The Stack – Jason's Tech Blog

HTML

Abbreviation: hypertext markup language A file format for text documents. As you use the web, your browser downloads content in this format, interprets it, and presents you with a web page. What’s hypertext? Basically, text with links to other text. As can be seen by opening it in a text editor, the HTML of aContinue reading “HTML”

Beginning development with function and a DB on Begin

I wrote about my impressions with this software development platform: View at Medium.com I expressed some confusion about certain obstacles and described some workarounds. Ryan from the project replied on Twitter and helped me towards figuring out the issues, and I’m quite satisfied with proper solutions. I amended my post with the answers. But IContinue reading “Beginning development with function and a DB on Begin”

Computers and socialism

Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971–1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telexContinue reading “Computers and socialism”

Draft: Article 13

Note: I wanted to get this article finished and published before the protests, and before the vote. Oh well. Last Saturday across Europe there were demonstrations and protests against proposed new EU copyright legislation. The concerning legislation concerns ‘online content-sharing service providers’, which means sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and regular web hosting companies. RightContinue reading “Draft: Article 13”

On hypertext, its origins, as it is, and as it could be

Ideas about non-linear ways of representing information […] precede the invention of the computer. But it was computer technology that enabled a blossoming of competing hypertext projects, various network protocols and commercial software products.

Non-hierarchical file system

Long ago, as the design of the Unix file system was being worked out, the entries . and .. appeared, to make navigation easier. I’m not sure but I believe .. went in during the Version 2 rewrite, when the file system became hierarchical (it had a very different structure early on). Rob Pike —Continue reading “Non-hierarchical file system”

After Facebook

I don’t have a great reason for not having a Facebook account, for deleting mine, as I did, a couple of months ago. But I’m okay with that. I’m not particularly interested in convincing other people to follow my lead, at least not right now. But I do think Facebook is rather bad. Here’s someContinue reading “After Facebook”

Hacking on Holochain: first impressions

Here’s an exciting player in the ascendant decentralised computing space: Holochain. It’s a ‘post-blockchain’ platform for apps that communicate peer-to-peer, with secure user identities and cryptographically-validated shared data. This week, key Holo people and creative collective darVOZ are running a sprint-athon in London. This is where I met them (people in both groups) for the firstContinue reading “Hacking on Holochain: first impressions”

Using nginx to give your Urbit page a nice URL

Here’s the newest component of my little media empire, a chat room: chat.operatingspace.net (dead link removed) It runs on Urbit, which is a fascinating, complex project which I’ll sum up here as: a decentralised, programmable social network. This blog post is a tutorial for something I just learned how to do: set up nginx toContinue reading “Using nginx to give your Urbit page a nice URL”