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thoughts of a 21st century environmentalist
Disqus can go fuck itself
Moment of rage here. For those unaware, Disqus is a commenting system you can add to your site instead of rolling your own. I used to be a fan – instead of creating a new account for every blog you wanted to comment on you could log in with an existing twitter/facebook/google account. And then […]
Posted in: Uncategorized
Reddit is just cats now
September 13, 2013
So i used to be a reddit fan. Great way to find new stuff. Except these last months it seems to front page has turned into a pet show-and-tell. Cut animals are all very well, bit hardly newsworthy. Conversely major events take place in the world. Huge surveillance revelations from the Snowden leaks, which you’d […]
Posted in: Uncategorized
Protests in the news
January 7, 2013
It’s very interesting to see how the media covers (or fails to cover) protests. I read in headline from a large international news source today that “hundreds” demonstrated for press freedom in China. Funny thing is, “hundreds” is actually not very many people. I have seen protests with 200-500 people and they barely made a […]
Posted in: Uncategorized
SQLAlchemy – MYSQL has gone away
January 2, 2013
So this bug bit me on the arse and it took me so long to track down the necessary bits of information needed to fix it that I think it’s worth sharing the hard won wisdom. The Problem When using SQLAlchemy with MYSQL for your python webapp, you encounter one or several of these error […]
Posted in: Computers
Forget Hydrogen: why H2 will never be big
September 28, 2012
I’ll confess up-front: this post exists largely because I feel the need to say things about energy and environment, topics which have been a bit lacking on this page. So I feel the need for a little public communication, sharing some of the things I know – things which to me seem fairly self evident […]
Posted in: Uncategorized
Old text, but still relevant: Protests and the Passive Voice
August 28, 2012
Ah, news coverage on g20 protests. There’s no better way to realise how biased ordinary news coverage is until its about something you’re personally involved in. All these stories which seem quite reasonable and fair, until you know something about what they’re talking about and then you see it as right-wing hysteria, the tremulous voices […]
An Ubuntu subscription service
July 28, 2012
The idea: A way for OSS devs to get paid. First the problem. OSS is great, but it’s always welcome if people can get a bit of money for their work. Some people try to live off it, others just pay for hosting. But the software is provided for free. You don’t want to pay […]
Posted in: Uncategorized
The hijacking of Sex
July 26, 2012
I recently finished reading “the happy hooker” by Xaviera Hollander. While it would be a stretch to say that it was a good book, it was definitely interesting and got me thinking about sexuality. It occurred to me in particular that public ideas on sex are heavily skewed towards the views of a few small […]
Posted in: Musings
Github for Science: A Concept
July 4, 2012
So coding and science have a rocky relationship. Scientists write programs to do all sorts of things: control experiments, process data, visualize it, store it in databases, solve maths problems, and more. But scientists are not software architects. Nor are they often terribly good project managers. What this means is that code that is crucial […]
Posted in: Computers
Why all of science should use Python
July 3, 2012
Bit of a nerdy one today, and not one relating to anything in particular. It’s just that over the past months i’ve become increasingly obsessed with the Python programming language. It’s just beautiful – I’m not going to go into much details as they can be found on python.org, but in short python can be […]
Posted in: Computers
Musings of an Idle Mind 
November 7, 2013
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