tdonia

Notes on the Synthesis of Form, by Christopher Alexander, can't be recommended enough for seeing a teapot as an elegant system / understanding the parallels between physical & software design.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_on_the_Synthesis_of_Form

Regardless of how inspirational this Johnny's business might sound, he's making his money on spam. I've never signed up for 'johnny cupcakes' merch and i've attempted multiple times to unsubscribe. Works briefly, but in a few months the emails start coming again. I don't bother unsubscribe attempts anymore; thank Regex for spam filters.

I am curious as to where he got my address - i usually tag anyone i don't know personally with an alias rather than a real address yet this guy has found a way to get a better email address. his story would be a lot more interesting if it shared that secret to his miraculous success.

I've found that my interest in their content has waned as a function of design delivery decisions they've made - specifically in their RSS feeds and their igoogle widget. This has led me to a certain fascination with their ux experiments - some of them are very interesting but not immediately profitable (I.e. their use of data driven reporting in article specific interactive tools & their google stories experiments ) while others like their Netflix most watched lists seems like paid & placed content. This skimmer in particular seems like something they'd develop for a portable experience but I can't tell for what device.

All that is a roundabout way of saying in my mind there are two parts to the new business of news - what gets produced and how it's delivered. Services like daylife have taken a stab at the delivery equation & places like the guardian have applied interesting approaches to developing editorial with tech - but the economist in print is still the best subway read for me right now and the only one I subscribe to. I expect that to change.

almost sort of works on the Nexus One (links don't have the proper hit states; typography gets bizarre; attempting to zoom in activates an article). Curious as to how it does on the iPhone and given it's sponsored (today at least) by Blackberry, how it does there.

PKD also stands for Polycystic Kidney Disease which was my first thought.

This one is much better than those on that list for my purposes at least:

http://duckduckgo.com/

why does it make sense that a url be set in fixed width?

i vote for stage 2 - sure, there's interesting material here and it could be pushed further as a domain specific idea, but if that isn't your end game then you should focus on pushing closer to your goal before giving in to distraction.

a trusted team will also help establish the value in an idea which is hard to do (in a way others will understand) by oneself. the sounding board can be really useful in helping define the exciting parts of an idea and at the same time distill the competitive bits - which means when it comes time to share the idea with a wider audience, it's clear how far the conversation can go.

should this prove to be true, this is an excellent opportunity for [google | yahoo | microsoft | apple | facebook | any other major tech company that relies on people making things with computers] to petition against this with their ad dollars in a very vocal manner. being the first to rally people against this seems like it'd be far more culturally relevant in the long term than spending the money on a superbowl ad and billboard campaign saying "my brand is good".

so, i'm curious, what are the best arguments for this?

the reason i ask is that it seems like the rules, as they currently exist, are valid on paper but illegitimate in practice. is it really worth it to extend the illusion of copyright protection to the rest of the planet knowing full well that it's got little hope of succeeding? or is there a way to argue that the system, as it works in the U.S. is a success?

most entertaining link from that article: http://whatwoulddondraperdo.tumblr.com/

I cannot recommend 'The Long Way' by Bernard Moitessier & 'The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst' highly enough. Both books cover how 2 contestants in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race could have won but did not, for rather interesting/different reasons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Times_Golden_Globe_Race

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Moitessier

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Crowhurst

part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxiDNdM2-bM

part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bA1LdQknbk

flying kites, riding bikes

anyone know how this compares to wuala's scheme?

i've only been in nyc for 7 years now, so i can't compare it to anything before then, but things don't seem quite as dire as the article suggests. sure, i've got friends looking for work but many of them were looking for work before the real estate bust. brooklyn, especially, seems to be growing pretty rapidly still. partly, i'm sure, because it's slightly cheaper than the island - but less so each day. that said - there have been a lot more condos in increasingly unlikely neighborhoods over the past couple years - it's quite possible that as those mortgages come due, a housing glut will drive down housing prices/change the neighborhoods landscape more radically. for now, though, these condos are still holding out for people to lease / not open to renters. beyond real estate, those of my friends who have started small businesses in the last year are having a great time of it so far/expanding a lot faster than expected.

