Adult Supervision Required
You're sitting at your kitchen table trying to recall where all your money went last month, while contemplating whether you'll have enough to pay the sneaky bill you just discovered in a mountain of unopened mail. To be honest, it's been a while since you looked at anything resembling a …
Native Tongue
My first exposure to programming was during a Year 11 computer science class. I was at a disadvantage from the start: several other students were already budding programmers and I had never really taken an interest. In hindsight I'm not sure what compelled me to take computer science; I recall …
Pragmatism About the Future of Technology
There is a great deal of fear and cynicism about the continued acceleration of technology, accompanied by endless dystopian predictions of our demise. I sometimes imagine travelling through time to see the future for myself. I think making decisions from this perspective might prove helpful for future generations -- playing on …
Minimum Viable Human
A few years ago I made a new-year's resolution to write four lines a day, every day, for a whole year. I fully expected it to be a diatribe of dear-diary bullshit, but I didn't care, it was a deliberate exercise with a singular purpose: I wanted to hone my …
Masculinity in the 21st Century
We stood in a back-alley bar facing a wall of whiskey. The decorator's brief was surely 'build a shrine to manliness', with an emphasis on luxurious beards. When asked which of the whiskies we wanted, we admitted defeat and sought the bartender's recommendation.
We found a quiet booth to enjoy …
Buffer Bloat - a microcosm of product development
As a post-grad, I developed a podcast addiction that included the wonderfully geeky Security Now. I encourage you all to listen to Steve, the 'explainer-in-chief', describe the inner workings of our connected lives, but I'd like to address a specific issue discussed in episode 345 called "buffer bloat".
Buffer bloat …
Human Instinct and Happiness
I find statements like “there’s more to life than raising children” infuriating, mostly because I surround myself with people who say such things with smug superiority, clueless about the absurdity of their sentiment. Having children is a basic human instinct; some might say the basic instinct -- the root of …
Idealism Versus Pragmatism
While conducting research, I struggled with the notion that any data I collected at best offered support of a premise, never proof; it is difficult to isolate and control experimental variables, and harder still to avoid over interpretation of the results. The corollary is that despite the absolutist axioms and …
Problems with Scientific Research
I knew I wasn't suited to academia within six months of starting a PhD, but this piece from the economist nicely encapsulates my frustrations
The hallowed process of peer review is not all it is cracked up to be, either. When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts …
Domain Names
New companies increasingly launch with vowel-starved monikers to ensure unique domain names. This is understandable given that the internet is such a big part of modern business, but ask anyone outside the tech sphere about using '.com' in a URL and they mumble something about '.com' for companies and '.org' …