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<dateCreated>Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:41:50 GMT</dateCreated>
<dateModified>Mon, 27 Oct 2008 09:45:03 GMT</dateModified>
<ownerName>Tom Morris</ownerName>
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<body><outline text="Afghanistan has turned out well since the UK/US invasion: &lt;a href= &quot;http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7682449.stm&quot;&gt;they imprison people for reading about women's rights&lt;/a&gt; rather than kill them. Progress: it requires baby steps." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 09:45:03 GMT"/><outline text="&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/swear-words&quot;&gt;Steven Pinker&lt;/a&gt; has an excellent article in &lt;cite&gt;The Atlantic&lt;/cite&gt; about swearing." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 09:41:46 GMT"/><outline text="Simon Willison's excellent BarCampLondon5 &lt;a href= &quot;http://www.slideshare.net/simon/when-zeppelins-ruled-the-earth-presentation&quot;&gt; presentation about zeppelins&lt;/a&gt; is up on SlideShare." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 09:40:39 GMT"/><outline text="Carnival time: &lt;a href= &quot;http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/10/carnival_of_the_liberals_76.php&quot;&gt; liberalism&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href= &quot;http://blog.principiacomica.com/2008/10/19/philosophers-carnival-lxxx.aspx&quot;&gt; philosophy&lt;/a&gt;." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 09:38:34 GMT"/><outline text="&lt;a href= &quot;http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2008/10/18/my-argument-against-proposition-8/&quot;&gt; Chris Messina&lt;/a&gt; had an excellent post the other day about gay marriage and Proposition 8. If you are a Californian and you are the least bit undecided or know someone undecided on Prop. 8, read Chris' post." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 09:34:13 GMT"/><outline text="If you like Ruby and you use a Mac, MacRuby is for you. &lt;a href= &quot;http://developer.apple.com/mac/articles/scriptingautomation/cocoaappswithmacruby.html&quot;&gt; Apple Developer Connection have a tutorial&lt;/a&gt;." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 09:31:21 GMT"/><outline text="&lt;a href= &quot;http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/10/our_queer_future.php&quot;&gt;PZ Myers&lt;/a&gt; on James Dobson's dystopian gay fantasies: &lt;q&gt;&lt;em&gt;Everything&lt;/em&gt; is about the gays - forget changes in the economy, or foreign affairs, or alternative energy, or labor, or anything that might actually affect most people. The whole story is about the gay conspiracy taking control and locking up the guns while spreading pornography throughout the land... It's a world-building prelude to a work of &lt;em&gt;slash&lt;/em&gt; fiction. Future chapters, I'm sure, will include lurid stories of handsome young Christian men being compelled by scantily clothed muscular gay men to watch explicit pornography, followed by more chapters detailing their forcible deflowering by hunky followers of the Obama.&lt;/q&gt;" created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:51:45 GMT"/><outline text="&lt;a href= &quot;http://www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=7728&quot;&gt;Rudy Giuliani has his 2012 campaign site up&lt;/a&gt;. A little early perhaps, but he's either realised the futility of the McCain-Palin ticket for the Republicans, or he's received some kind of Bachmann-esque &lt;a href= &quot;http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2008/10/god_told_bachmann_to_run.php&quot;&gt; revelation&lt;/a&gt;." created="Sun, 26 Oct 2008 23:41:51 GMT"/>
<outline text="On not banging one's head against a brick wall" created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:45:25 GMT"><outline text="Following &lt;a href= &quot;http://tommorris.org/blog/2008/10/24#When:22:32:41&quot;&gt;Friday's coverage&lt;/a&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.headconference.com&quot;&gt;Head Conference&lt;/a&gt;, I've got some more rambly thoughts. &lt;a href= &quot;http://adactio.com/journal/1523&quot;&gt;Jeremy&lt;/a&gt; has a post up, for a start." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:45:25 GMT"/><outline text="I didn't see many of the talks yesterday because of a certain member of the family having a panic and needing someone to calm them down and get them to think rationally. I saw most of the sessions on Saturday though, and here are some impressions." