- How To Write Unmaintainable Code – what not to do when programming.
- Computer de-evolution: Features that lost the evolutionary war –
ITworldComputerWorld (via Slashdot) - Two XKCD comics: First, “The Cloud” explained. Second, anyone who has used command-line utilities on Linux will appreciate Manual Override.
- International Usability – Big Stuff the Same, Details Differ (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
- Who really owns your photos in social media? (PBS/MediaShift, via This Is True)
- Smartphone marketshare: Android keeps growing, iOS passes Blackberry, and WP7′s on life support.
Tag: linkblogging
Recent Links
- Familiar yet alien ancient views of Earth – photorealistic simulations of the world as seen from space, millions of years ago.
- Flash Gordon Does Not Have Super-Speed (a friendly reminder)
- Back in 2006, Qualcomm effectively discontinued Eudora, though they sponsored a project to extend Mozilla Thunderbird with the look, feel, and some features of Eudora. I lost track of it over the years, but it turns out they finally released Eudora OSE last September…four years later.
- Revealed: How Area 51 Hid Secret Craft. Advanced designs by humans, of course, not alien ships.
Recent Links
- Those early Priuses are still going strong, ten years later.
- Never put critical private information online unless you are certain it’s protected. Your tax documents could show up in search results.
- Optimizing a Screen for Mobile Use (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
- Why bad science reporting matters: Churn The Other Cheek
- Homeopathy vs. Science: A Metaphor
Recent Links: Comic Strips, Moon, Hotspot Safety, Flash Forward and More
Comic strips and art:
- SMBC: Where does the time go when you play online games?
- XKCD: Server Attention Span
- The Joy of Tech: The Internet is running out of tubes. (via @brionv)
- Bizarro on Facebook slacktivism (at Failblog).
Sci-fi and fantasy:
- Keeping Up With the Cardassians. For months, this is what I heard every time someone mentioned the Kardashians. (What can I say? My brain is more attuned to Star Trek than to reality TV.)
- Author Robert J. Sawyer answers pointed questions about Flashforward and the TV adaptation, including what went wrong. I have to agree that it was really hurt by focusing too heavily on the conspiracy arc.
Coolness!
- Discovery spacewalk seen from the ground (Thierry Legault, of course!)
- Majestic Snow Batman towers over Vermont
- Ultra hi-res moon. The full-sized image is 24,000 x 24,000 pixels and half a gigabyte!
- Flash Coffee is a product tie-in just waiting to happen! (That F’ing Monkey). It would fit right in with the Central City Track Team shirt.
Tech stuff:
- Gmail accidentally reset thousands of accounts last month. (They got it back — this is Google after all.) I’ve come to rely heavily on Gmail, but I still keep a local copy of all my email in case something like this happens. (Engadget, via @pobox)
- Mobile Content Is Twice as Difficult (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
- Map of smartphone marketshare by OS & manufacturer [dead link]. It’s a 3-way split between iPhone, Android and Blackberry. iPhone & Blackberry are of course each one manufacturer, while Android is divided mainly among HTC, Samsung and Motorola. (via @androidandme)
Recent Links: Recalls, Ticket Meltdowns and More
- XKCD: ( – it’s true!
- TicketLeap dissects the technical bottleneck [archived] that caused last weekend’s Comic-Con sales meltdown. (TLDR version: Hostname lookups were turned on in the database, and it was blocking on DNS.)
- Looking for a new business idea? Try the random start-up generator! [Edit: it’s gone, but archive.org sampled ykombinator.com 31 times, so you can still check out some of the random buzzword/gibberish mashups.]
- Who would have thought that something called Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge Chew Bars would be bad for you? Candy Dynamics Recalls Toxic Waste® brand Nuclear Sludge® Chew Bars (via @ThisIsTrue, originally linked to FDA recall release, link updated to point to NPR article. Apparently it was too much lead in the “hazardously sour” candy.)
- Even NASA engineers didn’t find any electronic problems causing sudden acceleration in Toyotas. It looks like the sticky pedals and floor pads were it.
All right, all right! ) Happy now?