Alan

The Japanese Ministry of Defense has come up with an amazingly cool looking flying machine. Story available on diginfo.tv. It’s basically a hovering, flying sphere. Wild. Courtesy of YouTube

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Feb
20

Wiggly things and strong things.

Categories:

General

by Alan

The girls and I worked through a Guided Participatory Lesson for Children around building strong shapes. We built tetrahedrons, wiggly cubes and solid trusses, culminating in the awkward to assemble but rewarding icosahedron. Later they asked me to come back and help them “stabilize” their creation — it’s too wiggly Unkie. #win.

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Apr
16

Source Repository Visualization

Categories:

OSS,
Visualization

by Alan

I rendered a quick animation of the reSIProcate project’s development history using the wonderful ‘gource‘ tool. You can see it here if you like, in 720p/H.264. I love the flurries of activity that pop up over time. Props to Adam H for pointing me at this tool.

This post has no tag

2 comments

Jan
20

Quote of the Day: It’s the yaks.

Categories:

by Alan

I know, three posts in one day is really too many; but this quote really tickles my funny bone while being a solid reminder why we need some humility and introspection powers. While discussing the requirements or principles that might guide the development of a new mail application for Mac OS X; Brent manages to …

This post has no tag

1 comment

Jan
20

Very cute inspirational Lego short.

Categories:

General

by Alan

For my two blog readers that do not also read Gizmodo, this little short is truly wonderful: Lego Short Film Makes Me Want to Play With Legos Immediately [Lego]: “ CL!CK is a short film made by Lego about how Legos can inspire you to come up with great ideas. It’s a fancy ad, to …

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Jan
20

Privacy Violations by Facebook Employees

Categories:

by Alan

Schneier points out that Facebook is a privacy train wreck waiting to happen; something I have long believed. People need to take heed and be careful about what they reveal to whom. We are only at the very earliest of stages with our automated privacy specification and/or features. Life and personal privacy is going to …

This post has no tag

2 comments

Nov
19

A compelling replacement for make

Categories:

OSS,
Tech

by Alan

Having lived with make for over 20 years; I’ve decided that something has to be better. Turns out, there is something better. I’ve been enjoying getting to know both Python and scons together for the last few months. What a wonderful tool for building. There is a ton of information online, so I won’t add …

This post has no tag

1 comment

Nov
17

Web developers outsmarting users (or not). Design assumptions that hurt.

Categories:

by Alan

Website #FAILs. Lately I’ve noticed a lot of websites make crazy assumptions about my location. I was thinking it was geolocation gone wrong, but it appears that in general they are doing something completely illogical: they are using my language preference list to guess where I am. This amounts to assuming that all French speaking …

This post has no tag

5 comments

Oct
20

VMware Fusion linux guest os and host file sharing.

Categories:

Apple

by Alan

I managed to install vmware tools into my guest OS (CentOS 5.2) using the manual install method, mounting the ISO image and then running the perl installer. So far, so good. However, the files are all mounted with the host OS uid/gid. There is likely a better solution, but given that the guest is a …

This post has no tag

Leave comment

polyphase.ca

In Soviet Canuckistan, Blogs Read You!

Alan

Author's details

Latest posts

Most commented posts

Author's posts listings

A Brief Announcement – Welcome Eamonn

New kind of flying machine

Wiggly things and strong things.

Source Repository Visualization

Quote of the Day: It’s the yaks.

Very cute inspirational Lego short.

Privacy Violations by Facebook Employees

A compelling replacement for make

Web developers outsmarting users (or not). Design assumptions that hurt.

VMware Fusion linux guest os and host file sharing.

Archives

Meta

Copyright