Cross Dominant

#“This is Facebook’s Idea of Chronological” Oh I just give up. »

#“LEGO - Bring Back Beautiful” via buzzfeed.com Lego went down a terrible bolt-hole with all the boy-movie-centric crap. Good for biz in the short term but leaves behind 50% of the potential target market. Our 8 y/o daughter loves Lego, but it's the normal building blocks she likes so she can make architectural stuff (like the wonderful Ad above), not all that character-driven single-use rubbish. I'd love to see kits for London Eye, Empire State, Golden Gate, Olympics 2012 etc that would appeal to boys and girls. »

#“Don’t Forget to Download Your App Inventor Projects - Shutdown on Dec 31st” If you ever did anything on GoogleApp Inventor, you have 9 days to download your code.I had to log in 30 times to download all the projects of the kids in our school (30 teams of 2). Next step is to setup a private instance of App Inventor on App Engine and EC2 in lieu of MIT being ready. »

#“nide, a browser-based IDE for Node.JS is just what I need” via coreh.github.com I like the Cloud 9 IDE but it isn't integrated into my workflow. nide, OTOH, is installed on my servers. On first try, I love it already. Editing code in the browser is so much easier than using console Emacs/VIM or SFTP remotely. It looks like they have tied Git support in too. They need to add some sort of simple access control soon and I'll be a complete convert. »

#“We Need a Shrine to Tomorrow’s World in The Grafton Arcade” Ask many people of a certain age (around 40) where they first encountered a computer and you will invariably hear "Tomorrow's World in the Grafton Arcade". Yet strangely if you google it, most of the mentions online are by me since 2005. I can't overstate how important that shop was for several years in the 1980s. Just like the first McDonald's on Grafton Street was a Mecca for us muckers up for our Christmas shopping in the 80s, so too was Tomorrow's World for anyone who knew what a home computer was. »

#“Se\u00e1n Sherlock Needs to Watch and Listen To This” I listened to last night's TWiT podcast in the car this morning on the way from Cork to Dublin. The bulk of it is a brilliant debate between host Leo Laporte and guest Nilay Patel about online piracy, SOPA and intellectual property rights.  What's marvellous about it is that both of them seem to initially be in opposition to each other but both have extremely relevant points to make and refine their arguments. »

#“MongoPress - A MongoDB-based CMS inspired by WordPress” These guys started out building a plugin for WordPress to make it use MongoDB instead of MySQL but found it was almost impossible. So they decided to build an alternative called MongoPress based on many of the good things about WordPress and hopefully none of the bad things (Die-WordPress-Editor-Die-Die-Die).It's early days but it looks interesting so far. I'll play around over Christmas and see how it scales. »

#“Android 4.0 (ICS/Ice Cream Sandwich) is Pretty Lovely” I've got to hand it to Google, ICS is an absolute pleasure to use. Everything feels integrated and consistent and beautiful. It's really interesting how much of a difference even a font change can make. I just played around with an early community Alpha firmware of it for the HTC Sensation and even at this buggy stage, I want to switch. The iPad2 I've been using for the past 10 days feels like a clunky locked-down VTech toy in comparison. »

#“Jesus Christ Facebook, Now You Decide to Fuck-Up Python Users?” Earlier in the week I got annoyed at Facebook for changing yet another API for no good reason (oh let's change blah_blah to blahBlah from now on, just for kicks). I've come to the realisation that they are breaking the web bit by bit. A site you built in 1997 willprobablybe 100% functional in 2011. A site you built in 2010 with deep Facebook integration, will probably be 90% broken in 2012 if you are notmaintainingit daily. »

#“What do you young hipsters use to protect your iPads from the rain?” I'm thinking some sort of European Man Purse? I went with this in the end, from the North Face Outlet in Kildare. »