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Author Archives: David Megginson
What’s really different about “Enterprise”
(I wrote this in 2011 as a draft and then forgot about it. It still reads OK, so here it is, basically unchanged, and without the extra sections I’d probably originally planned to add.) Even though big web sites use … Continue reading
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An easy break-up
Google Reader is going away soon, so, with tears in my eyes, I decided to break up with Reader before it could break up with me. My rebound Android app is Feedly, which seems refreshingly easy-going — Feedly asked for … Continue reading
A handgun is like a smartphone, but with bullets
http://m.dailykos.com/story/2013/05/17/1208474/-GunFAIL-XVIII?showAll=yes Think – how often do you hear of someone dropping a laptop computer into a toilet or leaving it in a restaurant? How often do you see spider-web cracks on a laptop screen from a fall? Small, hand-sized computing … Continue reading
How government subsidies become censorship
«Pure science research drops sharply at National Research Council» (Ottawa Citizen, 2013-05-08) We’re learning the danger in Canada of having let too many sectors become dependent on federal money. When the arts, NGOs, scientific research, many kinds of R&D business, … Continue reading
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How to declare a conflict of interest in 140 characters?
How do you declare a conflict of interest in Twitter, when you have only 140 characters for your whole message? The trigger discussion The question came up after this Twitter exchange with Walter Robinson, an intelligent and moderate small-c conservative … Continue reading
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WebDAV and POST
Over the past decade and a half, I’ve known that WebDAV exists (and been grateful for that fact), but I have mostly ignored it. Today, as an experiment, I set up an Apache WebDAV server on my laptop. It’s great, … Continue reading
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Understanding Canada’s Conservatives
Less like the US Tea Party or Religious Right, and more like this guy. Canada’s federal Conservative government isn’t like American small-c social conservatives — for example, it seems to have no issues with teaching evolution in Canadian schools, it … Continue reading
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CSV linked data
I’ve been thinking for years about what is now called “linked data“: about how long the idea has been limping along, and about whether it will ever catch on the way HTML did. As we discovered over two decades ago … Continue reading
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POST, PUT, idempotence, and self-identification
I realize that the title of this posting might be a bit off-putting for non-RESTafarians, but it’s about a topic that matters to anyone building an application that uses simple web standards for updates. Background: how REST usually works There … Continue reading
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MySQL wrapper script: variables from the command line
There’s a lot I like about PostgreSQL, and I’ll probably switch eventually, but for now, I’m still more comfortable with MySQL, especially its ability to update huge amounts of existing data in-place very quickly. I do have some technical gripes … Continue reading
