Archive for March, 2010
All my links in one place
For the past four years I’ve been writing blog articles, taking photographs, tweeting and saving news items. This blog has been the hub of my web presence, but I’ve consistently been present on Twitter, Flickr and Google Reader, and occasionally also posted links elsewhere. But from the start, I’ve tried to provide people with a way of keeping track of everything I post in one place. For some time, I used Tumblr and Friendfeed to do this, but those solutions were pretty dysfunctional. I’ve now set up a lifestream , using Sweetcron, a rather clever open-source project, hosted on my own server, that aggregates all my stuff (except for Facebook posts, which are private) in one, funky, 1970s-inspired stream of blog posts, photos, tweets and links.
Stuff I couldn’t live without in 2010
Taking inspiration from Michael Arrington and Kevin Rose (I didn’t think Kevin Rose would ever be a source of inspiration, but maybe I’m just feeling lazy), I’ve succumbed to the trend. Here’s the list of stuff I couldn’t possibly do without. It’s much shorter than theirs, and has all the right, cool stuff. If I’m still around, I’ll update it in 2011.
A plea in support of Mr Obama’s perfectible health-care bill
I’m in no doubt that America needs universal health care for the same reasons that Europe needed it in 1945: it’s morally unacceptable, in a rich society, that anyone should be denied it for financial reasons. The bill presently before Congress is clearly perfectible, but in reality, arguments against it are but thinly-veiled pretexts barely concealing the selfishness and economic ignorance underlying Mr Obama’s opponents on this issue.
Improve your WordPress blog with MarsEdit, Amazon Cloudfront and Markdown
In an update to a post I wrote in 2007 about the tools I use to compose blog posts, I cover using MarsEdit for editing posts on my desktop, in combination with WriteRoom and TextMate. I explain how I’ve started using Amazon Cloudfront to store my images. I also cover new trends in caching and ways of using Markdown to produce cleaner code including, optionally, using it as the storage format for individual blog posts, using Michel Fortin’s PHP Markdown plugin.
Does being for the Liberty of England still mean being for the Protestant religion?
England is a Protestant country, make no mistake about it. It’s a deeply embedded part of her identity. And whether you be Protestant or Catholic, from a dogmatic point of view, is decidedly not the point at issue: we can all agree that when England ceases to be a Protestant country, a not insignificant part of her glory, earned in the battle-field and in defence of liberty far more than in the pulpit, will have been extinguished for ever. Sadly, the Protestant settlement resulting from the Glorious Revolution and the Act of Settlement no longer appears to command the slightest respect either from HM Government or from the Tory Opposition, one can conclude that it will be consigned to the dustbin of History at some point between now and the next Proclamation.
Reorganising this blog
The time has come to consolidate all the posts I’ve written since 2005 in a variety of guises, in one language and one site. The language, of course, had to be English and the site had to be donaldjenkins.com. I did toy for a while with the idea of running a bilingual blog. But the SEO implications of this were unclear and I thought it might be overkill. So I translated all the old blog posts, which hadn’t been available online for nearly two years, and uploaded them, for the first time, to this site. They have occasionally been made more concise, and comments (which were in French anyway) haven’t been preserved. You can browse through them by visiting the archives.
Does French tech have any future at all?
France has historically been a cradle of cutting-edge technology and to this day remains a world leader in the field of mathematics. Yet in recent years it has gradually departed from that stance and has increasingly turned into a sort of cultural but irrelevant Disneyland, while America has gained, as a result of the revolution induced by the PC and the Internet, a dominant, indeed monopolistic position in the field of information technology. Why has the forced diet of mathematics not fuelled the emergence of a string of French Stanfords, MITs and Georgia Techs? Why do clever young French people have zero knowledge of, or interest in, information technology? And, most puzzlingly of all, why is new technology not seriously taught in France’s best engineering schools, whose graduates are mostly ignorant of even basic programming skills?