Shiny Things

Thinkshiny.com - influencing Bush Administration policy since 2003.

Well, that was (not) painless

The upgrade to MovableType 3.0 has been completed. You’ll now need to register to post comments. Did I mention that I really, really loathe Perl?

Pavlov strikes back

We have a cat. Or, rather, we don’t have a cat. But there is a cat. She lives somewhere in the neighbourhood, and seems to think that we’re her second home. This is a happy arrangement for all concerned: we have all the fun of owning a cat, without all of the annoying feeding and litter-box-changing and licence-obtaining - except for one of the flatmates, who for some reason loathes cats.

Google Groups Reloaded

Google should be trumpeting this from the rooftops. “We’re going to beat Yahoo at their own game! We’re going to take our search technology, apply it to web discussion groups like we did to Usenet, and thump those lamers from Sunnyvale!” Instead, it’s squirreled away in an unfashionable corner of Google Labs, just waiting to be prodded and poked until it’s ready to be launched, and become the next Gmail-esque addition to the stable of things that Google does so much better than Yahoo and Microsoft.

What really drives the foreign exchange markets

If you’ve spent any time observing the financial markets, or watched the talking heads on Business Sunday, you’ve probably gained the impression that currency markets are driven by fundamentals - interest rates, trade balances - or maybe by technical factors - moving averages, candlesticks, the entrails of a goat. Nope. What really happens was best illustrated around midday today, Australian eastern time. About five minutes before midday (UTC+10), the pound sterling (GBP, sterling, cable, or whatever other name it goes by) suddenly plummeted sixty points in about five minutes.