My starting point on the web has never been my friends; rather it’s been other people who I’ve found to be interesting. I read blogs by people I’ve never met—and, truthfully, I’ll probably never meet—and the majority of the people I follow on Twitter are not people I know offline. I choose to listen for what they think or say or do rather than who they are. So much of my knowledge comes from the help of these strangers.
It is one in the morning. Howls ring across the street like the wailing of a banshee. Few words are determinable amongst the yowls and yelps; the sound is incoherent, like the gibbering and whoops of chimpanzees. A shopping trolley skids along the street, accompanied by shrieks.
Sometimes, in my kinder moments, I imagine I was similarly afflicted by a kind of exuberant incoherence when I was a student. Then I remember that even as a student I felt somewhat embarrassed by association with some of my peers. Not to imply I would have been a perfect neighbour, just that I tried to be somewhat more considerate than some in the neighbourhood.
John Carmack’s demonstration of the Rage engine running on iOS and the recently released Epic Citadel technology demo seem to represent a sea-change in the view of large games houses to iOS as a gaming platform, moving it from a niche platform to one in which they are prepared to put significant engineering resource to out-shine what their contemporaries are able to do with the device.
It also shows just how far extremely talented programmers can push the graphics envelope on iPhone-class hardware far beyond what most people imagined was possible. If either company is willing to licence their engines to other developers with reasonable licensing terms, we could see an explosion of brilliant games for the iOS platform as developers no longer feel the need to write their own graphics engines from scratch and can instead spend their times writing the code and story lines to make their games unique.
I gave a presentation on the Zope Component Architecture (ZCA) at Europython 2010 last Tuesday. In my presentation, I wanted to explain the core concepts of the ZCA in a way I would have appreciated when I was trying to learn the platform a few months ago.
A few years ago, in the early 2000s, Zope 2 was a large, monolithic framework which had blazed a trail in the Python world. Being there so early, however, meant that they had to invent many wheels along the way. This lead to Zope being viewed as a world unto itself, which was a perhaps extreme but accurate description in many ways.
Really excellent article about the web as more than the technologies, but about how it brings people together—and the issues we face in bringing this potential to fruition—from a someone who describes themselves as “not that technical”.
There’s a lot of talk about digital inclusion, about taxes to fund broadband and about universal access to the web. But it all misses the point. It was never just about having access to other people’s information. It was always about everybody, everywhere having the ability to add their thoughts, the things they know, to the web. Treating digital inclusion as a question of connecting pipes to homes is an easy mistake to make because it follows established patterns of water and gas and electricity and television aerials. But the web was never designed to be a broadcast / distribution mechanism. Digital inclusion doesn’t just mean everyone needs to have a receiver on their roof; it means they need access to a transmitter too. Without the ability to transmit, to publish, people just become passive consumers of other people’s information. And digital inclusion has to include the ability to produce as well as consume.