psd's Comments Feed

Free advice: buy a dongle

Paul Downeu — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:28:57 +0000

£10/month is typical for Mobile Broadband in the UK. Been using it for a couple of years now, my only problem being tunnels on my commute. What is this Wi-Fi of which you speak?

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Live-Blogging vs. Live-Tweeting at Conferences

Paul Downey — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 17:57:10 +0000

I think in a nutshell you’ve describe why I read your blog but don’t follow people who behave like you on Twitter, so see things very differently. I do, however, follow a lot of other people most of them tweet carefully, don’t see it as IRC and have a thought for their followers and in some small way to the permanent record. That’s not to judge you, but to raise awareness that your Twitter is not my Twitter.

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No comment Is this Le Web or Le Clique?

Paul Downey — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:55:59 +0000

I can only sympathise. I went to LeWeb a couple of years ago and came away frustrated. I felt like I’d been to watch a TV show being recored about a subject I cared passionately about where many given a pulpit on stage knew not so much less than the audience, but less than most anyone in the audience. I was amazed at the time given to talking about a chair or attention given to some silly flickr mashup when Doc Searls and David Isenberg were both given the hook. Maybe if the conference didn’t use the word “Web” I could relax more. As it was I came away feel bad about myself and how my frustrated railing against the inner-circle could only have been taken as little more than petty jealousy.

But then I met some great people in the corridors, partook the posh grub, had some great conversations which together reassured me I wasn’t going mad and made up for the disappointment of the show. I didn’t feel too guilty for ignoring the parade of vacuous panels.

So enjoy the great people who attend Le Web, I’m jealous of you being there for that! Concentrate on what you do best, continue to write, make things, get excited and ignore the self-seekers’ agenda. And maybe next year go to d.construct or reboot, better european events. It’s only a passing phase, this current hand waving elite, one which the real Web will no doubt render obsolete.

Chin up!

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Postcodes: Adam Crozier letter

Paul Downey — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 07:00:26 +0000

I’m a big supporter of a publicly owned Post Office, but this monopolistic behavior is simply ludicrous in a digital age. Dear Post Office: publish the Post Codes free to all before you drive us to collectively create a new system, open from the start.

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Paul Downey

Paul Downey — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Yeah, I kind of surprised myself on that one, considering I hail from Saltburn, from where you can see The Transporter on a clear day.

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Follow in the footsteps of geeks

Paul Downey — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:36:53 +0000

Cool post Bill — I wondered if you’d seen my own geek map of Britain (from a very London centric POV) which was in part inspired by the Geek Atlas:

http://blog.whatfettle.com/2009/07/08/gitscob/

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Should your website have a flash intro?

Paul Downey — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:18:38 +0000

Genius!
s/a Flash intro/Flash/g

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Handy tips to help you out

Paul Downey — Fri, 01 May 2009 12:53:28 +0000

Try this for the Google Maps hack (also works as a bookmarklet):

javascript:void(alert(gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));

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FOWD Art Attacks

Paul Downey — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks Alex, I just think it's fun - FWIW, I like the other entries, too!

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FOWD Art Attacks

Paul Downey — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Actually, something I forgot to mention, I found the product pitches from Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight particularly annoying, more so given neither are Web technologies, rather proprietary attempts to "own" the Web. Luckily the audience were savvy enough to think the same, judging from Twitter, etc.

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Twitter Compared to IM, Email and Forums

Paul Downey — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 09:56:00 +0000

Hey Ross! About a year ago I wrote an observation that people using Twitter fell into one of two camps: Twits answer the question "what are you doing", typically knew and thought about their followers before posting, whereas Twerps just see it as highly distributed chat, follow lots of people and want lots of followers, the more the better.

http://blog.whatfettle.com/2008/01/05/are-you-a-twitter-twit-or-a-twerp/

Of course these are just behaviors, and we all tend to be a bit of both on Twitter, but it saddens me that one year on, behaving like a Twerp dominates, as indicated by the above replies. I suspect that this behavior isn't sustainable and may eventually be Twitter's undoing.