Desire for experience. while there are those developers brazen enough to think their first project will change the world, personally i knew my jr. high coding skills weren't exactly enterprise level. i was more interested in playing with different platforms and exploring their limits / figuring out what works. back then i was playing with ASP (haneng & 4guysfromrolla tutorials) and PHP. ASP seemed more expensive (have to pay for a windows server) and there weren't nearly as many places i could use the code (unless i wanted to do something with a DSN or ActiveX / some other piece of windows infrastructure a kid has little incentive to learn) so eventually i stopped paying attention of ASP. now, years later, seeing what the .NET professional developers at my office fill their days with - i'm glad i didn't learn more of it, lest i'd be doing what they do. no sane person should ever be confronted with DotNetNuke.

1.2 billion (100m / month)

before someone gets up from their desk and walks down the hall, Mars is able to sell that person the idea of a 50cent Snickers. While this is not completely realistic - many times that snickers slot will be empty - it's enough to convince someone to get out of their chair, walk down the hall and 'check' the machine. At the machine, they've not only decided that they probably want something, they've begun to exert effort to achieve their goal. Upon finding the machine out of snickers, they either have to walk back disappointed (and now maybe slightly hungry, by suggestion) or they can get some other similarly priced snack to fulfill the need they created for themselves.

If, instead, at the beginning of the decision tree it was a 75cent guaranteed snickers bar then it would be a simple, rational decision - do i want to pay 75cents for this? The argument the marketing department makes is that there are are fewer people who rationally want that 75cent snickers bar vs. the people who can be sold on the dream of a 50cent snickers bar (that strangely looks and tastes more like a high-margin cookie).

on thinking in code: after doing a rather intense data integration/normalization/clean up project for many hours ending around 5 am or so, i had to take a shower before catching a nap. upon turning on the shower, my tired mind took a minute to organize/process the physical actions required to put myself into the shower - suddenly it wasn't a shower at all, rather, it was an array of droplets i had to somehow JOIN but the query was already running! all of this data was going down the drain - corrupted with no audit trails - but what regex/match would help? there was none... luckily, i snapped out of it and regained the proper level of abstraction conducive to good hygiene. apparently, i only had to step under the water. rest would work itself out with little need for analytic involvement.

after that, with sleep & time to breathe i went back and checked my work from that night because i assumed that a mind so frazzled would be similarly error prone. alas, that mode of thought, while not suited for normal-person-tasks worked well for the project. no bugs (from that night at least) and that single all nighter put the whole thing way ahead of schedule.

this is interesting, from the parent: "As levels of pedestrian and bicyclist activity rise their per capita risk falls. Drivers adapt their behavior in the presence of increased cycling and walking (17)." (17) Jacobsen P. Safety in numbers: more walkers and bicyclists, safer walking and bicycling. 2003.

savvy

Persistence Hunting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wI-9RJi0Qo

We forked our app to give it a try. It's definitely an interesting contender, but in our case, we didn't see any significant performance gains and so it wasn't worth moving away from MySQL. It did help us simplify our MySQL schema a lot though and i wouldn't be surprised if we revisit it when it hits v1. For someone getting started with it, the google group is quite useful [http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user] and the project team was pretty responsive.

seems very similar to the current chrome 3 developer's preview which changed the start page last week to one without a sidebar as in these shots. seems like they're preparing to use this space for something more sophisticated.

Casio (and i'm assuming others) have this as a feature already. Haven't seen it marketed in a cell phone yet though. Under the features tab it's the "PRERECORD CS" - storing a buffer of 30 photos.

http://exilim.casio.com/products_exfc100.shtml

Targeted at parents watching children's sporting events/not wanting to miss a moment.