"Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place."

joemoransblog: Another great piece by Simon Kuper, this time about the French: http://tinyurl.com/32u5jg8

'Asked what aspects of the 12th-century economy should be exported to modern Britain, Boyle said: "Debt-free living; a lot of holidays and parties and a lack of work ethic; the idea of a 'just price' for goods; some aspects of the medieval guilds and the importance of craftsmanship; and a more spiritual response to money."'

"[Crawford's book eloquently] makes the case for what [he] calls 'manual competence' in an age when the young are being steered instead towards 'the most ghostly kinds of work' and an insecure future in offices."

"A pioneering company in Denmark is giving people with autism the chance to apply their skills to jobs from IT to product testing. The result is a huge success that's about to be rolled out across Europe. Founder Thorkil Sonne tells Michael Booth how his workforce's superhuman recall and unflinching focus could teach the rest of us a thing or two"

"Here I’ll show how to use boto to start a server instance then how to send a file to the instance and execute a command on the remote server, and finally I’ll show how to terminate the instance." Looks like this

"An integrated interface to current and future infrastructural services offered by Amazon Web Services."

A pure Perl script to manipulate EC2 and S3. Saves having to install all that Java nonsense.

Amazingly, there is no graphical user interface to enable Windows Vista to connect to a VPN when either the client or server is behind a NAT, and it doesn't adjust automatically either. No, you need to edit a bloody registry setting. No wonder Cisco make good money on VPNs.

There are things that aren't documented in the manual, namely that you need to wrap the zone definition in a view {} block, which needs to be before Apple's view {} block (which is, thankfully, at the very end of the file).

Having spent part of this morning poking around in the guts of a wiki trying to figure out its format, I find that Apple have actually published a PDF with that info in. It doesn't mention, let alone document, the SQLite revision.db file, though.

A tool to import a directory structure into Wikipedia. Not quite what I want, but it might get me some of the way there.

How to programmatically futz with a MediaWiki install.

How to convert HTML to various wiki formats (including MediaWiki)

Dan fixed this (rather annoying and definitely underdocumented) issue this morning. So far, my experience with Mac OS X Server has been... whelming.

Bloody IE6. Still, filed for future reference.

On exchange rates, Apple support, conferences and more. A good read.

The Guardian carries extracts from a book about everyday life, on breakfast, office work, and weather.

"WCAG 2 is not too broken to fix, but we have no reason to think the WCAG Working Group will actually fix it."

And this, kids, is why I make sure I have plenty of breaks for cups of tea. No, really. Next up: when playing WoW, if you need to go to the loo, actually do so.

Including how to revert to the previous, insecure user:pass@host method