I've been following this pull request thread involving the removal of gendered pronouns in an open source project with interest. It's an obvious change to make a project more inclusive, yet it was met with:
Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that.
A patch was finally included, but then reverted by ...
November 30, 2013
Back in the old days, you'd get a newspaper delivered, and you'd perhaps read it around the breakfast table or at your desk to find out what was going on in the world. The same paper, day in, day out. You'd read the columns, know which comics they ran, maybe ...
November 29, 2013
This year, my mother's life was saved by a double lung transplant. I still have flashbacks to the day she was called, and to the moment when she was pushed through the double doors, wide-eyed, and I didn't know if I was ever going to see her again. Almost nine ...
November 28, 2013
Back in 2009, I wrote:
Right now, we have to register with each application we want to use. What if we required each application we used to register with us, in digital identities under our own control?
What if, using these identities, anyone could connect to anyone else, and anyone could store ...
November 28, 2013
When a TV show has been there your entire life, not just entertaining you but informing the way you think, it becomes something different.
At its heart, Doctor Who is a show about an eccentric who saves the world, over and over again, using the power of his wit and empathy. ...
November 23, 2013
If you're following me on sites like Twitter or Facebook, you may start seeing references at the end of my posts. They look something like:
(werd.io s/3Nb4L)
Or they'll just be a link to the post, with the URI scheme (the "http://" bit) removed.
I'm adding those to make it clearer that I'm ...
November 8, 2013
The barges deployed around the world simultaneously. Everyone lined up and Google started scanning us in, thousands at a time.— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013
They said it was just a demo space but when our clones started turning up in Streetview and Earth, everyone knew different.— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) ...
November 6, 2013
Split your early-stage startup into three teams:
Strategy
Development
Administration
The strategy team sets out the vision and owns the product. The idea is theirs. Then, they hand off to the development team, which is functionally subservient, and is simply responsible for building out the strategy team's vision. It's possible they're outsourced to a ...
November 6, 2013
Quinn Norton posted an insightful first part of her series on women on the Internet today. For me, the money quote is this:
Men have to open their mouths and talk about constructing an idea of manhood that makes sense in the 21st century. The whole world needs a manhood that ...
November 5, 2013
I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month again, mostly because last year was so much fun.
Last year I wrote a simple database-backed CMS to help me write. My brain was so addled by blogging for a decade that I found I could only be creative in a big text box ...
November 4, 2013
Edward Snowden released this letter to the world in PDF format. The following is a searchable text version of same. Any errors or inconsistencies are unintentional and my own. I am unconnected to Edward Snowden and he has not authorized this reshare or transcription.
To whom it may concern,
I have been ...
November 1, 2013