Freelance Freedom #139 This seems to be a central tenant of all creative processes, from programming, to graphic design, to web design, to finger painting. Theres a hell of alot of apparent ’nothing’ to do before you do anything, and if you play your cards right, its chargeable nothing time :D Programming With Proportional Fonts? An interesting new look at a programming environment mainstay that I admit I just assumed was a best practice! ...
Recent events in the cyber-security world have got me feeling paranoid. Between Estonia, Georgia, and the ever-increasing focus on Chinese cyber-political-warfare, geo-political entities are starting to realise that the whole ’lets stockpile enough weapons to blow up the world enough times for the number to be rendered pointless’ may not have been the best plan. China has caught everyone off-guard with its recent, albeit ‘hush hush’, displays of force (while not entirely getting off scott-free), and we should probably be alot more afraid of a cyber war than of flaming pants or security-crossed lovers. ...
ChromiumOS Zero Boots Faster, Offers Automatic Updates [Updates] 11/01/2010 Make Your Mockup in Markup 24/12/2009 10 Innovative Ways To Use Twitter For Business 09/01/2010 6 Digital Photography Websites With Free Tutorials 08/01/2010 Use Better Tools to Be a Better Student in 2010 [Students] 06/01/2010 Doing It Wrong 02/01/2010 Terrorball 04/01/2010
8 Ebor Drive pt 2 02/07/2009 8 Ebor Drive pt 1 02/07/2009
As part of the whole New Years Resolutions plan, I’m gonna get started on the OSS development thing. The Gist: Cross Platform Mobile application to collect international data on cell reception. The Gimmick: While services that do this exist, they assume even circular propagation of the signal. Granular reception maps that tell you where to head to to get more bars. The Detail: Low level should be relatively simple; the Android, Blackberry and Iphone API stacks allow easy reading of the current cell ID, RSSI, and GPS Co-ords. Upload those three values over XML (or Something), Web service plugs that into a MySQL server, which is then aggregated, and displayed on the Web, and can be queried by the mobile app. The Potential: While its unlikely that its going to ‘blow up’ since there is relatively little incentive for the end user, since the Applications are going to be free, there will be some that will install it for the sake of it. There is the opportunity to license the data gained service providers but the aggregated data will be made available online in open formats. ...
Post something at least once a day on either blog or web-album Stop sleeping in after 10am Drop some savings into the stock market, only take profits out, don’t add anything more Write an actual blog article once a week Find and contribute to an open source project Pull together a real portfolio of work Find more clients for my freelance work Set a timetable and stick to it Well, its a plan at least.
For a man who’s title is currently Baron Mandelson, _of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham, _First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the Council, educated in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and is hotly tipped to become a major part of the Lisbon-Treaty-generated-unelected-cou-detat-european-super-parliment, you’d think the power-addicted, peace-process screwing, ‘shreud loaning’ rat would leave well enough alone. ...
This blog is starting to turn into a Lenovo ad, but this time, there are no good factors to my recent experience. My X61 Tablet died, completly braindead, no power, no nothing. Unfortunatly I left it a bit longer than was nessary due to home moving, going back to university, restarting and old job and starting a new one, aswell as becoming Design Editor for my university’s independent newspaper. Eventually, I made the call to Lenovo, and they were great as always with dealing with my query. After posting off the laptop (the week of the 18th of October), minus hard drive and battery (call it paranoia), I waited. And two weeks-ish later, the laptop arrived (4th October), and all was well after a motherboard replacement. ...
Currently, this is a major American congressional argument, and hasn’t really come up publicly in Europe (outside of Scandinavia , but Net Neutrality is going to be one of those issues that if people aren’t made aware of it, the legislation removing it will sweep over all of us. Imagine what would have happened if in 1998, ISP’s had throttled the traffic going to a little rack in Stanford University that would late take over the internet as the great distributor of information. Imagine if Google couldn’t pay the ’top-tier access fee’ and had simply died. ...
As was noted in my LENOVO ROCKS post, I recieved a virgin hard drive for a laptop with no disk drives. This is a problem that has been long solved in Linux Distros but is not so good for Windows, but i did find this brilliant guide by Sandip from earlier this year, i just wanted to point out a few difference that i made to the process that i think make it slightly more transparent whats going on. ...