dermot's blog

I wrote an open letter to the Facebook admins. In the short time since writing I've noticed two fairly significant bugs with the system (I think to do with some jQuery-like functionality associated with the in-app chat system1), and one significant omission - users now can't access the Pages of which they have previously declared themselves to be fans. This last one seems very very stupid for a platform that supposedly makes a lot of money from advertising revenue, which is - in part - based on the Pages model. I have absolutely no idea how this UI overhaul made it out of testing. The fact that there's no testing visibility only serves to increase the them-and-us feeling that has been rising on Facebook steadily in the last year or so.

As a photographer, you always fantasise about the perfect shot. Whatever your personal interest is, whether lanscapes, portraits, wildlife, you always imagine what it'd be like to have a perfect confluence of the factors that make a great photo.

I've been a fan of Paul Nicklen's for a while, but this story just took my breath away. Watch it. Love it.

I was contracted to reprise my designs for Itzacon 6 this coming February. I had been running the concept around in my head and had been thinking a lot about the continuum of design ethos that starts with Italian Futurism, goes through Art Deco and on into the 1950s with Streamline Moderne and what has become known as Raygun Gothic. A retro feel, slightly grungy but also somewhat aspirational.

I started toying with the idea of having a richer desktop about a month ago. I was inspired by all the wondrously rich and often pointless computer displays one sees in films (I don't mean Alien, rather Independence Day, Quantum of Solace, et al), where there's literally more data than one can process streaming away in the background for no apparent reason. Feasibility aside, I'd have no problems having a desktop background which was animated - not a wildly fast one, it has to be said, but one that wasn't the same ol' static thing minute in minute out. On top of that, it's handy to have useful information displayed on your desktop. All sorts of things could fall under this category of useful; Disk usage, Time, date, news feeds, yadda yadda yadda.