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Paul Downey

Paul Downey — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Um, as the post says, the image was created by Krazy Dad aka Jim Bumgardner: http://www.krazydad.com/about.php

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A simple desultory philippic about copyright

Paul Downey — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:15:53 +0000

I really like this post, and the resulting conversation. I too am not a fan of DRM, and although I love CC, I’m definitely not a fan of restrictions such as “non-derivatives” and “non-commercial” whatever they may really mean these days.

One nitty technical issue: Joi talks about XHTML as if that was still relevant, and you rightly talk about HTML5. Unfortunately the prospects for being able to meaningfully encode semantics, especially namespaced concepts such as RDFa in HTML5 are still not looking great, and I can’t see how it can be “brought under control” given it possibly has greater momentum than the W3C itself. Adding controls over HTML5 will likely cause a divisive fork. I liked this interview some scary metaphors and sound-bytes, but pretty accurate on the HTML landscape: http://www.webscienceman.com/2009/01/24/html-xhtml-html5-future-html/

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Devils advocate on the “VCs will die meme”

psd — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 02:51:01 +0000

You only have to watch the BBC Dragons' Den (not the awful, US, mutation) to see the value many apparently successful startups place in VC, it's not just the cash injection which makes them willing to give up sizable portion of their equity, but the injection of contacts and expertise and "skin in the game" likely to take then to the next level.

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WTFramework?

Paul Downey — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Scriptaculous is treated as a special case, I wasn’t keen on rewriting the bookmarklet, so made it detect TiddlyWiki *and* JQuery explicitly:

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WTFramework?

Paul Downey — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I considered that - detecting TiddlyWiki after jQuery means its results usurp jQuery’s, but I’ve moved the TiddlyWiki section to the end to make that explicit.

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WTFramework?

Paul Downey — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I considered that, but figured the TiddlyWiki version string might indicate the JQuery version?

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WTFramework bookmarklet

Paul Downey — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:02:28 +0000

Lovely idea, well executed! I hacked it to add TiddlyWiki (should appear after jQuery) : http://blog.whatfettle.com/2008/11/19/wtframework/

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On The Vanity of Demanding Attribution

Paul Downey — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks Cristiano, great feedback, and sorry for my initially misspelling your name.

I think we’re definitely on the same page in terms of how we would like to be treated, though maybe differ in how we’d make that happen.

I do see the value of CC as changing the norms of expected behavior around building on other people’s work, for which the Non-Commercial-Notification is an interesting idea. Only I’m up for being much more relaxed in how these licenses are enforced, which again, I guess is your reason for questioning the strength of the word DEMANDING, and my hope that one day, everyone will get it and stop bothering me for permission.

I also love the BBC, so feel bad for calling them uncool, but do feel they could be a little less mean with their links, after all, it’s links which make up the Web.

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What I Believe Roy Said

Paul Downey — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Hmm.. guess I need to re-read the spec with these constraints in mind ..

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Task Specific Browsers

Paul Downey — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Yannis, yeah Chrome “incognito” might be good when lending your browser to someone else or surfing for pr0n, but isn’t quite a “subject specific browser” ..

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Task Specific Browsers

Paul Downey — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I suspect this could be simply done using something to wrap the Firefox profile manager, and to allow multiple versions of Firefox to run at one time.

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Paul Downey

Paul Downey — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Hi Kyle. Suggest you contact the museum (links above). I’m just a guy who visited it, four years ago.

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Learning about why people don’t adopt opensource

Paul Downey — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:38:51 +0000

JP: I think you just made my point only more clearly. A culture of “gratis” leads to loss of understanding of the value of “free”.

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Learning about why people don’t adopt opensource

Paul Downey — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:09:13 +0000

I enjoyed the first part of this post immensely.

The second part didn’t initially chime with me as I can’t get excited about MS Office (v) Open Office. I use neither, tending to use the Web, Wikis, or edit HTML in text editors. On reflection it is an excellent example of the true costs of imposing one size fits all for what should be very personal tools. I particularly resent the way a company, or in this case a public entity pays a supplier for software many people never use, making it appear cheaper per-seat for them, and leading to an assumption that everyone uses it. Gratis is often the strongest form of lockin.

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