It Burns! It Burns!

Bugs beware.

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:20:37 -0400

Bugs beware.

I work in a dangerous office.

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:58:35 -0400

I work in a dangerous office.

Alabama Shakes - Boys and Girls (by WNRNradio)

Thu, 16 May 2013 21:23:18 -0400

Alabama Shakes - Boys and Girls (by WNRNradio)

(via ProtoHouse by Softkill Design) The house comes with a flame...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:23:07 -0400

(via ProtoHouse by Softkill Design)

The house comes with a flame thrower just in case it turns out that you’re housing a vengeful mama alien.

Hauschka - Radar (by Jeff Desom)

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:00:08 -0400

Hauschka - Radar (by Jeff Desom)

Rear Window Timelapse (by Jeff Desom)

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:37:00 -0400

Rear Window Timelapse (by Jeff Desom)

donottouch.org

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:58:44 -0400

donottouch.org:

One of the most unique things I’ve seen on the Internet… Do it!

Quora: What are some of the most ridiculous startup ideas which eventually became successful?

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:07:39 -0400

Quora: What are some of the most ridiculous startup ideas which eventually became successful?:

Craigslist - it will be ugly. It will be free. Except for the hookers.

Github - software engineers will pay monthly fees for the rest of their lives in order to create free software out of other free software!

(via Blizzard customer support - Things I like - Quora)

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 23:30:26 -0400

(via Blizzard customer support - Things I like - Quora)

My first puff piece :)

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:49:10 -0400

My first puff piece :)

CS61A, Spring 2012 Online Textbook

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 12:18:48 -0400

CS61A, Spring 2012 Online Textbook:

The best intro CS textbook of all time, now available in Python.

(I am sad to see Scheme go…)

Wackiest Aisle Ever.

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 08:36:50 -0500

Wackiest Aisle Ever.

Flat Pixels: The Battle Between Flat Design And Skeuomorphism

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:09:48 -0500

Flat Pixels: The Battle Between Flat Design And Skeuomorphism:

Excellent well-measured piece on skeuomorphism vs flat design.

"Einstein, throughout his childhood education, was an excellent math student - always the top in his..."

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:17:54 -0500

“Einstein, throughout his childhood education, was an excellent math student - always the top in his class. When a rabbi showed Einstein a newspaper article (in 1935) that said Einstein had been bad at math as a student, Einstein laughed and replied “I never failed in mathematics. Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.””

- Albert Einstein: Is it true that Albert Einstein failed in Mathematics many times during his school days? - Quora

Einstein, apparently, was actually very good in math despite popular belief.

Hm. That’s probably me viewing myself all the time.

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 11:04:56 -0500

Hm. That’s probably me viewing myself all the time.

"Facebook is a large, inefficient engine for transforming electricity and programmers into a..."

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:16:42 -0500

“Facebook is a large, inefficient engine for transforming electricity and programmers into a down-market place to sell low-value advertising.”

- Why Facebook will never make a significant profit - Quartz

Coding Horror: Death to the Space Infidels!

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 17:00:04 -0500

Coding Horror: Death to the Space Infidels!:

I’ve always wondered whether or not it was worth the effort to enforce a consistent code style.

In their classic paper Perception in Chess, Chase and Simon reported on a study that compared the abilities of experts and novices to remember the positions of pieces in chess. When pieces were arranged on the board as they might be during a game, the experts’ memories were far superior to the novices’. When the pieces were arranged randomly, there was little difference between the memories of the experts and the novices. The traditional interpretation of this result is that an expert’s memory is not inherently better than a novice’s but that the expert has a knowledge structure that helps him or her remember particular kinds of information. When new information corresponds to the knowledge structure — in this case, the sensible placement of chess pieces — the expert can remember it easily. When new information doesn’t correspond to a knowledge structure — the chess pieces are randomly positioned — the expert can’t remember it any better than the novice.

A few years later, Ben Shneiderman duplicated Chase and Simon’s results in the computer-programming arena and reported his results in a paper called Exploratory Experiments in Programmer Behavior. Shneiderman found that when program statements were arranged in a sensible order, experts were able to remember them better than novices. When statements were shuffled, the experts’ superiority was reduced. Shneiderman’s results have been confirmed in other studies. The basic concept has also been confirmed in the games Go and bridge and in electronics, music, and physics.

(Steve McConnell, via Jeff Atwood)

Well, this is the closest argument I’ve gotten so far. Atwood seems to think that code style has something to do with sensible order, but I think those are separate issues.

My Symphony

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 17:00:12 -0500

My Symphony:

My Symphony

To live content with small means;
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
And refinement rather than fashion;
To be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich;
To study hard, think quietly,
Talk gently,
Act frankly;
To listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart;
To bear all cheerfully,
Do all bravely,
Await occasions,
Hurry Never.
In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common.
This is my symphony.

— William Henry Channing

This does not seem like a fortune to me.

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 15:00:43 -0500

This does not seem like a fortune to me.

You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:00:14 -0500

You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation:

You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,

you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.

To ignore the appetitive goddesses,
to desert the formidable shrines

of Rhea, Aphrodite, Demeter, Diana,
to pray instead to St. Phocas,

St Barbara, San Saturnino,
or whoever one's patron is,

that one may be worthy of their mystery,
what a prodigious step to have taken.

There should be monuments, there should be odes,
to the nameless heroes who took it first,

to the first flaker of flints
who forgot his dinner,

the first collector of sea-shells
to remain celibate.

Where should we be but for them?
Feral still, un-housetrained, still

wandering through forests without
a consonant to our names,

slaves of Dame Kind, lacking
all notion of a city

and, at this noon, for this death,
there would be no agents.

— Auden, Horae Canonicae