Ed Cone: “Try weird stuff, see what works.“

I’m writing a piece for Ant’s Eye View that will explore this theme in greater detail, but I thought this study I found on the Web site of Common Cause was worth noting all by itself. I’ve written before on the deplorable state of our democracy, where incumbents are so entrenched that the results of […]

OK, so I’m looking through the log files for this site, checking out what files are most popular, where you all are coming from, etc., and I notice something that seems, well, odd. See, one of the bits of info my log files capture is what search terms people used when they come to my […]

I’ve written in this space about the Half-Life mod Day of Defeat before. DoD is a mod that turns Half-Life into a raging, multiplayer World War Two battle, and does it so successfully that Valve, the company behind Half-Life, has actually partnered with the DoD team to turn their labor of love into a retail […]

One of the issues I am very involved with is Web accessibility for the handicapped. That’s why I found this discussion so interesting. It’s about something I’ve wondered about for a long time — many sites now prevent people from writing programs to create fake user accounts by putting a graphic with some random text […]

Another new entry from the nifty gadgets front: a company called PoGo! Products has announced Radio YourWay, a tiny device they’re calling “TiVo for radio”. It allows you to time-shift radio programming in the same way PVRs do for television; just set it and it records whatever program you want to its internal memory as […]

Sweet! Old Man Murray is back. No new content yet but at least the old stuff has been reposted, so you can once again rock out to the driving beat of such classics as “America Under Attack“, the Crate Review System, and (of course) the infamous review of the train-wreck Jurassic Park game Trespasser. Welcome […]

Oh, man, this is too cool… Anyone who has worked with me knows how much I like to listen to music while I work. It helps me concentrate and block out external distractions, especially when I’m programming. Currently this means I use streaming Internet audio to feed my music jones. That’s great, except it means […]

Hey, my colleague Ginger Ammon has a blog! Welcome Ginger! 🙂

This is interesting — tech book publisher O’Reilly and Associates have adopted the limited, 28 year copyright term known as the Founders’ Copyright (since it’s the original copyright term granted by the Founding Fathers in the 1790s) for their publications. This means that many O’Reilly books will enter the public domain within our lifetime — […]