All code will eventually go stale - (37signals)
Matches my experience.
Franz Josef Glacier's 'rapid' retreat (photos)
A spectacular ice retreat at the Franz Josef Glacier has surprised experts. The glacier has retreated 500m in four years, prompting suggestions of a road up the valley as the ice disappears from view.
Wow!
Dinner at Depot
It’s been the second time we visited this lovely restaurant right in the centre of Auckland.
This time we had our seats right next to the kitchen. It was absolutely fascinating to watch all the food getting made. And of course it tasted delicious.
Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant
Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
If this is true, it strikes me as such an obvious mistake to make at a company like Microsoft. Hard to believe.
“Check out my debit card!” Or: why people make bad security choices
But then we started using credit cards remotely, first by making payments over the telephone and later for use over computer networks. Neither physical possession of the cards nor a signature on paper could be used for authentication any more. So the card numbers themselves, along with the three digit security (CVV), codes became the means of authentication. As with Social Security numbers, we ended up using a piece of information for authentication that was never designed to be used that way.
A great post on Identification vs. Authentication, and why it’s unclear to some people, how credit cards and the like work.
Nicole and I went on a little tramping trip to Pirongia forest park a couple of weeks ago. Spent one night in a cosy little hut.
You can see all photos on Flickr.
An inside look at how we use Basecamp
So we built in a special feature that’s unique to our [37signals’] Basecamp account that allows us to make one of our projects completely public. It’s read-only, it can’t be changed, but you can see all the discussions, to-dos, files, etc., just as they happened.
It’s pretty amazing they made this public and are planning to make even more projects available publicly. When do you ever have a chance to get such a raw glimpse at how a widely successful company works?
I think it’s fascinating to see how they talk to each other, how they disagree and agree, and how they learn from their own history.
This last example really highlights the benefits of writing things down.
If you have any interest in software development, this is a must-read.
inessential.com: Matthew on Twitter Restrictions
The interesting (to geeks like us) part is this: what system that works like Twitter could exist without a company behind it?
Think about it this way:
Under the hood, following somebody is really just subscribing to a feed of their statuses. Posting is really just updating a feed of your own statuses.
So you standardize on a feed format. RSS would work great, of course, and there’s a ton of RSS reading and writing code out there already — and it’s not like it’s dead. (For instance, just this week Apple released a major iPhone app that uses RSS.)
Any given feed could live anywhere on the web.
It would be amazing if such a thing came to life.
Web Audio pipeline from the Bob Moog Google Doodle.
Google open sources their mini moog doodle.
“The intention of this open source project is to provide a moderately complex example of how one might use the Web Audio API to make a digital synthesizer on the web.”
Neat!
iPhone turns 5: Here are the naysayers
Boom!
Street Art Britomart
Found these stickers around the Britomart building in Auckland.
Little Big Details
A blog that collects little software UI details that make software not suck.
My favorite new blog.
Coding Horror: The Great MP3 Bitrate Experiment
Jeff Atwood wanted to find out if his readers could spot the differences between several encodings of the same song in a different quality - from 128 kbps all the way up to raw CD quality.
Today I learned that you can swipe your iPhone’s recently used apps panel to the right twice - which reveals the Airplay button I only knew existed on the iPad.
That meant I could listen to the new Testament song through the Soundcloud HTML5 player widget in Safari on my iPhone on my stereo via air. Super-awesome.
Read your camera’s manual
I only just now finished reading through the manual of my GF1 - more than one year after I bought this camera.
Previously, I did only read parts of it, because I thought there was not much to learn. After all, I have been shooting with my Nikon D40 for three years before. I know it very well, and things seemed to work very similarly on the GF1. While this is still true for the very basics, I was surprised by how much clearer some of the settings got after having read through the whole thing. And I also learned things I didn’t know about at all. For example, I discovered shortcuts to useful settings that are otherwise buried somewhere in the menu.
Why is this important?
Because when you know your camera well, there’s a greater chance you’ll be able to use it to its full potential. When you’re out shooting, you can stop worrying about your gear and completely concentrate on the photo you would like to take. And the manual is the best head-start you can get.