October 2011
1 post
“The Kindles are to Amazon what the printed catalog was to Sears a century ago.”
– Amazon’s New Kindles At Daring Fireball
August 2011
7 posts
Jobs' One More Thing… →
Best article I’ve read yet about Jobs’ resignation (at Techcrunch of all places!).
While his age and health suggest that his time running Apple should be near an end or over, his track record in recent years suggests the opposite. Jobs is retiring in his prime.
Apple just had its best quarter ever. The iPhone, released just four years ago, is now their most important product....
WatchTMBG covers Chumbawamba
See also:
The Low Anthem covers Wilco
Of Montreal covers The White Stripes
Baths covers LCD Soundsystem
Ted Leo And The Pharmacists cover Tears For Fears
…and loads more. I could listen these all morning.
July 2011
17 posts
Tumblr's Staircar: Redis Presharding →
Enter Staircar: a lightweight HTTP service to make interacting with hundreds of Redis instances look easy. We considered some nascent open source projects for the job, but found they had a lot of functionality we didn’t need, and/or struggled with response times once the number of elements in the sorted set started to grow. Thus, we ended up with our own libevent-based interface in C, which...
“I really have come to understand that 90% of success is showing up. The other...”
– Ranch Weather. Ranch Lenses. Texas Girl.
“Photography Poker”
“[Alan] Tudyk plays the voice of a Marine in the Xbox 360 game Halo 3. He is...”
– May have just found the one and only reason to buy an 360 and play Halo 3.
Bored People Quit →
I think of boredom as a clock. Every second that someone on my team is bored, a second passes on this clock. After some aggregated amount of seconds that varies for every person, they look at the time, throw up their arms, and quit.
A Whole Bunch of Amazing Stuff Pseudo Elements Can... →
What it says on the tin.
via Cameron Moll
2 tags
June 2011
1 post
September 2010
2 posts
“People commonly use the word “procrastination” to describe what they do on the...”
– Paul Graham — The Acceleration of Addictiveness
“Let me state my beliefs about this in the strongest possible way. The very fact...”
– Perl, the first postmodern computer language
August 2010
3 posts
“UPS plots its delivery routes to make as many right turns as possible. In a...”
– UPS Figures Out the ‘Right Way’ to Save Money, Time and Gas
Real Editors Ship →
The web is changing and it needs more editors. Do not dispute me. I love you. Goodbye.
— Paul Ford
“[…] the only person’s code that sucks is my own, and the reason why it...”
– Your Code Sucks
June 2010
1 post
Confession #67: Say Hello to My Little Friend →
The realtime web has become a habit. It’s a twitch. I do it without thinking. More importantly, when I succumb to the reflex of checking it every few minutes or seconds, I do so at the expense of thinking.
May 2010
2 posts
Solving the Alt-Tab Problem →
You’ve been using alt-tab to bounce back-and-forth between your text editor and your web browser—you’ve formed a habit. You now click over to your Twitter client to see your friend’s latest updates, click back to your text editor, type a few sentences and hit alt-tab. What happens? Because of your habit, you expect it to go to your web browser, but because the last used application was your...
1 tag
WatchString Calculator Kata In Python
For this kata, I’m slowing down intentionally – typing slower and inserting small, regular pauses so the viewer has time to look around a bit.
April 2010
26 posts
Fun With Secret Questions & Answers →
My new bank […] configures a security question and answer for customer service calls. In addition to your SSN, date of birth, and mother’s maiden name they also ask you the question you specify and wait for the answer you’ve provided.
Hilarity ensues.
The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash →
Very interesting theory of where Apple is heading in the next 5 years. While I can buy into this vision of Apple being wholly focused on the cloud, that begs the “privacy in the cloud” question, echoed by the author in the comments:
Trading off privacy management against convenience is going to be a big story over the next decade.
The question really is: are you willing to trade...
The Anti-Mac User Interface →
Written in 1996
“Instead of designing beautiful data-structures and elegant algorithms, we’re...”
– The Reinvigorated Programmer
“here are a few words for the huge community of legal professionals who make...”
– Tim Bray in Giving Up On Patents
Denial of Expertise →
This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use.
Why records DO all sound the same →
Because record companies are scared, they don’t want to take risks, and they’re doing the best they can to generate mainstream radio hits.
“Busy, my friends, is a cop-out. It’s a euphemism for everything from “I’m...”
– Why I Stopped Working with Busy People
“I began telling them that if they would buy a Mac, I would give them 24/7 tech...”
– /the/path/of/most/resistance
Brilliant.
The street as platform →
The way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye.
You’ll want to Instapaper this one.
The cult of busy →
This is the cult of busy. That simply by always seeming to have something to do, we all assume you must be important or successful.
“There’s just something different about holding that Web page in your hands,...”
– Apple iPad Review by Macworld
Totally, totally agree.
“Create something excellent where the technology is transparent, and allow only...”
– Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web on A List Apart