Bibliofaction short story website needs a new home

Would you like to run Bibliofaction.com? Despite our best efforts, Andrew and I are no longer finding the time to properly look after the Bibliofaction website and community. So it’s time to find someone new to take care of it. It’s going free to a good home (though it has some costs involved and would benefit from some technical work). We’d like the website to be run by someone who supports the original goals of the site – to encourage everyone to have a go at writing a short story. It should be a welcoming, inclusive and inspiring place – but we won’t have ongoing involvement in the site, so really it’s your call! Here are some top-level facts that might be useful to you: 3,500+ published stories ~10,000 visits per month (it was a bit higher when we were … Continue reading »

Drawn: Multi-armed Bandit Experiments

I read this really interesting article on multi-armed bandit experiments the other day, and while I enjoyed the graphs and the stats, I got distracted wondering what a multi-armed bandit experiment would actually look like? So I had a go at drawing one last night.

Why removing evolution from science textbooks might not really matter

This needs more thought, but writing this has helped me to join up a few ideas I was stewing over with my coffee yesterday morning while my son was napping. So I’ll publish this as is, and your thoughts are welcome. While it’s useful to teach the fundamentals of physics, chemistry and biology in schools, I think what we need to start with and to prioritize is teaching the scientific method, the importance of curiosity and the need to question the answers. As an aside: Question the Answers is also the name of my favourite Bosstones album. Rather than teaching the latest and best hypotheses, we should be showing kids how science as a whole works. How a community of disparate researchers come to agreement on an idea, and how people continue to challenge that idea as best as possible … Continue reading »

The Witchery of Story

  The opening quote from The Storytelling Animal. This should be a good read.

Evening coding

With lots of interesting client work on at the moment, I’ve decided to spend some evening time moving along the next version of Done by When. This is nothing too stressful, but the project is getting really interesting now. I think I’m over the initial conceptual learning curve and now I’m making proper progress. Where the launch version of Done by When was primarily a working proof of concept, this next version is about attention to detail and responsiveness (that’s the speed of interactions as opposed to the adaptive layout stuff that’s already in place). I feel like I’m properly upgrading something when I’m spending as much time removing code as I am writing it new. More updates soon.

For a free and open internet, be quick

“On December 3rd, the world’s governments will meet to update a key treaty of a UN agency called the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Some governments are proposing to extend ITU authority to Internet governance in ways that could threaten Internet openness and innovation, increase access costs, and erode human rights online.” – src: protectinternetfreedom.net Here are a couple of places you can show your support for a free and open web right away: http://www.protectinternetfreedom.net https://www.google.com/intl/en/takeaction If you have a bit more time, you can get creative with Mozilla’s Webmaker kit https://webmaker.org/en-US/ITU/kit/ You can see who is speaking on your behalf here: http://files.wcitleaks.org/public/S12-WCIT12-ADM-0004!!PDF-E_18Nov.pdf And this article sums up the transparency issues: https://www.cdt.org/blogs/cynthia-wong/1607…

Learning Backbone.js and Single Page Applications

Following up my post about the backbone.js book I downloaded, I’ve been playing, testing and learning as much as I can. So much so that I’ve neglected my Coursera design course, though I think this is a better use of my time in the long run. This particular Coursera course was mainly to test out the MOOC process first-hand, and it’s pretty cool on the whole. I’ll still be taking part in the Game Theory course that’s coming up, and I’d give Coursera a big thumbs up overall. I’ve studied design previously, so the content in the course (while very good) was mostly a re-hashing of old stuff for me, whereas delving into the world of Backbone.js and Single Page Applications has been a great way to challenge my existing approach to web design and development. It’s been a real brain … Continue reading »

On aiming high

Testing, testing… This little chunk of the internet is coming at you via space. Sure, lots of our data and information bounces around satellites these days, but this is the first time I’ve personally aimed a big metal dish at an object ‘floating’ thousands of miles above the Earth. This also means we’re ready for winter, when the wind and the storms tend to knock out the phone lines around here for a few days at a time. Back up connectivity like this makes my little web business a bit more resilient.

Menu Planner: Sequence of user needs

Here’s the next instalment from my Coursera project notes:   This has been an interesting exercise but I’m looking forward to doing some actual design and prototyping work soon. I’ve also been thinking about how much more flexible software design can be than physical product design; especially hosted auto-updating software like a web app.

On getting agile with Google @App_engine

In the course of just 48 hours I deployed six separate upgrades to Done by When, mostly thanks to Google App Engine. These weren’t major changes, but they were distinct pieces of work driven by user feedback and an analysis of the system/user stats. I was shipping early, and shipping often and had quietly moved into a working agile methodology. This is a huge change from working on projects with a six month lead time, a massive spec, a big launch and then maybe an upgrade to version two a year down the line if you’re lucky; which is the sad story of too many web projects. It’s only now, when I stop to reflect on this change in working practice that I realised how much of this is due to Google App Engine’s one-click deploy. You develop locally, set … Continue reading »