Thursday 31 July 2008 at 1:51 pm
For that retro vibe -
Web to Snail Mail. Reminds me of
Gmail Paper.
Wonderful -
Big Picture view of the Large Hadron Collider. Impressive piece of machinery!
Before wizzy graphics there was
Core Wars. Back when you had to write your own game-bots out of assembler.
Charles Stross (Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Halting State etc) writes about
Bechdel's Law which is a quick test for popular media (tv/movies/books) - 1. Does it have at least two women in it, 2. Who [at some point] talk to each other, 3. About something besides a man. Plenty of followups including
this great comic and another excellent article about
creating realistic female characters in comics and sci-fi/fantasy.
Very useful -
Adeona - Free Laptop Tracking Tool. Cross platform (Windows, Linux, OS X) and it works with an iSight camera. If you have the decrypt key you can retrieve information and images from the stolen machine. Installed.
Popmatters are running a great series of articles -
resurgence of vinyl and the
joy of second hand book shops.
Open source home automation and control project -
OpenRemote. Looks interesting.
I can vouch for number two -
Dirty Tech Jobs. Shifting server rooms and datacenters is a pain in the ass. Number four is not much better - getting inter-group co-operation is a nightmare.
Saturday 26 July 2008 at 4:45 pm
Time to replace the header with my first foray into night-photography (Canon A540, Manual, No flash, ISO 200).
The picture was taken from home in
Melrose overlooking Lyall Bay, Rongotai and Wellington airport by the light of a spectacular full moon.
Unfortunately, the image is slightly munged due to the scaling required to squeeze the tall shot into a thin header.
Saturday 26 July 2008 at 4:10 pm
Back in
2006 I kept track of the number of times I got asked for ID - it happens so infrequently now that it was kind of funny when it did happen.
Two years after that post its happened again. Obviously I look decades younger than I actually am - despite all the white hair, grey stubble and general air of bah-humbug grumpiness.
Then again maybe its a subtle marketing ploy by supermarkets to randomly verify age on alcohol purchases regardless of how young or old someone looks - if you're over 18 you'll take the ID check as a sign that you look better than you really do and come back to the store again for another dose of ego-inflation
Saturday 26 July 2008 at 3:58 pm
Mel actually pointed to this but I'll repost this because its so awesome - play the
epMotion ad. It'll make you smile.
And all for an obscure piece of scientific equipment
Wednesday 16 July 2008 at 06:46 am
Fantastic Japanese watches -
Tokyo Flash.
Nifty -
Charles Mingus Jazz bassist and
Cat Trainer.
Genius -
Sean Tavis is running for State Representative in Kansas using an XKCD inspired viral campaign. Good luck to him!
John Robb always has interesting things to say about the state of the world -
End of Neo-Liberalism? NZ has taken the free market approach further than most (driven by a Labour government no-less) - almost everything is deregulated or privitised apart from core governemnt functions (even then people claim we're over-regulated).
Fascinating -
Economics of a WWII POW camp. Key point - save your ciggies.
Nice looking CMS
Silverstripe. Shame it needs a database backend. I'm still holding out for the new
Pivot to come out of testing. Of course if your a simlicity nut then
Blosxom 2.1.0 is out now - you just can't beat text files and perl.
Some nifty new mini-pc's coming out - like the
Ripple or the
Acer x1200. And as per one of the links in the comments theres a whole thread over at
Coding Horror on what mini pc's are available and what you can use them for.
A great write-up
comparing various Cloud Computing systems. Interesting stuff in there about the legal implications of running in a 'cloud' - do you abide by laws of the country in which the cloud resource happens to be running at that time ?
Finally via
kottke.org number five in a series on markers for humanities decline -
Bratty Brides. Brides who want their bridesmaids to get botox or boob jobs before walking down the aisle with them. WTF!? Seriously.
Friday 11 July 2008 at 09:14 am
What can I say other than
Mogwai rule!
It was a toss-up as to which video to link to so I thought I'd add them both - '
Summer' and '
Christmas Steps'. Both live. The first is full length and the second is slightly truncated - it comes in just before the crescendo.
The genius in Mogwai's music lies in its simplicity, dynamics and lack of vocals - essentially every cliche has been rolled into a lyric at least a million times so why bother singing anything at all ?
Let the music carry your message.
Wednesday 09 July 2008 at 5:51 pm
So
NZ is going to be the first country to get the new 3G iPhone - and it will only cost $199NZ ($150USD) on a two year plan which is pretty awesome.
The one catch of course is that
the two year plan is pretty crippling. Vodafone is essentially going to
ream early adopters.
The amusing thing is that every man and his dog in NZ is in the throes of 'iPhone Madness' - the merest hint that our organisation might be getting them to trial has sent people in a spin.
To that end I figured I'd just tell everyone that I'm on an early adopter program and I've been using the new iPhone for a couple of weeks now. And of course, its rubbish.
Oh the fun to be had . . .
(of course if anyone has a real 3G iPhone that they want to give me then it would just be plain rude not to accept it)
Sunday 06 July 2008 at 4:11 pm
One of those WTF!? type of moments - have a read of
Sex and the City and Handbag Insanity.
Rental designer handbags for wannabe fashionistas !?
I'm sure this rates high on the scale of markers that spell impending doom for civilisation. Right up there with
hand-bag dogs.
Friday 04 July 2008 at 06:40 am
A couple of great video manipulation posts to mess with your head
LiquidTime Chronotopic Anamorphosis (this ones trippy!)
On a similar 'messing with reality' bent is the
Image Fulgurator which detects when a flash goes off and projects an image on whatever is being photographed.
Fascinating -
Working at Google vs Microsoft. This is an apt observation (amony many others in the article) -
As all organizations mature they tend to add PROCESS. These processes exist to insulate the companies from the mistakes that occur after a company gets to a certain size and can no longer trust its employees to always do the right thing. Requiring code reviews, design specifications, black box & whitebox & unit testing, usability studies, threat models, etc are all the kinds of overhead that differentiate a mature software development shop from a “fly by the seat of your pants” startup.
My vi is getting rusty but these tips are handy -
100 vim commands every programmer should know.
A fascinating article on
200 Year Software from the inventor of the spreadsheet Dan Bricklin. Essentially Dan posits the idea that software for record keeping should be architected in the same way as key physical infrastructure or else huge chunks of our history are going to disappear due to technological obsolescense.
Similar to last weeks post about failing Electrical Infrastructure is another article on the crumbling use Infrastructure -
The cracks are showing. The
'grim meathook future' appears to be on the horizon.
Oil is the least of our worries, apparently we're running out of
Galium (and Indium, Hafnium, Zinc & Copper). Stock up on those flat screens while you still can.
A rather fascinating insight into a software developers debugging process (even for a non geek its easy to read) -
The greatest bug of them all.
Mel wrote a great post on attending the Henley Regatta - take a read for a glimpse at
real history and tradition in action. I can't believe they actually measured the dress lengths!
Tuesday 01 July 2008 at 6:56 pm
Humour for anyone in IT thats had 'That Call' -
The Website is Down !
Brilliant !
