One of my favourite buzzphrases is 'efficiency and eloquence', whether in the design of code, the position of things in a box, or the layout of a webpage. one of the big grievances I have about some of the largest websites is there misuse of space in an attempt to guarantee cross-browser support: only showing information in a central column in the page.
Read More...Google have really been turning out the goods over the last few months. I had expected the interim between Chrome (the Browser) and Chrome (the OS) to mainly be work on fixing things, and porting things to various platforms. And yet, they come out and surpassed themselves again and again. Quite aside from the work on the Android powered phones, the release of Google Voice and Google Wave seem to be a great step forward for cloud computing. I unfortunately don't have access to voice as I live in the UK (there are probably ways round this, but I haven't tried, and I'm not all that bothered to by honest - I'm not a great fan of phones anyway). But the release of Google's new programming language, Go, has left me slightly concerned. Mashable, which is where I actually found a link to the Go website, is generally right in saying that "one of the core philosophies of Google, and one of the reasons it has been so successful, is efficiency". But I've got a feeling that any cross-platform byte-code language is going to be prone to slow. I must admit that having garbage collection done for me makes writing things quickly a doodle, and Google's claim that "the resulting programs run nearly as quickly as comparable C or C++ code".
Read More...Another day, another post. This time, Merry's Law.
There are many rules and laws in the world: Godwin's, Muphry's, Sod's, and Merry's. Like most of the good ones, it's short, simple, and eloquent.
Read More...Despite doing web design for many a year on and off (and with varying degrees of success), I never really engaged in the internet itself. one of it's biggest problems is that it's a resource that you must go to, rather than one which goes to you. Although this is true of all traditional media1, it's much more exaggerated: the set of all printed books and of all television programmes is much smaller than the resources of the internet. Yet I suspect that many people visit fewer sites than they watch television programmes, or books by different authors. Is this a waste of the data out there? Or is a continuous education a worthless pursuit?
Read More...So, here are we are. I'm going to buck the trend by introducing myself and talking a little about what I'm going to blog about in my first post.
Ok, not so original, I admit.
I'm Ben(edict), an undergraduate at Imperial College London, England where I'm studying Information Systems Engineering (which I may explain at some point. If you're thinking of studying computer type things in England, take a look - it's really good fun). I therefore have quite an interest in coding, and I suspect that many of the posts will be programming and technology related rants (and also some really neat stuff).
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