posted 12:35 pm by matthew — Comments (0)

---

July 22, 2004

how to waste half an hour

This is going to be necessarily geeky but it needs to be made public. crontab is a nice little utility to automatically run tasks based on a simple scheduling syntax. Each user has their own personal crontab and can edit it to their heart’s content. The problem however is how it’s invoked:

crontab -e

That’s ‘e’ - for edit. There are a number of other arguments you can pass to crontab, such as -r, for remove, which completely wipes your crontab - whoosh - your list of task to be run on different days and different times just disappeared.

Now look at your keyboard, how far apart are the letters ‘e’ and ‘r’? Can you guess what I just did, on a server I’d not seen much before?

crontab -r - a great way to spend your afternoon trying to deduce how it was previously configured.

---
Posted 1:25 pm by Wrighty — Comments (0)

---

July 21, 2004

Whole Foods Market

“The company had a written “Declaration of Interdependence” (1,571 words, 249 more than the Declaration of Independence). It had a set of written core values ("satisfying and delighting our customers,” “team-member happiness and excellence"). And most striking of all, even for a small company, it had a set of quirky management rules that made Whole Foods an odd but effective workplace.

Each store had a book in the office that listed the pay of every employee for the previous year. The book was available to anyone – and was especially valuable if you were promoted or if you relocated, and wanted to see how your pay compared with your colleagues’. The pay book, surprisingly little used, set a tone of what Mackey called “no secrets management.”

Every store was divided into about eight functional teams: You were hired to the seafood team, or the prepared-foods team, or the cashier/front-end team. But you didn’t just get hired. You got hired provisionally. After four weeks of work, the team you had joined voted whether to keep you; you needed a two-thirds yes vote to join the staff permanently.”

Good tips to grow a company; publish all salaries, get employees to vote for new hirings, give small teams responsibility for choosing stock and limit senior salaries to a fixed multiple of frontline staff salaries (first x9 then x14). A very good read: The Anarchist’s Cookbook

---
Posted 2:03 pm by Wrighty — Comments (0)

---

July 19, 2004

Julie Burchill spouts some shit

Julie Burchill on the great divide

“White trash by any other name stinks; yet the rank odour comes not from the despised trailer trash themselves, but from the creeps who use such charming examples of social-racism as “pram-face”, “chip-shop” and “chav-scum” to describe fellow human beings.”

(Be sure to check out the amusing thread this link came from on Popbitch)

---
Posted 1:40 pm by matthew — Comments (0)

---

July 16, 2004

Hitchhiker’s Guide to Biomorphic Software

Hitchhiker’s Guide to Biomorphic Software:

“Consider the following facts. In nature, swarms of wasps work together without central control to build complex nest structures. Individual ants forage for food, and by laying down a chemical signal promote the emergence of an optimal path to the food source for other colony members to follow. As a survival mechanism, individual slime mold cells join together and act as a single, multicell organism to weather periods of famine. In each example, self-organizing groups of simple, cooperating individuals join together to perform complex operations in a distributed, parallel manner.

Furthermore, the behavior exhibited by the group is not directly encoded within the individual members, but emerges from the interactions of the members. Consider that the membership is not static but is an ever-changing group of individuals, as members are added and removed in an unpredictable manner. To make it even more interesting, there is no central controller explicitly orchestrating the action of the individual parts. And in the midst of all this seemingly chaotic interaction, still the organism forms, grows, lives, repairs itself, adapts, and survives. If only my computer environment were as successful. Perhaps it can be. “

Just the other day I was walking along The Oracle with a friend when we saw a flock of around a hundred sparrows flying about the shops as if they were a unified blob of matter, deforming over structures, elongating and then snapping back into shape.

My friend didn’t get shat on. That time.

---
Posted 2:05 pm by Wrighty — Comments (0)

Rock like it’s 1997

The Second Browser War - an good summary of the current state of browsers. It’s interesting to see competitors working together to produce open standards and the reason seems to be, with the exception of Opera, the participants are not looking to directly make money by selling their browsers - Netscape exists to give AOL bargaininga power with MS, Apple want a good native browser for OS X and even Opera license their browser to be used in PDAs rather than sell to consumers.

---
Posted 1:58 pm by Wrighty — Comments Off

---

July 15, 2004

Software That Lasts 200 Years

One to read at a later date: Software That Lasts 200 Years

---
Posted 1:54 pm by Wrighty — Comments (0)

---

July 14, 2004

Turning the tables on Nigeria’s e-mail conmen

Turning the tables on Nigeria’s e-mail conmen - or how to get a scammer to paint his breast, mail you $80 and convert religion…

---
Posted 2:05 pm by Wrighty — Comments (0)

---

July 11, 2004

Paul is a security risk

Leaving yourself logged into MT is a bad idea. As is dropping burger cheese on suede.

---
Posted 11:53 am by Wrighty — Comments (0)

---

July 8, 2004

Bloggers Suffer Burnout

I’m still not sure what happened to my email from Wired. They must have wanted to interview me for their piece entitled Bloggers Suffer Burnout. Maybe Matt got the email instead?

(And no, you can’t post comments. You can thank those adult-material marketers for that one.)

---
Posted 11:04 pm by Wrighty — Comments (0)

© 2001-2008 Matthew Sheppard & Paul Wright