technology

The Mule goes SURFing

30 July 2010

A month ago I posted about “SURF”, the newly-established Sydney R user forum (R being an excellent open-source statistics tool). Shortly after publishing that post, I attended the inaugural forum meeting. While we waited for attendees to arrive, a few people introduced themselves, explaining why they were interested in R and how much experience they [...]

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Surf

25 June 2010

A new R user group has launched in Sydney. It aims to bring together both experienced R users and complete beginners. The forum will meet monthly with talks on a wide range of subjects exploring all of the facets of this powerful tool.

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The Re-birth of the Tablet

5 May 2010

The iPad looks set to inject new life into the tablet computer, which has been limping along for the last 10 years, not dying but not setting the world on fire either. Even so, I am not about to dump my Kindle.

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Gigabang for your buck

1 May 2010
Small ISP chart

The Age and the Herald published an extremely junky chart about broadband plans that hides some anomalies in the data and provides a valuable lesson on the importance of good charting technique.

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Symbol Soup – using tags in the Mule Stable

14 March 2010
Tags

The first time you visit the Mule Stable it can look a bit like a symbol soup, full of # symbols, @ symbols and exclamation marks. But these symbols are in fact a short-hand that can turn posting simple text messages into something a lot more powerful. In this demo video, I run through all the different types of tag symbols you can use on the Mule Stable.

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The Kindle in Australia

24 October 2009

Initial impressions of the Kindle now that it is shipping to Australia: the good, the bad and the crippled.

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Posterous: the next big thing?

17 September 2009

A few months ago, a new site arrived on the increasingly crowded web 2.0 scene. Posterous offers a medium that fits somewhere between a blog and a microblog (the canonical example of the microblog being, of course, the juggernaut that is Twitter). Maybe it should be called a “miniblog”. Posterous is not the only site [...]

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Dropbox

29 October 2008

I feel I am due for a break from the GFC* and so will instead return to the subject of Web 2.0. Whenever I come across a new Web 2.0 site/application/service I cannot help but sign up. A quick search for the phrase “welcome to” in my gmail archives throws up about 100 messages, representing [...]

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An Online Communication Primer

1 September 2008

In a recent post on his Sprechblase (“Speech Bubble”) blog, Cem Basman examines a number of different forms of communication that have evolved on the web: chat, forums, wikis, blogs and microblogs. Although the boundaries can be blurred, Cem’s summary of the key features of each of these forms is a useful one. The original [...]

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Poor Phorm

30 July 2008

Google and others have had great success with online advertising, while the provision of the mere “pipes” of the internet has become an increasingly competitive, commoditised business. So, it is no surprise that some ISPs have felt they have missed out on the real success of the internet and are keen to join the party. [...]

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