Wondering what the anarchist would do if I nicked their iPhone…

I’m on the train with some of the anti-Thatcher protesters. Idealistic young anarchists discussing the failure of standing in the rain drinking cans of beer as an activism technique, and the failure of other anarchists to give a shit about feminism and minorities.

Saw one guy being dragged off in handcuffs in the station.

Lots of Transport Police at Charing Cross. Not sure if it is for run-of-the-mill pissheads and Saturday night revellers or something more.

There’s a talk about “geeks and professionalism” at a conference called ‘Devs Love Bacon’. (Except us vegetarians, obvs.)

“Everyone in this room is now a gender-queer panda” (@mia_out)

At GLAM-WIKI, @mia_out just lumped Wikipedians in with the government and the Daily Mail… oh god, we’ve become The Man.

Am somewhat amused that the discussions about #glamwiki are happening almost exclusively on Twitter’s silo. Because we love open… right?

CV tip: if you claim to have “attention to detail”, check to make sure there are no grammar issues in the sentence where you proclaim your attention to detail. True story.

What concerns me far more than whether Thatcher has a state funeral is that government’s have discretion over whether to provide one or not. We could do something radical like pass a law that says whether or not ex-prime-ministers get a state funeral or not. Then it wouldn’t be up to fate, fortune and partisan political hacks to decide.

You know, equal and consistent treatment under the law. What a radical idea.

Over the years, the experience of using the internet from a mobile device has been getting worse rather than better.

I started using mobile internet years ago, just on the cusp of the introduction of 3G. For a long time, I was accessing the Internet through GPRS. And GPRS worked pretty damn well. The experience of connecting was painful in some ways, but once connected, it worked wonderfully.

One simple example: if you went through a train tunnel, often the reconnection would be almost immediate after exiting the tunnel. You’d be back online within a few seconds, pretty much as soon as you had a few bars of signal.

These days, I use the ‘personal wifi hotspot’ on Android. Which is a great idea, but upon exiting a railway tunnel, it can often take up to a minute or two to reconnect to the Internet. Sometimes, the only way I get a connection involves manual intervention (switching the ‘Data network mode’ setting on Android to off and then on again).

I can hear the complaints already. “Yeah, but it’s so much faster!”

And I don’t care.

Speed is pretty much irrelevant. It’s like money. Once you have enough of it, you don’t really need to give a shit. It’s only when you don’t have enough that it is really a concern. I usually have enough speed to do the sort of tasks I need to do: editing Wikipedia, checking my email, checking code in or out of version control (the fact that I can check into Git and then later push it up to the server helps; and git svn is a lifesaver).

I don’t do much more than that… because of usage limitations. My mobile provider, O2, has a 1Gb limit on usage per month. So, you can make my connection as fast as you like—GPRS, 3G, HSDPA, 4G—all it means is that I can more quickly reach the monthly cap. If you put a relatively low monthly cap on the amount of miles one is allowed to do, upgrading the speed of one’s car isn’t going to make much of a difference.

I’m sure when 4G comes trotting along, Wikipedia will load a smidgen faster. I’m still not going to be watching iPlayer on the train because even if it is OMG SUPER BLOW YOUR SOCKS OFF FASTER THAN A SPEEDING BULLET like the advertising tells me, watching half an hour of telly will use up quarter of my damn data plan for the month.

I’d post this, but first I need to manually tell my phone to reconnect to the fucking Internet… because god forbid I should be able to use the service I pay for in that barren wasteland of connectivity, south London.

According to The Economist, only 8% of benefit claimants have three or more children. I say this, because we wouldn’t judge everybody who is on benefits on the basis of one case, would we? Oh, wait…

Who is Margaret Thatcher? Apparently, some people don’t know. And their first response to not knowing is to jump on to Twitter and let the world know that they don’t know. I ♥ human stupidity.

Thatcher is dead. Two words: Section 28.

I shall shed no tears tonight.

Just been photomapping Old Compton Street. London changes so quickly…

The HTML5 Test has a blog post on Blink.

Andrew Ray has an argument for why new developers shouldn’t use Vim. I have a very compelling reason to use Vim: because mice suck. Mice may let you point to places on the screen easier… I quite like having a working wrist though.

Static typing: because def foo(bar) is less useful than def foo(bar: String). Don’t try and deny it, kids.

Yahoo! Has Probably Destroyed the Most History, Ever – And Historians Need to Wake Up. Because to Silicon Valley, the things you create are just “user-generated content”, hooks on which they can sell adverts for shit you probably don’t need.

On May 19, I’m helping run Lua on Wikimedia, a training/hacking day where we can play with the new Lua scripting in Wikimedia projects. Do come along if that’s your sort of thing.

The British Library want to archive the web. Time for the long web?