Polifesto used to use a subset of HTML5 to mark up policies. I thought that this might be a bit unforgiving for users because there'd be an error if the markup wasn't valid XML. Influenced by a blog post, I thought I'd give Creole a try. Let me know what …

Harsh, but honest! So what's your reasoning?

Utter waste of time, effort and blog post.

Well you did ask!

I've been a long-time fan of OpenId, but I now think BrowserId is better. Here are the two main reasons why:

• With BrowserId the user enters an email address, whereas with OpenId the user enters a URL. Most users already have an email address that they remember, and can type …

The thing is that once you've committed in Mercurial, the idea is that it stays there forever. In Git, the idea is that commits only become immutable when it's made public.

That means that with Git you can look back over the history and change it so that it makes …

Your description of mercurial doesn't tie up with my (limited) experience, especially with regards to watching holby city. Unfortunately I'm too tired to Zzzzzzzzz

I know very little about the religious war of Git versus Mercurial, but ignorance has never stopped me from having a firm opinion.

I come down on the side of Git for these reasons:

Local Version Numbers

Mercurial has the idea of local version numbers as well as universal hashes …

Watching Looper last night I became exasperated with film makers for not getting time travel right. The model of time travel that they use suffers from the grandfather paradox. After the film I tried to explain time (with diagrams!!) to my friends, but everyone left immediately. I'm going to try …

Listening to the In Our Time programme on the Putney Debates brought home to me how much Adam Roberts had drawn on the historical New Model Army in his book of the same name.

On Monday last week I went camping in Cornwall:

taking the book with me. Not having …

Here are some instructions for setting up your Ubuntu 13.04 machine so that you can share your desktop with someone else over the internet.

Right, first of all go to the Dash (the thing in the top left of the screen) and type desktop sharing. Click on the Desktop …