The Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. Mouse (via The Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. Mouse Is Jonathan Ive’s Antichrist - Mad catz cyborg - Gizmodo) (via Jeff Atwood)
I think this is not as bad as the Open Office mouse. I appreciate the superior design, but it’s definitely not my cup of tea.
This mouse might appeal to the same people that like the Level 10 PC chassis.
“[Paul] Feldman has also reached some of his own conclusions about honesty, based on more on his experience than the [sales] data [he collected]. He has come to believe that morale is a big factor - that an office is more honest when the employees like their boss and their work. He also believes that employees further up the corporate ladder cheat more than those down below. He got this idea after delivering [bagels] for years to one company spread out over three floors - an executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service, and administrative employees. (Feldman wondered, if perhaps the executives cheated out of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. What he didn’t consider is that perhaps cheating was how they got to be executives.)”–
Stephen J. Dubner & Steven D. Levitt in “Freakonomics”
Paul Feldman collected the money for the bagels by leaving a box in the office which he collected later that day.
Here’s the whole story of Paul Feldman, a.k.a. the “Bagelman”.
Bubble Pop: Reflection Perfection (via richard.heeks) (via Your Best Shot 2009: Bubbles)
I think this is approaching perfection, in terms of what I set out to capture. Maybe nail varnish would complete this. ;-) There’s something so satisfying about picturing something in your head and then finally seeing it on the camera!
The weather conditions this morning were absolutely perfect. There was absolutely no wind, the bubbles just hung in the air, and there was even cloud cover - like a giant diffuser created just for me.
The lighting of this shot is natural - sunlight through cloud. The Nikon D90 is great for giving clear images at high ISO (here ISO 800); making this shot possible.
N.B. This is a real photo of a soap bubble bursting. I’ve made slight edits to raise colour and light, but this is just to add some punch. This is not a Photoshop creation!
Stunning! Here’s the bigger version.
(1/500, f/5.6, ISO 800)
Rails Model, View, Controller, and Helper: what goes where? - Stack Overflow
“Too many wrongly characterize the debate as “security versus privacy.” The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.”– Bruce Schneier, real American hero, from a 2006 post about privacy, resurfaced in rebuttal to Eric Schmidt’s comment that “if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”. (via jimray) (via whiskyvangoghgo)
“In a world with zombies you better fucking carpe diem. There’s no time to be depressed, to contemplate the fairness of life or to write inane blog posts. Zombies are a personification of our mortality. The danger that you or someone you love just isn’t there any more tomorrow. Or in an hour.–
Zombies force people to set priorities. I never saw anyone in a zombie movie using a GTD app.”
(Speaking of being back from the grave) ;-)
The Crown: Back from the grave (via couch8085)
The Crown are back from the grave.
I’m very pleased, because it’s one of my favorite bands: killer riffs, killer drumming, awesome voice… especially on this album!
Check it out - if you dare!
Check out the new Extras page. I bet there’s at least one feature on there that you didn’t know about.
That’s great. I didn’t know about this:
Google Reader
Send items directly from Google Reader simply by clicking the Instapaper Read Later >bookmarklet with an item selected.
I always used the ‘Send to’ option, which requires more clicks.
And I also wasn’t aware of the the Readability-like functionality.
Instapaper Text bookmarklet
Install this bookmarklet to instantly view any compatible web page in Instapaper’s >Text view, right in your browser.
If you are not using Instapaper, I can just encourage you to try it out. It makes reading on the web a joy. You can save pages to read later and can also read these articles without the clutter of ads and other distracting things. It also presents them in a serif font at an easy to read size.
It’s one of my favorite and most-used apps!
“What I think [John Gruber] is getting at is the sentiment embodied by already announced products like the Litl and Google’s Chrome OS. This is the middle ground between the desktop and mobile software platforms, which makes perfect sense for a hardware device that fills a similar position.– John Siracusa in Antacid tablet
The “reconception” part comes in when you consider how many people really need the power—and the complexity that comes with it—of a desktop platform, and in what situations. As a computer geek watching the Chrome OS introduction video, it’s hard not to think about how much easier some people’s lives would be (hi Mom and Dad) if they could trade technical complexities they don’t care about for vastly increased simplicity and ease of use.”
