Ramkumar Shankar

Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world

Tie these ballons to your car! (via i.imgur.com)

This is a great example of the power of collaboration and the spirit of open source at work.

Sunday morning Lessig tweeted that JZ was ill and why was a mystery — all true. The blog produced some amazingly helpful comments from people and doctors at large, including references to two discrete academic journal articles — one from a Korean medical journal from 1994! Thanks to the Net I had a copy on my PC and then e-faxed to the nurse’s station on my floor in a matter of minutes. In the meantime, over the course of today (Monday the 15th), additional results have come back to help narrow the diagnosis in a properly documentable and formal way — one that’s converging, it seems, to the obscure Korean article. To be clear, the terrific doctors here have been methodically arriving at this diagnosis already.

It goes to show how the ‘many eyes’ theory can be effectively applied in numerous areas and situations to solve problems. Yes, the tenets and virtues of open source are well publicized in the technology/software world, but the application of its spirit and thought process certainly should not be limited to this world.

davidkaneda:

Apple’s Spat With Google is Getting Personal (via NYT)

I had no idea Google Chrome was teleporting goats.

I’m playing through God of War: Chains of Olympus again (in god mode this time) to commemorate the release of God of War 3. Bloody good times!

nostrich:

Bygone Bureau picks the winners for the arguments that matter most. Love this.

My biggest gripe with modern programming is the sheer volume of arbitrary stuff I need to know. My current project has so far required me to know about Python, Django, Google App Engine and it’s datastore, XHTML, CSS, JQuery, Javascript, JSON, and a clutch of XML schema, APIs and the like.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for all of it, but it just doesn’t seem like what I was promised when I followed SICP for the first time. It just feels like I spend most of my time scouring through documentation and trying to remember umpteen different sets of syntax and class names rather than actually thinking in code.

Back in ye olden days, most programming tasks I performed felt quite natural and painless, just a quiet little chat between me and the compiler. Sometimes longwinded, sometimes repetitive, but I just sat and though and typed and software happened. The work I do these days feels more like being a dogsbody at the tower of babel. I just don’t seem to feel fluent in anything much any more.

We talk about ‘flow’ quite a lot in software and I just have to wonder what’s happening to us all in that respect. Just like a conversation becomes stilted if the speakers keep having to refer to their phrasebooks and dictionaries, I wonder how much longer it will be possible to retain any sort of flowful state when writing software. Might the idea of mastery disappear forever under a constant torrent of new tools and technologies?

This was a comment by jdietrich over at Hacker News. And here is the post that started the discussion. Be sure to read the follow on post as well. The comment I quoted captures my sentiments as well. In our aim to write libraries, frameworks and APIs, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get into any sort of ‘flow’ when writing code. The analogy of speakers having to keep referring to their phrasebooks is a very apt one. The last fun programming project I did was a university project. And part of the reason why it was that fun was perhaps because I didn’t have to spend hours poring over documentation to learn class names. I wrote a module in C to read and decode a text message. The reading I had to do was about the SMS standard. Importantly I was still thinking in code the entire time.

Is modern programming geared more for assemblers than creators? Where do you stand? What is your preferred language/framework for development?

What do you get every 2-3 years? A new Overkill album! This one is called Ironbound (very nice cover there), and it’s killer stuff. If you haven’t been very pleased with their last couple of albums, this should set your mind at ease. Blitz hasn’t sounded this good in awhile, and the rest of the band is as energetic as ever.

Apple tops the list for the 3rd year in a row.

Staying on topic of my last post, this is the why piracy works edition.

The Brads – a comic about web design » Why DRM Doesn’t Work

Just got Burnout Legends for my PSP during the half-price sale. I haven’t had this much fun smashing other vehicles in quite awhile.

Sergey Brin’s Online Resume

Very nice.

I’m trying this next time.

