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The Language Instinct
Interesting premise that comprehension of language is something we are born with a priori. The Language Instinct gave me terms for ideas and concepts that I had naturally intuited learning Japanese but could never describe well.
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Catholic Church Takes First Step Towards Moral Relativism
The Pope has allowed that condoms are acceptable in certain limited circumstances. With this welcome first step, the Catholic Church joins us in accepting that the world is not always black and white, and that nuance is appropriate even for the most difficult of questions.
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Where Good Ideas Come From
Nice treatise on how good ideas come about as a result of collaborative environments, open sources of information and the clash of multiple disciplines, rather than just the “flash of inspiration” that people generally assume.
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Ed Vaizey: A Danger To The Internet
Ed Vaizey has all disavowed Net Neutrality, saying instead that market forces should shape future access to the Internet. He is dangerously wrong and underestimates the degree to which a tiered Internet will impinge upon creativity, innovation and free speech.
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A Tale of Two Commissions
An informal comparison of the response from the Canadian High Commissions in Australia and the UK to the same enquiry.
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Object Oriented jQuery Plugins Mk 2
Update: This code is now on GitHub and has had some substantial improvements made. You should look at the latest code here and submit a pull request if you make any improvements! In a recent post, I outlined a method to abstract away the complexity of creating an encapsulated jQuery plugin. However, as was pointed […]
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Object Oriented jQuery Plugins
Object oriented jQuery plugins have typically been hard to create in an elegant way. Here, we demonstrate how to design a clean jQuery plugin which allows for full encapsulation of data, and allows access to public methods without using the data object as a obvious proxy.
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Subtle Behaviour of The Static Keyword in PHP 5.3
Describing a slight inconsistency in PHP 5.3’s use of the static keyword and how it can affect late-static binding.
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Do You Still Want Gengo?
Gengo is a multi-lingual plugin for WordPress that has fallen by the wayside. Is there enough interest out there for me to restart development on it?
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Fabulous Capitulation
England’s performance at the World Cup 2010 was an embarrassment, and I’m glad that it’s over.
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Why You Probably Support Electoral Reform
There has been a recent groundswell of support for electoral reform in the UK. This piece describes why you are probably in favour of it – even if you don’t think you are.
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Using Multiple Start and End Keys for CouchDB Views
Describing how to patch CouchDB 0.10.1 to query views with multiple start and end key ranges in one request.
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Handling JSON Objects in CouchDB Native Erlang Views
Using CouchDB Erlang views can be confusing when your documents contain JSON objects. Understanding how Couch processes JSON internally and making use of Erlang pattern matching smoothes the way.
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CSS Technique: Morning Sunset
A novel CSS+Javascript effect that allows a site to blend from one full-page image to another as the visitor scrolls down the page.
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CouchDB For A Real-Time Monitoring System
CouchDB is a promising young technology offering an alternative to Postgres and other SQL-based datastores for fast retrieval and aggregation of data. Here, I discuss findings on its suitability for a real-time monitoring system.
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Modelling Recurring Events in PHP
In a previous article, I described how set operations could be modelled in PHP. With that foundation, we can begin to generate complex date criteria suitable for modelling recurring events. There are a number of different kinds of date condition, which Martin Fowler terms “Temporal Expressions”. Typical temporal expressions include “Last Day in the Month”, […]
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Fixing Mystique for Backtype Connect
Using the Mystique WordPress theme with the Backtype Connect plugin causes posts to stop rendering halfway through. Luckily, the fix is relatively straightforward.
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Grow Up Australia
Finally, there seems to be some momentum behind the drive to create an R18+ classification for videogames, which would bring Australia inline with the rest of the developed world. Hopefully with the support of major stores like EBGames and a large grassroots campaign, this anachronism will be corrected soon. Sign the petition and have your […]
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Set Operations in PHP
Modelling Set operations in PHP using object oriented classes to represent Union, Intersection and Difference.
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Automatically Mounting WebDAV in Ubuntu with a FuseDAV Init Script
How to automatically mount a WebDAV share in Ubuntu using FuseDAV, an init script and a simple configuration file.
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Howdy!
Technology and travel stories from a global roaming, kangaroo loving, sake drinking gaijin pom.
Check out my projects and my resume, take a look at some code on Github and feel free to contact me.