So a quick blog on the switch to WordPress. The main reason I decided to switch was the ability to have comments; which you can do in blosxom with various plugins, but then you have to worry about spam yourself, whereas with WordPress comments (and comment moderation) are standard and plugins to deal with spam […]
A little while ago I followed a link to a video of a Kathy Sierra talk (always good value). But one of the ideas therein that particularly intrigued me, particularly in the context of starting up a company, was the notion of “making the t-shirt first”. You can look at it as just compressing the […]
What’s the difference between a company and a business? One’s an almost meaningless bit of paper, the other’s a way of making lots of money. Me, I now have a company!
It’s a bit funny, but I kind-of think banks are a huge impediment to financial literacy. There are two key insights that could be really useful to Joe Public (or, for that matter, me, say ten years ago…) that banks absolutely mess up. Credits and debits One is basic double-entry accounting. In double-entry accounting, you […]
Wow, I switch on the rewriting to make the switch from blosxom to wordpress actually happen, and what do I see when I go to blog about it? “WordPress 2.7 is available! Please update now.” I guess this is what you have to expect when you use software that’s actively maintained… UPDATE 2008/12/12: Okay, 2.7 […]
inamerrata will shortly be moving to a new home, with a wordpress backend instead of a blosxom one. I suspect that means a little Planet spamming will be forthcoming, when I add the redirect rules to move the old posts/feeds to the new urls… On the upside: no more “Read more…” links, and comments! Truly […]
I know LCA has had a policy of treating its speakers like rock stars in the past, but sometimes I wonder if that gets taken a bit far, you know? Like, who can even tell the difference anymore? P!nk, rock star Valerie Aurora, kernel hacker I mean, just imagine what confusion could ensue if we […]
I was looking at bank accounts and interest rates the other day — such as the Virgin Super page that lists every single fund returning a negative percentage, except for cash and one of the funds available to over-60s. It seems really hard to compare percentage rates, for example if you gain 10% on year, […]
Early last month there was a short piece by Robin Hanson on his group blog titled Disagreement is Disrespect: But this does seem a handy opportunity to repeat that while disagreement isn’t hate, it is disrespect. When you knowingly disagree with someone you are judging them to be less rational than you, at least on […]
Economics has lots of odd results. Many of them are deeply insightful, like the principle of comparative advantage, with the potential to improve lots of people’s lives when understood and acted upon. On the other hand, some of them are just bizarre, which for my money includes the claim that voting is irrational. Basically, the […]
A photographic portrait of Keith Packard writing his lca abstract:
Lunch for today. Recipe: Lamb forequarter chop (200g). Cook on frypan ’til medium, sprinkle with garlic salt to taste. One mandarin, peeled, broken, scattered. One cavendish banana, peeled, sliced, scattered. Blueberries. Strawberries. Total time to cook, consume, clean, and blog about an hour. Total cost, about $5. Missing were mango, cheese and beer. Oh well, […]
I’ve been trying for a while now to find someone saying something sensible about the current financial shenanigans. It’s quite difficult. First you’ve got to avoid getting distracted by the various folks who’re going to claim it’s a crisis even if it isn’t — newspapers looking for some bad news to run on page one, […]
As part of trying to convince myself to commit to my next project I spent some time wondering just what it might mean if the project really is beyond my abilities. At what point does it make sense to say “don’t even try in the first place?” or “okay, you’ve given it a fair shot, […]
So it’s been a bit over five years of indolence, time for a change. The original title for this blog was in homage to Andrew’s incoherence log, and found by trolling for interesting sounding words beginning with “in-“. Not seeing any reason to change a winning formula, I tried the same again, and came across […]