1st November 2009 - Link Blog
No PDFs! The Sunlight Foundation point out that PDFs are a terrible way of implementing “more transparent government” due to their general lack of structure. At the Guardian (and I’m sure at other newspapers) we waste an absurd amount of time manually extracting data from PDF files and turning it in to something more useful. Even CSV is significantly more useful for many types of information.
Recent articles
- The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting - 4th September 2026
- OpenAI's rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis - 4th September 2026
- Claude's new system prompt really doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics - 2nd September 2026