October 2008
18 posts
Brand and Ross
Tedious and trivial as it is, the fuss in the UK about the Brand and Ross incident highlights how out of control the BBC is. If the BBC was a normal company they both would have been sacked instantly. But the BBC craves justification, and in the modern mind the aura of celebrity somehow casts it . So they don’t sack them. They wait 10 days and then in the face of ferocious public...
Firefox 3.1b
I’ve been using the latest Firefox beta for the last week. It’s excellent.
A month ago I got fed up with Safari maxing my CPU. I tried Opera but it’s kinda fugly and I just didnt enjoy it on a mac.
I’ve used FF a lot in the past but got frustrated with it maxing my CPU; a weeks testing suggests it’s fine now.
I tried to get Geode working but couldn’t find...
Asset bubbles and fiscal policy
What role did UK fiscal policy play in the inflation bubble? Hard to correlate, but looking at revenue versus expenditure, we can see that the moment that Labour came to power, there was a massive growth in spending that frittered away the piggy bank for the bad days to come:
So when Brown boasted an end to boom and bust, what he actually meant was that he was spending as if we were already in...
interesting take on greenery vs politics →
Neal Stephenson's Anathem
I’m a huge Neal Stephenson fan: every geeks favourite author. I just finished his latest tome, ‘Anathem’. A great book even though it is extremely peculiar and occasionally slightly plodding.
Company websites as social websites
I think Ning is an awesome platform. It’s really quick and easy to create powerful, good-looking sites, and the API is very sophisticated. Insterad of having a normal company website, why not reimagine it as a social website for your customers and host it on Ning?
Asset bubbles and shorts
One might also note that the asset bubble was not because of shorts; rather, shorts reduce the probability of a bubble, provide advanced warning of bubbles and reduce the overall volatility of the market.
added comments with disqus
37 Signals video
This is a great presentation of 37Signals development philosophy:
http://network.businessofsoftware.org/video/video/show?id=2352433%3AVideo%3A2016
Asset bubbles
So banks and regulators are taking a pasting for the financial crisis. But the core culprits are the governments and no one’s calling them on it.
Every Western government has supported a huge asset bubble for the past 15 years, as typically asset prices are not factored into inflation figures.
It is the bursting of this bubble that has destablized the banks and not the other way around.
...
Ian Davies joins Quolos
Team coming along nicely.
Goodwood
The cars I drove Friday
Amadeus CEO day
Had a great day out on Friday with the CEO’s of Amadeus’s other portfolio companies. Did some driving and learnt a few things.