So it’s the new year. Yay! How time flies when you’re hav­ing fun.

I don’t know about you, but I had a blast this last year. New (awe­some) apart­ment, started on my the­sis, launched this blog, and just gen­er­ally had a good time.

So how to fol­low it up? What can 2010 do to beat this?

Rather than com­ing up with a whole bunch of new year’s res­o­lu­tions for myself, I thought it might be more inter­est­ing to reverse the process — and say what I’d like to see oth­ers do in the com­ing year.

Through­out the year, I’ve encoun­tered a lot of soft­ware prod­ucts that, for one rea­son or another, I’d like to see improve. Per­haps they sim­ply suck cur­rently, and des­per­ately need to be fixed — or per­haps they’re already so good that I’m happy to use them, but I can think of fur­ther improve­ments that’d really make the “best in class”.

So for the next cou­ple of days, I’ll post my thoughts on what I’d like to see from a few of these prod­ucts dur­ing the com­ing year.

Hope you have a great new year’s eve! See you next year.

Ever since I signed up on StackOverflow.com roughly a year ago, I’ve had an OpenID. On the whole, I think it’s a great con­cept, and I wish more sites would allow me to sign in with it.

How­ever, a few things have been both­er­ing me about it. (more…)

Looks like the spam­mers found me. Just had to delete 10 spam com­ments that appeared overnight. What a shame. I’m going to try enabling the Akismet anti­spam plu­gin. Hope­fully it doesn’t mark real com­ments as spam. If it does, my apolo­gies. Let me know and I’ll beat it into submission.

As a gen­eral rule, I swore years ago to stay as far away from web design and web devel­op­ment as at all pos­si­ble. I still believe that this is one of the fun­da­men­tal rules of hap­pi­ness, and I haven’t regret­ted it, but for once, I was actu­ally impressed (rather than depressed, which is what web devel­op­ment usu­ally makes me feel like) with a few pieces of web design, and so I decided to make an excep­tion and talk about it for a moment.

After launch­ing this blog ear­lier today, I spent a bit of time research­ing how to get a more intu­itive syn­tax for for­mat­ting my posts. I’m not really a fan of “rich text” text edi­tors like the one Word­press uses by default (luck­ily it can be dis­abled). It offers lim­ited con­trol, is awk­ward to use, and just doesn’t lend itself to well-formatted posts.

So I decided to look for alternatives.

(more…)

Here we go again!

I think this is prob­a­bly my third attempt at blog­ging. Hope­fully I won’t get dis­tracted this time. At least I’ve got a hand­ful of top­ics lined up this time, and hon­estly, how hard can it be? It’s just writ­ing stuff! :p

So yeah, wel­come to my blog!