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Category: Blog

The weird world of the Daily Mail

Today the Daily Mail is complaining about a joke that was broadcast on the News Quiz in October last year. (Is it still considered news six months after the event?)

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading the article, so, to summarise:

  1. Broadcasting a joke that implies, but doesn’t use, a swear word is bad
  2. But printing the same joke in a newspaper is okay
  3. Broadcasting scantily clad women dancing is bad
  4. But printing pictures of the same is okay
  5. Putting quotes around a word to indicate disdain is good writing
  6. A single complaint represents The Silent Majority
  7. Mob rule would be a good thing
  8. Potentially causing offence is grounds for severe sanctions
  9. (But see bullets two and four for exceptions)
  10. Knee-jerk liberals — whatever they are — are a wide-spread problem
  11. Knee-jerk tabloids are okay
  12. Personal responsibility is good
  13. (Unless we have to exercise it ourselves)
  14. Your opinion is wrong
  15. Mine is right
  16. Banning stuff that we don’t like represents freedom
  17. Stating things as fact makes them true
  18. Black is white
  19. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia

I may have veered off target a little at the end but I think that’s pretty close to the core of the article. Did I miss anything?

In with the new

MacBook Pro screen with bad pixels

It was nothing like as dramatic as my iBook dying one evening, but there was no getting around the fact that my nearly five year old MacBook was no longer up to the tasks that I was trying to throw at it. Developing applications, even for resource limited devices such as the iPhone, needs a pretty substantial piece of Mac software called Xcode. My photography pushed me towards getting Aperture to manage all my pictures. It’s great, but it did have a tendency to grind to a halt when it was least convenient.

What did you ship in 2010?

I first saw this on Seth Godin’s blog and thought it was a good idea in principle:

This might be a useful exercise. Doesn’t matter whether it was a hit or not, it just matters that you shipped it. Shipping something that scares you (and a lot of what follows did) is the entire point.

It is, however, quite hard for people who don’t live life in public in the same way that Seth does. I’ve spent a lot of the year doing pre-sales work either with clients that don’t like being named or for deals that we lost (and therefore not something a lot of people would want publicised). And now, in my new job, one reading of my contract means that I can’t even send out press releases.

Nine Best Posts of 2010

I didn’t think that I had blogged very much this year, but now that I look back over it seems that I’ve done quite well. There have only been a few PhotoFriday challenges that I’ve missed and I’ve managed a fair few travel and even the odd technical blog.

None of this years blogs have done especially well in terms of page impressions but here are a few that I liked for various reasons.

Your Vote Counts

One common refrain after the BNP made an appearance on Question Time last year was that if only more people went out and voted then right-wing extremists would not get elected. Of course that’s not the whole story but there’s some truth in that. Since we will have a General Election this time next week this becomes a very important point.

This got me thinking about my experience with the British electoral system. As far as I can remember, I’ve voted in every election that I have been eligible except for those when I have not been at home. In fact I was in California in this last election when Griffin was elected to the European parliament.

Best Posts of 2009

It’s that time of year where all the papers, magazines and websites devolve into the best of the year articles rather than actually generate new content. I didn’t want to feel left out so here’s my contribution.

Of course “best” can mean any number of different things, so I’m going to pick a few top fives.

Here are the most popular pages viewed this year:

  1. Installing Oracle 10g Express Edition on CentOS 4
  2. Professionalism
  3. Oracle 8i for Linux Installation HOWTO
  4. Minolta Dual Scan II
  5. Review: Belkin Wi-Fi Phone

It continues to surprise me how popular the Oracle pages are. They are now very old products and the pages have not been updated for quite some time now.

WWDC 2009

![WWDC 2009 Apple Logo](https://i0.wp.com/www.zx81.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/img_0726.jpg?resize=427%2C640 "WWDC 2009 Apple Logo")
WWDC 2009 Apple Logo

Ever since I’ve been “into” Macs, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference has been a draw. As an iPhone developer this years was especially interesting to me. Unfortunately it’s not a full time job to me so it was hard to justify the time off work or the expense of the ticket.

I was, however, in the Bay Area just before the event and managed to have a quick walk around Moscone. I felt a bit geeky taking pictures of a trade conference, but I wasn’t the only one doing so and I didn’t have my nose pressed against the glass unlike certain people!