Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action (via TEDtalksDirector)
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers – and as a counterpoint Tivo, which (until a recent court victory that tripled its stock price) appeared to be struggling.
This describes a problem I experience quite often:
You’ve been using alt-tab to bounce back-and-forth between your text editor and your web browser—you’ve formed a habit. You now click over to your Twitter client to see your friend’s latest updates, click back to your text editor, type a few sentences and hit alt-tab. What happens? Because of your habit, you expect it to go to your web browser, but because the last used application was your Twitter client, that’s where it switches. That’s most likely not what you wanted. What happens next? You generally pause to think, and then use double alt-tab to switch where you wanted to go, which is your web browser. Then you hit alt-tab to switch back to your editor (habit!) and instead it goes back to Twitter. The troubled cycle repeats until MRU’s [MRU - Most Recently Used] ordered once again aligns with your habit.
It’s an interesting article, which asks more questions than giving solutions, although it provides one solution candidate.
I didn’t know that some people put that much thought into this, especially because I don’t know if this problem is solvable at all. I hold it with commenter Ralf G, who says:
The problem with your proposed solutions is the “almost always”. I don’t particularly like the current alt+tab situation (see below) but it at least behaves predictably. I think it might be possible to do what you describe IF you had deep insight into the state of apps. As an example, after you get an IM, the user switches to the Adium window 95% of the time. The problem is when behaviors aren’t well defined.
There’s also the problem that this is not a very commonly used keyboard command, as Rob points out:
Cool article but I think there is a bigger elephant in the room.
How does a user discover the alt-tab mechanism?
Alt-tab has to be the single least discoverable keystroke in personal computing.
Christ-come-to-Earth would need his mate with a BSc. in Computer Science to tell him about it.
I thought this was a very interesting read anyway.
The Peter Principle is the principle that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.”
It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions.
Peter’s Corollary states that “in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties” and adds that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence”.
(via Marco)
(via fuckyeahcomputerscience)
Syndey Harbor Bridge
That’s great! An awesome composition.
It would be even better if the 1st person was walking closer to the camera.
But what I really like, is that it reminds me, to have an eye for the not-so-obvious details. When you’re walking on Sydney’s Harbour Bridge, it’s easy to only see the Opera House.
He didn’t include it, and I love it!
I took a similar picture, but it really is a more obvious composition:
What I’m looking at on Wikipedia, right now.
In the context of computing, a polyglot is a computer program or script written in a valid form of multiple programming languages, which performs the same operations or output independently of the programming language used to compile or interpret it.
Here’s more from this article:
The two most commonly used techniques for constructing a polyglot program are to make liberal use of languages which use different characters for comments and to redefine various tokens as others in different languages.
Weird stuff. Check out the example of the article to see such a “thing”.
37signals’ Rework arrived today. Can’t wait to read it.
“Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”– Twitter / Jeffrey Zeldman: Content precedes design. D …
digital-photography-school.com
In a nutshell, the D40 was affordable, weighs less than 500g and can make great photos. Build quality is better than you’d expect from an all-plastic body and a dinky 18-55mm kit lens
I love this camera. I’ve had it for two years now and I don’t plan to replace it anytime soon. I shot thousands of pictures and it is still as good as on day one - even heavy rain didn’t do harm.
Ok, I’d like to get a better high ISO performance, but this is pretty much the only thing. The 6 megapixels are definitely enough for me!
Read more: http://digital-photography-school.com/nikon-d40-modern-classic-review
I found the first search result for “IE7 inline-block” funny.
I like this Stack Overflow feature: when adding a comment to an answer or question, you have to type at least 15 characters.
This discourages users to write meaningless comments à la ‘Nice!’ or 'Awesome!’ and probably makes them more often use the features that were made for this (like up- or down-voting).
I found this graffiti on a wall somewhere in Auckland, after walking home from a concert. This was one of those moments where I was very glad of having my small Canon Ixus camera with me.
The graffiti shows Marilyn Monroe (obviously) with a Moko - Māori for “Tattoo” - on her chin.
Validation (via hughnewman1024)
15 minutes, very well spent.
“Clarity is a sign of strength.”– John Gruber in Daring Fireball: It’s Not the Control, It’s the Secrecy
Retrieve a discarded water bottle. Tear off the label and fill with any water that’s not too murky from a creek, standpipe, or puddle. Place the bottle on a piece of metal in full sun. In six hours the UVA radiation will kill viruses, bacteria, and parasites in the water, making it safe to drink.
Clever.
(via NGM Blog Central - High Marks for Clean Water - National Geographic Magazine - NGM.com)