December 2004 Archives

18:09 and the fray was entered, 150 people (probably more) got their pillows out and started whacking the nearest person with a pillow. Great fun and still going after 20 minutes when my feather pillow gave out. It was held outside the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square in London.
Lots of photos on Flickr, in the Pillow Fight group.

• The Anxious City, Richard J Williams
  An interesting looking book on urban culture, looking at anxiety and the role of a city, its form and purpose. My cousin Richard wrote it too.
  (categories: anxiety culture design fear richard_williams urban)

• Fast Company | The 6 Myths Of Creativity
  short article on what people commonly do in business that stops creativity - unsurprisingly giving people unpressured time to think is beneficial
  (categories: creativity development research thinking time_management)

• chongqed.org: Preventing wiki spam
  tips for preventing wikispam
  (categories: avoid ban blacklist spam wiki)

• mobile clubbing - pillow fight II - so much fun, so close to home
  bring a pillow, release the christmas shopping tension in a frenzy of feathers
  (categories: TAZ london national_gallery pillow_fight)

• bmj.com - response to the French paradox - sex, good food and wine make you live longer
  essentially love life and you'll live longer
  (categories: bmj french longevity love_for_life medical research sex wine)

I spent all of Saturday at the London Perl Workshop working the video camera for the main room. I enjoyed myself quite a bit, even though I'm not a perl programmer. Good sessions on web application design, test first software design and caching . Entertaining sessions on basic sorting and database access, plus Matt B on Python. Some of it went entirely over my head, but I came away with 12 hours of video to capture and encode, some new friends and a better awareness of Perl. Though a stronger conviction that Python and PHP are more likely to feature in my future than perl.

I'm happy to announce that Mark and I are joining the great and the good at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference, next March in San Diego. Mark and I will be giving a talk, entitled "Public documents as weblogs" on the subject of opening up the consultation process by making documents released as PDFs from public bodies open and web friendly.

It should be a great fun event, they even give you badges early.

• Inderjeet Singh's Blog: Using Airport Express as a range extender/repeater for Linksys Cable/DSL router WRT54G
  A howto for the Linksys WRT54G and Apple Airport Express bridging in WDS mode
  (categories: 802.11b 802.11g WRT54G airport airport_express apple bridge linksys wds)
• ONLamp.com: Choosing a Language for Interactive Fiction
  All together cool article on languages for writing interative fiction, or adventure games
  (categories: IF hypertext infocom inform interactive_fiction tads zil zork)
• Wired 12.12: START : End of TV as we Know it ?
  tv over ip, a short article looking at the possible future
  (categories: future ip iptv television tv vpn)
• Setup guide for Buffalo WGR-G54 basestation and Apple Airport Express WDS
  How to bridge a Buffalo basestation and an Apple Airport Express in WDS mode
  (categories: airport airport_express apple buffalo wds wgr-g54)