Back in the early days of this blog, it was hardly tied into the British blogosphere at all; if you look at the 2003-2004 archives it’s just stuffed with US presidential politics, and most of its earliest supporters came from the US. Which is ironic given its distinctive Europhile taste, I suppose. That started to…
Read More wave of naive optimismIt seems that Andrew Gilligan has been stung by the phrase “Bendy Jihad”. So much so that he has devoted a whole column to moaning about it, or rather to moaning about anyone having the cheek to disagree with him. It’s a pity, then, that he couldn’t see his way to attributing his attack correctly,…
Read More Gilligan’s “Ibogaine Frenzy”; Assaults Wrong Man, Screaming NonsenseIt all started with this Making Light thread; Bill Higgins was musing about improvising a radiation detector, which led him to this deeply cool device – scroll down for the cunning methodology that goes with it. But James MacDonald beat him, I think, with this cloud chamber implementation: Field-expedient cloud chamber:Needed: shot glass. High-proof vodka…
Read More Homemade particle physicsSo, if World President Brown was to ask me what to do about the headless Viktor Bout empire, and the operators like it, what would I say? Here’s what I’d do: Let’s draw up a big list of dodgy airlines. Better, let’s use rules; ex-Soviet aircraft, or old 737s, based in the UAE, registration in…
Read More Operation Firedump – the great rampcheckAs someone once said: ladies and gentlemen, we got him. It appears that – of all people – Boris Johnson gets the honour of dragging “Sir” Ian out of his spider hole. Of course, this raises all kinds of legal issues as to who, exactly, gets to hire’n’fire the commissioner of the Met. Is it…
Read More Mission accomplishedWhat have we here? Via Spencer Ackerman: David Wurmser, trying to sketch the wiring in his head on a really big piece of paper. The spider chart was meant “to create a strategic picture, and that strategic picture is the foundation of policy change,” Wurmser said. “It helped you visualize, because if you saw, say,…
Read More All day long I think of things but nothing seems to satisfyIs anyone else disturbed by the fact Ed Balls appears to have been replaced by Chris Dillow? Ed Balls, the schools secretary and only member of the Co-operative party in the cabinet, will today propose that 100 schools over the next two years become co-operative trust schools owned and controlled by the local community. He…
Read More tomorrow’s public inquiry todayMet up with regular reader and Linux hacker Duane Griffin to discuss the ORGANISE project . As a result, here’s a new and much amended specification that supersedes the first one.
Read More In which we review the Organise projectSo I took my stupid damn idea off to the stupid ideas club. When we got there, guess who? Spyblog was waiting at the rendezvous with some Dutchmen and an Argentine documentarist and half the No2ID members not currently in hospital. And after we made our way through Jock McZanu’s EU Maddie monsoon (GOOD HERE…
Read More Organise, and a very wet 2600I’ve been reading the oohing and aahing about the Obama web operation (for example, here at the Linux Journal); all those individual pages and RSS feeds and iCals for every event. It strikes me that some of this can be generalised, and that we can probably improve on it. After all, as LJ points out,…
Read More Organise