The Fatal Flaw With Google Buzz’s Edit Button [Gizmodo]

Swedish Binary (via fuckyeahcomputerscience)

Text to receive the symptoms!

fuckyeahcomputerscience:

chachaholic:

i like coding in notepad++ too. but when im feeling geeky, i use vi =p

A lesser-known genre of metal? Seen in a record store in Camden Town today.

1. What’s the one thing you would have done differently as a mom?
2. Why did you choose to be with my father?
3. In what ways do you think I’m like you? And not like you?
4. Which one of us kids did you like the best?
5. Is there anything you have always wanted to tell me but never have?
6. Do you think it’s easier or harder to be a mother now than when you were raising our family?
7. Is there anything you regret not having asked your parents?
8. What’s the best thing I can do for you right now?
9. Is there anything that you wish had been different between us―or that you would still like to change?
10. When did you realize you were no longer a child?

timoni:

dwineman:

Me: (tries to visit a local restaurant’s website via iPhone)
Restaurant website: I require Flash. Fuck off.
Me: I just want to know how late you’re open.
Website: Nope.
Me: But I’m on my phone. Don’t you have a little “HTML Version” link up in the corner or something?
Website: I’m ignoring you.
Me: What if I’m on my phone because I’m out, looking for a place to eat? Didn’t that ever occur to you?
Website: Fuck entirely off.
Me: (gives up, switches to computer)
Website: Oh! Hi! What can I help you with today?
Me: What are your —
Website: Hang on, I’m loading the music.
Me: Really.
Website: You’ll love it. It’s “Girl from Ipanema” arranged for steel drum and keytar.
Me: No, you don’t have to —
Website: Loading…
Me: All I want is —
Website: I SAID DOT DOT DOT.
Me: (drums fingers on desk)
Website: There we go. Isn’t that nice? It’s… what’s the word. Ethnicky.
Me: What are your hours?
Website: Take a look at our menu! It’s a PDF of a screenshot of a scan of a Word document printed on a dishtowel. With fonts!
Me: I don’t care. What are your hours?
Website: Don’t worry, the menu loads in a new window so the music won’t stop. Can I show you some broken images?
Me: What. Are. Your. Hou. Rs.
Website: I… I don’t know.
Me: (goes to Denny’s)

Goodness this is so true.

So very true.

A brief history of pretty much everything

Valentine’s Day

This sounds like great news. If you haven’t tried Aardvark yet, you really should.

Nolan’s Cheddar makes you strong

Until you display webpages properly (instead of complaining they have stopped responding), I’m going back to Firefox. Good thing I still have Feedly over there.

lee:

mimisaurus:

catharsis:

(via fuckyeahcomputerscience)

From Lucien, 6, in the mezzanine drawers at Ace Hotel Portland.

[acehotel]

Dick Brass [Microsoft’s Creative Destruction]

Why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, has failed to bring us the future.

stevenf.com

Read it. It’s awesome.

Skype, you’re next.

There are many issues you could have with the iPad. No multitasking, still no Flash. No camera, no GPS. They all fall away the minute you use it. I cannot emphasise enough this point: “Hold your judgment until you’ve spent five minutes with it”. No YouTube film, no promotional video, no keynote address, no list of features can even hint at the extraordinary feeling you get from actually using and interacting with one of these magical objects.

Such a refreshing read. And that’s not because he really seems to love the iPad, but simply because it’s an honest candid take on Apple’s new product.

iPad About [Stephen Fry]

fascinating

First, when you dial your own Google Voice number, we now begin playing your voicemails without the need to press 1 anymore. Since listening to voicemail is the most common reason people call their own numbers, we thought it made sense to save you an extra step.

And you really begin to wonder why it never made much sense to carriers earlier. They require a heck of a lot of key presses from me before I can get to my voicemail.

[Google Voice Blog]

It’s all in the presentation. I have an account on google reader. I added my feeds, but I never bothered going there eventually. Enter Feedly. It organizes your favourite sites in a great magazine-like start page. And it quite simply rocks as a way to track and share news.

Available as an extension for Google Chrome and Firefox.