Liesl Barrell

Today (March 24) the blogosphere honours Ada Lovelace, considered the first ever computer programmer (and daughter of poofy-shirted poet Byron, no less). Charles Babbage nicknamed her The Enchantress of Numbers, and she kicked algorithmic ass for his Analytical Engine back in the pre-natal days of computing. A Web of One’s Own But what’s really neat [...]

One of the only good things about being stuck in two airports and a plane this holiday season, was that I got to read the current issue of Wired cover to cover in one sitting (in addition to completing many crosswords, notes on my content plan for this blog, listening to music, and staring intently [...]

We discovered something strange at HTC the other day. There was some Swedish character encoding lurking in our system. I for one think the Swedes are commendable for their efforts to fight the inevitable extinction of natural blondes. If we were to map the human genome on an actual map of the world, Sweden would [...]

In a slightly more banal lost-in-translation disparity than the whole “crisis-opportunity” thing, the French the word for upload and download is technically one and the same: Télécharger. While many French interfaces dodge around it by using recevoir/envoyer or importer/exporter for clarity, I think it’s neat that for “Télécharger” the focus is on the action in [...]