Simile Timeline, an AJAX widget for visualising time-based events »

Simile Timeline is an interactive widget for arbitrary timelines. It implements a data visualisation that is something like what Edward Tufte mocked up as an alternative to Gantt charts for project timelines.

It gives two views: a zoomed in view of the detail, and a zoomed out view to give context. Looks great.

Lifehacker has a good example of it being used to record a personal timeline — a CV of sorts.

Ask E.T.: Project management graphics »

In this thread on project management graphics, Edward Tufte shows a fantastic alternative solution to Gantt charts, which as implemented in MS Project scale badly both in the time and the task dimensions.

Would love to see an application implement this. Or maybe have a go myself.

Amazon adds static IP addresses to EC2 »

This is great news: Amazon EC2 now lets you reserve static IP addresses, and allocate them to your instances. Previously, IP addresses were dynamic — if you shutdown an instance, or it crashed, the IP that it had was lost: it would go back into the general allocation pool.

This makes EC2 much more viable for running public web sites, because now you can set up a load balancer on a static IP, and not have to worry about dynamic DNS, and clients that ignore TTLs.

Ross Gittins wants you to stop showering »

Ross Gittins, an otherwise seemingly sane economist opinion writer, wants you to go easy on your showering, in the name of energy savings. We’ve all been brainwashed by Dove ads, apparently, and can easily go a few days without a shower.

Ross Gittins hasn’t sat behind the guy on the bus that I did tonight, obviously.

MetaCarta GeoSearch News »

MetaCarta’s GeoSearch News is a newly launched service that indexes news articles from a bunch of sources (the wires and masthead news sites primarily), mines the content for location data, and then plots those on a searchable Google map.

Nifty!

Paul Keating on Woolley’s Opera House plan »

Paul Keating has a fun piece in the SMH about Ken Woolley’s plan for a new, unsympathetic opera theatre on Sydney’s Opera House forecourt:

Joern Utzon gave Sydney not only the greatest building of the 20th century but one unique in all history. Its plastic yet classic forms confounded his competitors, who entered designs based on their idolatry of the steel beam and the box-like structures which grew, Meccano-like, from their drawing boards.

A giant box dropped into this space, I believe, has absolutely no merit. And to provide a theatre on the scale proposed by Woolley would need to be much larger, far larger than that illustrated in the Herald. A major auditorium will look like a major auditorium.

Ken Woolley says:

“Some critics will feel it compromises Utzon’s original vision, while others will say it just will not work … It does demand courage. Only the brave would dare build something near the sacred monument.”

Wow, such clever and subtle mind-trickery there from Ken. We’re not cowards just because we don’t like your plan.

NSW photographer’s rights »

Andrew Nemeth:

An analysis of legal issues which apply to street photography in NSW Australia, written from a photographer’s perspective, with a focus on what rights shooters have (and don’t have) when it comes to candid photographs of people.

Even though “unauthorised” photography hasn’t been prohibited, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s open slather. Far from it! NSW Defamation and Offensive-behaviour laws still apply, as do common-law doctrines of Nuisance, Trespass, or statutory prohibitions arising out of the Commonwealth Trade Practices Act.

Pragmatism vs. Idealism: IE8 »

Joel Spolsky on web standards, and the Internet Explorer 8 team’s decision to default into backwards compatibility (or not):

As usual, the idealists are 100% right in principle and, as usual, the pragmatists are right in practice. The flames will continue for years. This debate precisely splits the world in two. If you have a way to buy stock in Internet flame wars, now would be a good time to do that.

Secretly? Here’s what I think is going to happen. The IE8 team going to tell everyone that IE8 will use web standards by default, and run a nice long beta during which they beg people to test their pages with IE8 and get them to work. And when they get closer to shipping, and only 32% of the web pages in the world render properly, they’ll say, “look guys, we’re really sorry, we really wanted IE8 standards mode to be the default, but we can’t ship a browser that doesn’t work,” and they’ll revert to the pragmatic decision. Or maybe they won’t, because the pragmatists at Microsoft have been out of power for a long time. In which case, IE is going to lose a lot of market share, which would please the idealists to no end, and probably won’t decrease Dean Hachamovitch’s big year-end bonus by one cent.

This is a great, entertaining article from Joel that explores the legacy of browser (non) standards and backwards compatibility, and Microsoft’s tough choice between idealism and pragmatism.

Mike van Niekerk interview: Future of journalism series »

The Editor’s Weblog is running a series of articles on the future of journalism. First off is Mike van Niekerk, editor-in-chief of online for Fairfax Media (Sydney Morning Herald, The Age).

Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

… We must be careful not to allow our better instincts drowned out by what one thinks the audience wants. For example, stories about Britney Spears are regularly highly rated on our websites. Those kinds of stories can be a temptation, but we must be careful about upholding our brand values.

Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?

I have to be very cautious with this answer. The economics of new media make it very difficult to fund investigative journalism in the same way it once was. If you’re talking about the kind of journalism that keeps governments and corporations at check, I am concerned about its sustainability in the future.

Related: the ABC is launching a whole bunch of hyperlocal regional sites, populated by repurposed existing ABC news content, and user generated content, and is setting up a continuous news desk in Ultimo.

Hello, world!

After an awfully long hiatus — almost four years — I’m firing up the old word processor and starting to blog again.

This, then, is the first post of my new blog. I’ll be posting about things that I find interesting, and that I hope you do too. Links and articles about technology, software development, management, internet culture, and business. And photos. And whatever else happens to come along.

So, let’s get started :)