“–”
- In fact, as far as I can tell the “desktop OS” is basically a failure. Outside of computer professionals and “graphic designers,” most people just want to start their web browser. They can barely use the rest of their operating system past that — and they don’t want or need to, either.
- So building computers that are designed to do one thing, run a web browser, incredibly, and do it insanely well, is a great idea.
Whisky Van Gogh Go: why ChromeOS is a great idea
I believe there are millions of users out there that have a personal computer and only use it for doing stuff on the internet. And even if they do something else, using a classic desktop application - like writing the occasional letter in MS Word f.e. - there is already a web application for this. These users don’t need an expensive, full-featured computer with lots of storage and processing power to accomplish their tasks.
I like the theme in movies when people realize their lives are finite and/or they are given just a short time left to live. Particularly interesting is what they do with that limited time…
“Fear mongering is a lousy profession, one that ought to be regulated, if not banned. I’m more in favor of hope mongering. 2010 is the year that the world will change. In fact, every year is that year, but this is the only time we’ll get to change the world this time.”– Seth’s Blog: Is there a fear shortage?
Here are some interesting survey results. “What other languages are Ruby developers familiar with? How do they code? What tools do they use?”
These and more questions have been answered by more than 1000 participants.
Below, you can read a summary of the results and/or visit the individual result pages which include all the details (what I recommend):
Here is an excerpt from the original post by thoughtbot-giantrobots summarizing the results:
Thanks to the 1000+ developers who participated in our ruby community survey a few weeks back.
Here are the results as we head into 2010.
There are result reports linked to from within each section, and this post does not comprehensively list all the results, so click through if you’re interested.
Demographics
The demographics results show that PHP (36%) and Java (22%) are the dominant “prior languages” of many ruby developers. Notably, we left out Python. Sorry python folks.
We also see that more than half the people who took the survey work on ruby professionally on a small team.
Textmate (51%) wins the editor battle, with vim (21%) in second place - and “Distributed VCS” (git, hg, etc) dominates (83%) the version control section. I’m sure that credit and thanks are due to the github team for building a product which makes using a great VCS tool even better.
Formatting
The results show that in regard to an 80 character line limit, the “modern displays are wide enough to not enforce a limit” position wins out, though not with a majority. The questions about keyword spacing, and blank lines are fairly evenly split. A solid 75% of people always use parentheses on method definition — maybe enough to justify criticizing people who don’t?
Style
The results (part 1, part 2) show a strong preference for “self.method_name” over “class « self” for class method definitions and for only using exceptions in exceptional situations.
Database
The results show that a slight majority prefer to disallow null in boolean columns — but most are willing to allow NULL in Integer and String columns. Results are split on adding indexing “only when performance issue” vs proactively adding them to foreign key columns ahead of time.
Views and Rails
The results that many people use a shared folder for “global partials”, and show little consensus on how/where to send email from. I think this question got the most “other” replies — let us know how else you’re sending email in the comments.
Documentation
The results show that ruby programmers prefer meaningful variable names, and only like to document code when it’s complex and needs explanation. Almost 80% have committed a code change which effects only code formatting and not functionality.
Wrapup
Maybe most encouragingly, when asked about whether the types of questions in the survey mattered or were a huge waste of time, nearly 90% chose the “I think it’s worth caring about your craft, and these questions are professionally relevant” option. From our experience at conferences and user group events, that seems consistent with the commitment to quality and best practices that exists in the ruby community.
“A broad swath of psychological and economic research has argued that people will pay different amounts for the same item depending on who is providing it. The economist Richard Thaler, in his 1985 “Beer on the Beach” study, showed that a thirsty sunbather would pay $2.65 for a beer delivered from a resort hotel but only $1.50 for the same beer if it came from a shabby grocery store.”– Stephen J. Dubner & Steven D. Levitt in “Freakonomics”
nikf:
Pixar Short “Lifted” - as seen prior to Ratatouille.
The UI designer of that panel is definitely not a genius! ;-)