The Bush administration was characterised by a curious indifference to inconvenient facts. Not just bare-faced lies, such as Iraq’s fearsome and non-existent arsenal, or the disingenuous obfuscation of scientific evidence to muddy the waters on climate change; they also denied reality to themselves, in a way that elevated incompetence to self-sabotage (de-Baathification, the economy). The [...]

The new Star Trek movie is good, much better than I had anticipated. After the abominable Star Wars prequels, I was sceptical about the recent trend for “rebooting”. But, as with James Bond and Batman, this new movie maintains the spirit of the original series while adding some fresh touches. The casting of the young [...]

I wrote a post on LiberalConspiracy.org about the poor choices on offer for left-inclined voters in the UK.

The latest version of Quentin T’s Boks, a visual grid editor for Blueprint CSS, is out. I’m pleased to notice (thanks to Quentin’s head up) that to generate random text, it uses part of my Almirun Common Library, which in turn connects to the Lipsum service. Isn’t open source ace.

There is something seriously wrong-headed about the mushy sentiments expressed in today’s Guardian by Salam Pax, Baghdad blogger and darling of the Western liberal media, regarding the shoe thrown at Bush by Muntazer al-Zaidi. His arguments about the responsibilities of a journalist vis-a-vis the feelings of a private citizen are those of a jobsworth, and [...]

Well surprise surprise. Another instance of one part of Adobe not communicating properly with another. So I go to the Kuler website to try out some colour combinations. It tells me I need to install the latest version of the Flash Player. Strange, because I’m already running Flash 10. I assume it must be some [...]

The deadline for Grant Skinner’s #tweetcoding contest (the concept is: write something interesting in 140 characters of ActionScript – check out the rules) is now over. My own entry, Nostalgia, was pretty lame, but there were some amazing ones. My favourites in no particular order:
Zach Archer’s Sound Effects.
Luis M Viras’ Osciloscope.
T Friedel’s Diagonal Snake.
Loren Bednar’s [...]

How is it, in 2009, that there are still AS2 sites being built? Maintained, I will grudgingly allow, but why are there still sites being built in this palaeolithic technology? Steam-punk chic? It’s beyond me …
(And more importantly, how did I end up agreeing to work on one of these damned projects?)

For obscure and uninteresting reasons, I’ve found myself working on a Windows machine these last couple of days doing Flash development. Neither of these things (Flash, Windows) is a good thing, but needs must. The editor in the Flash IDE being a freshly dumped and steaming elephant turd (I give up all for it, given [...]

I see Google have got around to activating Gears for GMail: this means, after some background synchronising, you can use search through your email without being connected to the web. This is great news, because GMail is one of those few web apps that are actually better than their desktop counterparts (although Thunderbird was alright [...]