On this day in 2004, I wrote my first post here on Webtorque.org As with all things Internet, 10 years seems more like 50. Tim O’Reilly had just started popularising the term “Web 2.0“, and the digerati were people who did things like blogs – before Twitter came along and made everyone do it, sort of. For me, this was all glued together, in the UK at least, by NTK, in which I once got a name check for an unbelievably obscure joke involving The Sa…
Tag: musings
Until iOS came along on Apple’s touch screen devices, having a windowing operating system was de rigour for any sophisticated computing experience. Nobody really asked why – it just seemed good. Have a video playing in one window, your email in another, have your spreadsheet in another one and, I dunno, move them all around with your mouse. For fun. What’s not to like? Until iOS, the idea of a major market player releasing an operating system tha…
The other day, I was interested to see the comments on this Google+ post by BoingBoing contributor and general Internet person Sean Bonner. Somebody called Steven G appeared to be complaining about Sean’s lack of attribution. Naively, I assumed he meant the creators of the work, and posted a reply along those lines. But I quickly realised by his reply to me that this wasn’t what he meant at all. He didn’t appear to care (or even know) about thing…
What I know about Internet protocols can be written on the back of a postage stamp, but that doesn’t stop me from wondering about them. Wikileaks’s recent call for mirrors (link may be down, obviously) got me thinking about the general possibility of a web site mirroring protocol that would make automatic the distribution and discovery of content beyond the reach of censorship. It strikes me that there are already a clutch of open protocols that …
I’ve just been mailed by a company called Zetetic about their mobile password storage application called Strip. Zetetic are interesting in that they are a small, cutting-edge software development house specialising in RoR and .NET. They appear to be principally a consultancy, but also develop and and sell their own applications. This is very similar to that other noo-tech (and intensely American) poster child, 37Signals. Have a look at Zetetic’s …
For no particular reason, I’ve been editing the Wikipedia entry for Megatripolis this week, mainly tidying it up a bit. I added something about pHreak a while ago, but in the course of editing this time, I found this photo, taken in about 1996, of the pHreak BBS being demonstrated at the club. Ahh, nostalgia! I think (but I’m not sure) that the person on the left is Bob Blake, who was involved with pHreak shortly before I took over – but I may be…