This was originally posted on Twitter here: A re-written version is available here: UK in a Changing Europe and here: The New Statesman A rambling, disorganised thread on negotiations with the EU a…
Month: June 2017
The quintessential poolside summer reading: A Mind at Play
👓 IndieWebifying my website: part 1, the why & how | AltPlatform
I’ve decided to re-design my personal website, richardmacmanus.com. My primary reason is to become a full-fledged member of the IndieWeb community. If I’m writing about Open Web technologies here on AltPlatform, then I ought to be eating my own dog food. Another reason is to discover – likely ...
📖 Read pages 16-55 of A Mind at Play by Jimmy Soni & Rob Goodman
Knowing that I’ve read a lot about Shannon and even Vannevar Bush over the years, I’m pleasantly surprised to read some interesting tidbits about them that I’ve not previously come across. I was a bit worried that this text wouldn’t provide me with much or anything new on the subjects at hand.
I’m really appreciating some of the prose and writing structure, particularly given that it’s a collaborative work between two authors. At times there are some really nonstandard sentence structures, but they’re wonderful in their rule breaking.
They’re doing an excellent job so far of explaining the more difficult pieces of science relating to information theory. In fact, some of the intro was as good as I think I’ve ever seen simple explanations of what is going on within the topic. I’m also pleased that they’ve made some interesting forays into topics like eugenics and the background role it played in the story for Shannon.
They had a chance to do a broader view of the history of computing, but opted against it, or at least must have made a conscious choice to leave out Babbage/Lovelace within the greater pantheon. I can see narratively why they may have done this knowing what is to come later in the text, but a few sentences as a nod would have been welcome.
The book does, however, get on my nerves with one of my personal pet peeves in popular science and biographical works like this: while there are reasonable notes at the end, absolutely no proper footnotes appear at the bottoms of pages or even indicators within the text other than pieces of text with quotation marks. I’m glad the notes even exist in the back, but it just drives me crazy that publishers blatantly hide them this way. The text could at least have had markers indicating where to find the notes. What are we? Animals?
Nota bene: I’m currently reading an advanced reader copy of this; the book won’t be out until mid-July 2017.
Checkin Lacy Park
👓 Developers Who Use Spaces Make More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs | Stack Overflow Blog
Do you use tabs or spaces for code indentation?
Checkin Little Free Library in Altadena
👓 Richard MacManus | Dave Winer
Richard is one of the old school bloggers. He started ReadWriteWeb in 2003. It started as a Radio UserLand project and grew into a leading tech publication, something which I'm personally proud of. # He has a new blog up and running. I've added it to my personal river here on Scripting News. He asks about where the blogrolls have gone, a topic I wrote about a couple of days ago. Richard would certainly be in my blogroll.#
The most powerful aspect of the Internet is the open web. From the very beginning, there has been a conflict with on one side walled gardens and closed networks with open standards and interoperability on the other.
Checkin Jons
👓 Gutenberg: First Impressions | Matt Cromwell
Gutenberg is the future of content in WordPress. It will deliver the elegance of Medium but with far more power and flexibility of layouts and content types
👓 IndieWeb podcast club | eli.li
…like a book club, but for podcasts, and distributed over the indieweb. Anyone interested? Here is how I imagine it would work. You listen to a podcast, you enjoy the podcast or have thoughts otherwise about it. You blog about said podcast on your indieweb compatible or at least indieweb-friendly ...
👓 I really like the idea of an IndieWeb podcast club (or any o | John Johnston
I really like the idea of an IndieWeb podcast club (or any other kind of podcast club). I’ve been listening to more podcasts lately. A club would aid discussion & discovery.
👓 22/06/2017, 06:20 | Colin Walker
Liked: IndieWeb podcast club, posted June 22, 2017...
Eli suggests that bloggers could come together for an "Indieweb Podcast Club" - like a book club but for Podcasts.
The idea is someone posts about a specific podcast episode, others read that post, listen to the same episode and then a conversation ensues between posts.
I think that's a great idea!
A number of folks have previously listed what podcasts they are listening to so I think I'll start with that and see if this goes anywhere.