I had a little play with Rust this week. I’d been meaning to for a long time, but the arrival of 1.0 motivated me to spend a few hours playing around with the tools and the tutorial. I haven’t actually written anything myself yet – I’m sure I’ll have some different, perhaps more valid thoughts …
Category Archives: Default
Boredom
Dan McKinley wrote a great blog post about choosing boring technology. It’s worth reading, but the tl;dr is that by adopting new and exciting technology you introduce additional risk and instability, which limits your ability to innovate on your product. I agree with pretty much everything he said. There’s another dimension to the boredom question …
The Problem With Democracy
The problem with democracy is that the people of a country lose the right to consider themselves independent of government policies. If a government does or says awful things then the people of the democracy have to bear responsibility. Citizens of totalitarian regimes can’t really be held responsible for what their governments do. I don’t …
The Kevin Bacon of Music
Who is the most connected musician? Mathematics had Paul Erd?s, film has Kevin Bacon, but who is the center of the musical world. At some point I flippantly suggested Brian Eno because of this long career as a producer. Rich Trott brought this up again recently when linking to his awesome Music Routes site. Rich has …
Streaming royalties: taking over, but what are the details
So TechCrunch posted that Kobalt, a company who collects digital music publishing revenue for artists has announced that Spotify revenue has overtaken iTunes revenue by 13% in Europe. That’s interesting, not surprising given the trends but is missing answers to a few key questions: What are the overall revenues – does this represent an overall …
Continue reading “Streaming royalties: taking over, but what are the details”
Bitcoin isn’t a currency
As more and more sites are accepting bitcoin payments I’m struck by the fact that they don’t list BTC prices, but list USD prices and allow you to resolve your USD denominated transaction with the bitcoin payment system. This makes bitcoin as much of a “currency” as MasterCard, PayPal or a personal check.
Horse Meat
I like horse meat. It’s delicious and healthy. And not so different from beef. I’m really enjoying watching the unfolding European horse meat scandal. Even countries like France where horse is regularly eaten are outraged that they’ve been lied to. The scandal has exposed the complicated supply chain in the European cheap meat trade. It’s …
2012, The Year of the Linux Personal Computer
2012 Q3 PC sales: 87.5M 2012 Q3 Android sales: 122.5M For sure, many would-be PC buyers were waiting for Windows 8 and refreshed models that were waiting for Windows 8 to be released, but that still means that last quarter 1.4 times as many Linux computers were sold than Windows computers. You might try to …
Continue reading “2012, The Year of the Linux Personal Computer”
Cloudy with a chance of downtime
AWS went down again last Friday. I wouldn’t normally care, I only run non-critical toy projects out of their infrastructure, but I know that it disrupted a friend’s wedding and that’s just not cool. Amazon’s public statement about the event is fairly detailed and fairly believable. In one of their northern Virginia datacenters “each generator …
Seven Inches
This year at Google I/O I got a Nexus 7, the new tablet from Google and Asus. First of all Android 4.1 Jelly Bean is great – it has a ton of incremental improvements over the already excellent ICS, plus Google Now, which promises to be a really useful daily tool. Last year I got …