I'm a web developer in Singapore, and I work as a consultant. I care about metal music, gaming, elegant code and design among other things.
In the meantime, the hard thing to do is to be ready. Because that’s the real message of PIPA and SOPA. Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming — not producing, not sharing — and we should say, “No.”
Mark Shuttleworth just announced the HUD, which is sort of like Synapse, but for app menu items. Personally, I’m looking forward to this in Precise (if it lands). Compared to the traditional menu, discoverability does take a hit in the HUD (at least in its current form) and Mark does admit as much. However, the Inkscape example in the video is interesting. Fuzzy matching and prioritising is rather sweet.
I’d also imagine this to work really well in applications where you’re already spending a lot of time on the keyboard: text editors, word processors and terminals come to mind. Great to see Canonical pushing forward here.
In Book IV, section 4, of St. Augustine’s “The City of God”, Augustine tells the parable of a pirate captain who is captured and brought before Alexander the Great. The emperor says “How dare you terrorize the seas”? The pirate captain replies, “How dare you terrorize the whole world? Because I only have one ship, I’m called a pirate; because you have a great navy, you’re called an emperor.” The difference between a pirate and an emperor is one of scale only. And that’s the position we find ourselves in here: the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) and its allies have twisted the discussion so we’re talking about the wrong thing. We shouldn’t be talking about the small-scale piracy of individual movies (which probably helps sales in the long run, as we’ve observed in the publishing business). We should be talking about the real piracy, the wholesale takeover of creativity by the media industry. That’s the piracy we should be outlawing.
SOPA and PIPA (by khanacademy)
Simple and easy to follow primer on the two draconian and incredibly lopsided bills.
Tweets from kids trying to use Wikipedia for their homework—and failing. SOPA!
Heh, silly kids.
Penn Jillette rambles quite a bit. It’s moderately amusing at best, and he does it often. But there is something to be said for the larger point he tries to make. Which is that it is possible to live an ethical/moral life based on shared experiences with other people, and without believing in a god.
An excellent example of software that has done this well is in the video game genre, going back as far as 1985 with Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. It was a game that truly anyone could pick up and play, with an invisible interface that taught you everything you needed to know to get started and become good at it. The screen would only scroll right, so you couldn’t walk left. You could jump, but standing on top of special bricks did nothing, so you would try to jump against them from below. Pipes visibly led down, so you’d try your luck with the down arrow on the direction pad. And at the end of the level, the bonus flag was raised high, encouraging competitive players to jump to the very peak for top points. All of the game’s mechanics were explained in one level, without a single instruction, tutorial or guiding word.
Why is math the only discipline that has to put up with this bullshit? People gladly learn art, music, literature and geography. You’ll even nod like a happy idiot when you learn what a haiku is, and you never complain or whine about how you’ll never use this in your “life.” When is the last time you wrote a haiku, asshole?
I haven’t been to the best page in the universe for some time now, but this latest piece by Maddox is rather hilarious. In a way that only Maddox can pull it off.
Too many managers believe in the myth of 100 percent utilization. That’s the belief that every single technical person must be fully utilized every single minute of every single day. The problem with this myth is that there is no time for innovation, no time for serendipitous thinking, no time for exploration.
And, worse, there’s gridlock. With 100 percent utilization, the very people you need on one project are already partially committed on another project. You can’t get together for a meeting. You can’t have a phone call. You can’t even respond to email in a reasonable time. Why? Because you’re late responding to the other interrupts.
I agree to be searched and tell them I will read the Constitution in a normal voice while they do it. This is not good enough for Guy with a Tie. He says if I read the statement, I can’t pay attention to what the frisking officer tells me. You know, how she is going to put her hands here and there and use the back of her hand to check my “sensitive areas”. They tell me I need to listen to this, I kid you not, for my own safety. I say I will only read while she is not speaking. That won’t do either, because I won’t be concentrating on her instructions. Seriously, this was their rational explanation to me for continuing to violate my First and Fourth Amendment rights. I have to get home so I finally acquiesce.
When you take something easy and safe and make it look difficult and death-defying, you are a cheesy circus act. When you take something impossible and make it look easy, you’re an artist.
Way too many unanswered questions. A great read nonetheless.
So many vows … they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It’s too much. No matter what you do, you’re forsaking one vow or the other.
There is no god and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.
Penn Jillette, in his book God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales
(via Daring Fireball)
A new trailer for The Dark Knight Rises. Everyone should just stop making movies after this. There’s no point really.
If I had a dime for every time someone in the hearing used the phrase “I’m not a nerd” or “I’m no tech expert, but they tell me . . .,” I’d have a large number of dimes and still feel intensely worried about the future of the uncensored Internet. If this were surgery, the patient would have run out screaming a long time ago. But this is like a group of well-intentioned amateurs getting together to perform heart surgery on a patient incapable of moving. “We hear from the motion picture industry that heart surgery is what’s required,” they say cheerily. “We’re not going to cut the good valves, just the bad — neurons, or whatever you call those durn thingies.”
This is terrifying to watch. It would be amusing — there’s nothing like people who did not grow up with the Internet attempting to ask questions about technology very slowly and stumbling over words like “server” and “service” when you want an easy laugh. Except that this time, the joke’s on us.
My second extension. This will display the top stories from Hacker News in a speed dial.
Hit the link to download. More details here.