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:45:25 GMT"/><outline text="&lt;a href= &quot;http://www.headconference.com/speakers/stephanie-booth/&quot;&gt;Stephanie Booth&lt;/a&gt; gave a personal talk on freelancing, organising conferences and other potential brushes with failure. There is so a business opportunity for a nerd talent manager, matching up the suit people to the command-line people." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:45:25 GMT"/><outline text="The next session I went to was &lt;a href= &quot;http://www.headconference.com/speakers/thomas-vander-wal/&quot;&gt;Thomas Vander-Wal's &lt;cite&gt;Seeping through the Garden Wall&lt;/cite&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which, I have to say, I wasn't particularly impressed with. It was very business analysis but didn't actually have much in the way of case studies. I'm glad that nerd tools, created in frustration at the complexities of the corporate enterprise toolset, are now being turned into corporate enterprise tools. It'll prompt some innovation as the nerds who were once happy with some hacky wiki written in Perl or whatever will rebel once it becomes a feature-ridden JavaSE monster. The horrific tragedy of &lt;a href= &quot;http://blogs.sun.com/marigan/entry/how_the_vi_editor_would&quot;&gt;Microsoft Vi&lt;/a&gt; comes back into vision." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:45:25 GMT"/><outline text="I went to &lt;a href= &quot;http://www.headconference.com/speakers/cliff-hall/&quot;&gt;Cliff Hall's&lt;/a&gt; session on writing code that will last, and it was quite interesting. I wasn't sure I agreed with him. Sure, in the Flash/Flex space, or in web apps, or even in some commercial desktop apps, code won't last tremendously long periods, but code in open source that works gets pretty immortalised. gcc has been around for a long time, and will probably not be going anywhere quickly." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:45:25 GMT"/><outline text="Next up was &lt;a href= &quot;http://www.headconference.com/speakers/molly-e-holzschlag/&quot;&gt;Molly Holzschlag's talk&lt;/a&gt; about standards. Tremendous fun - although the chat did become (with my assistance) a bitch-fest about IE8 and it's lack of support for XHTML and so on." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:45:25 GMT"/><outline text="&lt;a href= &quot;http://www.headconference.com/speakers/derek-featherstone/&quot;&gt;Derek Featherstone&lt;/a&gt; gave a good talk about accessibility and Ajax, giving some broad principles on how to make Ajax accessible and talked about some of the things coming up like ARIA roles in HTML 5." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:45:25 GMT"/><outline text="I took an hour out to have a meal. I then logged back on for &lt;a href= &quot;http://www.headconference.com/speakers/lynda-weinman/&quot;&gt;Lynda Weinman's talk about online education&lt;/a&gt;, which I found interesting but over-optimistic. Universities and classrooms aren't going away, and they are often the best place to learn for a lot of things. I think that while we may be able to train Photoshop users in a browser window, I'm rather sceptical about doing the same for physicists, philosophers and Presidents. Horrific visions of University of Phoenix-esque distance learning/online education scams come to mind. That's not to say there aren't plenty of things wrong with the various levels of the education system that need fixing very quickly. If I didn't believe that universities still have a role to play, I wouldn't be going to one." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:45:25 GMT"/><outline text="Yesterday, I managed to sneak out of family commitments to catch most of &lt;a href= &quot;http://www.headconference.com/speakers/robert-lee-cann/&quot;&gt;Leeky's talk about Git&lt;/a&gt;, the chat for which devolved quickly into some truly horrific puns about forking and rebasing. I wish I could have seen Ben Segal's talk, Simon Willison's talk and John Sheridan's talk. I guess I'll have to wait for the videos to come out." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:45:25 GMT"/><outline text="One thing I would like to see next year would be a BarCamp-style anyone-can-present track. Half an hour each, running parallel with the rest of the event and anyone who has got a ticket can run a session. Plus it would have been neat if, after a session, the chat could be 'spun out' into a separate 'hallway' area. In general, the discussions were - no thanks to me - very good and the format of having a built-in backchannel worked really well." created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:45:25 GMT"/><outline text="Very enjoyable, and a big round of applause to &lt;a href= &quot;http://aralbalkan.com/&quot;&gt;Aral&lt;/a&gt;!" created="Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:45:25 GMT"/></outline></body>
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