Author: Dan Dickinson

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Matt Haughey on Twittering During Tragedy

Frequently, when I start discussing Twitter with people who don’t use the service, I receive responses ranging from “I don’t know what I’d use it for” to “The world doesn’t need to know what I had for breakfast”.

Matt Haughey has just posted about twittering during tragedy, as he recently underwent treatment for a brain tumor. This closing paragraph stuck out to me:

>Twitter is a great tool for personal broadcast to a vast set of friends and family and it’s quickly turning into a new default communication medium for the online world. It can certainly be distracting in the face of day-to-day cubicle work, but in this specific case it […] was actually helpful at alerting friends to the accident and later informing them of the tragedy, and mirrors my own use of the service in a vaguely similar situation.

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Recommended

Doctor!

Paul Cornell, who was responsible for the fantastic “Human Nature” / “Family Of Blood” episodes of Doctor Who, has penned a lovely little Who-related short story for the Holidays, titled “The Last Doctor”:

The old man stood on the hill and looked up at the night sky. He’d been right to climb up here, despite how it had hurt his knees and back.
There were no stars.
There were no clouds. He knew where stars should remain. He knew by his learning and in his bones. Those stars were gone. They had been the last.
He’d known this was likely. But he was still frightened.

Reading it reminded me of the lovely treasure trove of historical Doctor Who documents the BBC released late last year, including this section from the 1963 background notes:
>A frail old man lost in space and time. They give him this name because they don’t know who he is. He seems not to remember where he has come from; he is suspicious and capable of sudden malignance; he seems to have some undefined enemy; he is searching for something as well as fleeing from something. He has a “machine” which enables them to travel together through time, through space, and through matter.

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Puzzled Over

Best Error Message Of 2009

Google Chrome was finally released for OS X this week. There’s plenty of ongoing debate about usability concerns, such as placement of tab close buttons.
While I don’t have a lot to contribute to those arguments, I’d like to inquire as to why upon attempting to open an HTML file from the OS, I would be given an alert that reads:
The document 'index.html' could not be opened. Chrome cannot open files in the 'HTML document' format.
Chromium issue #14808, “Double-clicking a local html file with Chrome as default browser doesn’t open the file”, has been open since June 20th of this year. It is rated with a priority of 3, which translates to “Low. Resolve when time allows.”
Did I miss some critical moment in time where opening HTML files locally became passé?