February 2012
6 posts
3 tags
“In eight years 5-Hour has gone from nowhere to $1 billion in retail sales....”
– An interesting story on the man behind “5 hour energy” - an “energy shot” big in America…
4 tags
“So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer...”
– The future is just a game for computers!
5 tags
WatchSnowboarder at night in a suit made of LEDs… AWESOME!
4 tags
4 tags
7 tags
“The only thing I can offer is the advice to take everything you read in the...”
– MG Siegler’s conclusion to his essay on the state of the technology press
January 2012
5 posts
4 tags
“Let’s take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit...”
– Thus starts an analogy from Michael Wolfe to explain why software development task estimations are regularly off by a factor of 2-3.
5 tags
“The difference between a pirate and an emperor is one of scale only. And...”
– Mike Loukides on Pirates and Piracy
7 tags
“If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most...”
– Raspberry Pi explaining why they couldn’t manufacture their computer in the UK as they wanted to
4 tags
“A lot of the serious players… just like clicking a cow sometimes. It’s...”
– Ian Bogost - a game designer, lecturer and author - on his satirical creation cow clicker in part of an interesting article about how despite it being a throw-away idea criticising social/ facebook games it was unexpectedly successful
5 tags
December 2011
5 posts
4 tags
“We live in a three-dimensional world. Our hands are designed for moving and...”
– Bret Victor’s rant on the future of interaction design (hint: the future isn’t a touchscreen)
6 tags
“Trying to make this hard for me will only lead to accidents like Java, where...”
– Juraj Kirchheim on the haXe mailing list
3 tags
WatchVery cool video of morphing 3d shapes - the amazing thing is they actually physically made these things and recorded it as a stop frame animation (see the making of)
4 tags
November 2011
6 posts
2 tags
“And make no mistake, bartering away your “one and only youth” (jwz again)...”
– Amy Hoy on why startups are one long con
5 tags
“People will spend hours researching a $2 purchase, browsing reviews, emailing...”
– Shifty Jelly on the realities of life as an independent (mobile) apps developer
6 tags
4 tags
“These issues go to the core of what democracy means. We have a major economic...”
– Bob Ostertag on the police’s pepper spraying of peacefully protesting students at the University of California in Davis
4 tags
3 tags
“Anyway: if you sign up for Klout you are coming down with the internet...”
– Charles Stross on evil social networks (in particular clout)
October 2011
7 posts
6 tags
“We want to create wonder. We wanted to simplify people’s lives. Right now,...”
– Matias Duarte of Google on the philiosophy behind and work that has gone into Ice Cream Sandwich - the latest version of Android. It certainly sounds like Google now have a strong personality leading Android design and development in a deliberate and specific direction. Which can only be a good...
5 tags
“Obviously if DHS now has powers to simply take over a New York City street...”
– Naomi Wolf on her arrest for peacefully protesting in New York
4 tags
“What’s so great about the Apple story is that Steve ended up making...”
– Tim O’Reilly on companies driven by passion rather than profit
5 tags
“There’s no doubt that the business models of delivering news to people are...”
– Part of Aegir Hallmunder’s interesting analysis of the new Guardian iPad app
3 tags
“It’s easy when you work in the design industry to focus on design itself and not...”
– Rob Foddering on creating design that means something
2 tags
“But as a software developer, I am deeply ambivalent about an Apple dominated...”
– Jeff Atwood on serving at the pleasure of the king
2 tags
“I could go on and on and on about how a $700 iPad has about as much to do with...”
– Zack Morris rants about the state of the art in software engineering
September 2011
6 posts
5 tags
“Facebook calls this “frictionless sharing”, which is their euphemism for silent...”
– Adrian Short on “the end of the web as we know it”
6 tags
“BT’s current market capitalisation is just north of £20bn. So, as an...”
– Tim Worstall explains how British Telecom, with a market value of abound £20b owns about £50b worth of copper cable.
9 tags
3 tags
3 tags
“The BBC does not compete. Like the NHS, it may not be perfect, but it is paid...”
– Warren Ellis in an oddly prescient article written in Wired at the start of 2010 and looking into the future few months. Finding it on the lunch table 18 months later makes it even more interesting reading…
5 tags
“The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the...”
– Douglas Rushkoff asks “Are jobs obsolete?”
August 2011
2 posts
3 tags
3 tags
“I’d rather use a service that has a strong, single-minded vision, even if...”
– Andy Biao on why “if someone out there doesn’t hate your product, it’s probably not worth using”
July 2011
1 post
“Your guessers were terrible, like toddlers hypothesising how a helicopter works.”
– Charlie Brooker on the news pundits jumping to wrong conclusions over the Norway mass killings
June 2011
2 posts
2 tags
“Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good...”
– Zed A Shaw’s Advice from an Old Programmer
4 tags
May 2011
2 posts
5 tags
“Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing...”
– A quote from a prisoner in a Chinese jail about how the prison guards were forcing them to “gold farm” in online games like World of Warcraft
April 2011
5 posts
2 tags
“Premature architecture design is like premature optimization: you will be wrong...”
– Miguel de Icaza talking about over-engineering / over-architecting your code (the example about the NuGet command line client in the comments is interesting too)
4 tags
3 tags
“Micromanagement is symptomatic of a lack of trust. The remedy for this ailment...”
– Tom Preston-Werner talking about github’s first year - interesting reading/ advice for any startup
7 tags
4 tags
“Don’t give your customers what they ask for, give them what they want. Under...”
– Kyle Neath of github talking about product design - very interesting although I think that github is in a very privileged position in terms of working on a tool that they use daily and which is successful enough that they can ensure their entire staff is top notch…
March 2011
4 posts
5 tags
“I want to remind you that financial success is not the only goal or the only...”
– Tim O’Reilly back in January 2009 imploring people to work on stuff that matters
3 tags
5 tags
“I love asynchronous stuff as much as the next guy, but think of a queue like...”
– Ted Dziuba making the case against queues (and the case against Java it seems)