Since I rebuilt my web site, I've been using some interesting statistics tools that show information about visitors to my web site. Back in the day, pretty much the only traffic you'd see was real people using web browsers to actually look at your site. These days, the amount of traffic coming from spiders (automated "bots" that crawl the web indexing its pages) is phenomenal. Sadly, these days I get about as much traffic from spiders as I do from actual people. In addition to the spider-bots, there's also a lot of traffic from other kinds of malicious bots whose only job is to crawl the web looking...

Alchemy gets a bad rap these days, seen only as a primitive version of chemistry - its practitioners greedy fools thinking they could turn lead into gold. The truth is that Alchemy was an early attempt to understand how the world worked, and it blended ideas from religion and science. Some Alchemists believed that if they understood enough about the elemental forces in nature, they would be able to create the philosopher's stone, which would be able to turn base matter into gold. Other Alchemists were driven more by the quest for spiritual enlightenment, and saw their proto-chemistry experiments...

I've been developing for the web since 1994, and in that time I've seen technologies come and go. Some have been truly bad ideas from the start (like the blink tag). Others filled a genuine need (like Flash). Back in the mid-nineties, I dabbled a lot with Macromedia Director. I spent countless hours building a thing I called the ColourZoomer, which loaded an image and then let you interactively change the colours, zoom and crop it. I learned a lot about OO programming doing that. I also built an application called "The Alchemist", which was like a ColourZoomer on steroids. It let you load images...

It seems to me that a lot of the problems caused by democracy (corruption, lack of representation, mindless politicking, fear and loathing campaigns, dog-whistling, short-termism etc) are attributable to the fact that our parliamentry system is based on very old technology - the idea that the only way the voice of the people can be heard is for those people to be organised by geographical areas where all will vote for a single person who will go and represent them and their area in a parliament somewhere. What this causes is a concentration of power in the hands of a few, most of whom we actually...

Do you see, mesdames et messieurs, the contents of my shop? It is full of great works. The human spirit has been squeezed dry by their creation. They stand here, mute but immutable; silent evidence; the fingerprints of the human soul. You can see it in every stroke. The soul is the work's shadow. It is set in the hardened paint like the figures frozen at Pompeii, or the silhouettes of those vaporised at Hiroshima. What price shall I put on them? I'm interested in how a "realistic" image captured by a camera can evolve into something more abstract. Digital photography is my chosen medium because...