April 2013
6 posts
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You don’t need every customer →
Great post by Marco Arment on handling customer comments. The bit about pricing complaints especially stood out.
Someone saying they won’t buy at your price is just one data point. Each sale of your appis another data point. If you sell 100 copies of your app and get 3 comments on Twitter from people saying it’s too expensive and they won’t buy it, I’d say you’re doing great.
Your product...
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What would a poverty map of India look like? →
Cool interactive chart, I’d love to see something like this across more countries, but it might be difficult to collect the data … hmmm. Might be fun a weekend project.
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Duck typing: good, duck wrapping: bad? →
I feel I’ve seen useful cases for certain types of duck wrapping, e.g Google Closure functions that take either a string or an element and getElementById if you gave them a string. If it’s well documented it doesn’t seem that bad?
The best part of this article was the beginning:
Duck-wrapping (verb): If it doesn’t quack like a duck, wrap it in a duck.
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World’s top supercomputer from ‘09 is now... →
It never ceases to amaze me how quickly technology improves. I remember hearing about IBM Roadrunner beating the speed record for supercomputers (it feels not that long ago), and now it’s already obsolete as one?
March 2013
22 posts
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26 Things I Learned During My First Year Of Real... →
#4 - Definitely true. I can’t believe how much free time I used to have, yet I feel like I get more done per week in the little free time I have now than I did back then.
#6 - “Let’s talk about this offline” has always struck me as a hilarious phrase when used in a physical meeting, offline.
Quite a few interesting points in this piece that I relate to.
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Three eras of currency
cdixon:
Commodity based, e.g. Gold
Politically based, e.g. Dollar
Math based, e.g. Bitcoin
Interesting categorization of currencies. I was initially pretty skeptical about bitcoin, but I’m getting really curious about how a non-government-based currency (not necessarily Bitcoin) could work long term. I need to find more articles about this.
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How to hire a developer →
Interesting post on how not to and how to approach devs, if you’re looking to recruit them for a job at your company.
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Chrome inspector detection →
I didn’t realise it was possible to detect if the chrome inspector is open, pretty cool trick.
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Is Moleskine Inc Replicable? →
priceonomics:
How can Moleskine, a company that makes notebooks and stationery products, push for an IPO at “a valuation between 22 and 29.1 times the company’s earnings last year”?
Analytics used to predict who will leave a job →
Filed under: Interesting things we can learn through machine learning.
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Experiments with voice control for a browser →
Cool experiment, using voice commands in the browser. Definitely keen to see where this goes, but it’s Chrome only at the moment (and just a quick experiment to get people thinking). I’m especially interested in the natural language aspect of it. This would take out the technical requirements around understanding _what_ you want. Sometimes, people using a device don’t know what...
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Why he created Comic Sans →
Interesting read on why comic sans was created, from the person that designed it. And of course, it’s not the creators fault that people with no design taste misuse his typography.
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An analysis of the results of the Kenyan election →
Interesting perspective on the elections in Kenya. It’s hard to comment on from the outside or fully appreciate the issues with Kenyatta being elected while on trial with ICC (without much research), but either way, I’m glad it was generally a peaceful election.
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February 2013
10 posts
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Then there were three. →
On Opera switching to WebKit, and what would happen if Webkit became the dominant/victorious engine: “It wouldn’t be the worst possible outcome —- victory of a closed-source engine would be worse —- but it would be a far cry from the open Web goals we’ve been striving for.” As a web developer, my short term thought is “yay, fewer platforms to debug...
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Introducing Courier Prime →
Nice update to the Courier font. And royalty free too.
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How to land an airplane if you are not a pilot →
Really interesting article. You never know when you’ll need to land an airplane!
Related unfortunate news: The Android version of the X-Plane simulator this article references is under attack by a patent troll.
January 2013
8 posts
Form follows function →
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Secret messages stored by programmers in older... →
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An online service for detecting objects in photos... →
Worked reasonably well with some test images I sent it. I don’t have any direct use for this right now, so I can’t test it further, but it looks like it could be useful for anyone that wants to do image processing to build a product but doesn’t have the engineering time/people to build out the processing itself.
What’s really cool to me is this (especially with its per...
Gabe Newell on gaming hardware in the [near-far]... →
Fantastic interview with Gabe Newell on the future of gaming in our homes (input devices, consoles, connectivity - he touches on many topics). Had a great little anecdote about a “Theory of Fun” that they came up with when first developing Half-Life.
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“These are dog days. This is really where you really see who’s with you. Ain’t...”
– Kevin Garnett, Boston Celtics
December 2012
15 posts
Justin Duke: Sending emails through Python +... →
justyduke:
(I apologize in advance for the robotic tone of this blog post.) This is a quick blog post about sending emails through Python’s builtin SMTP library, using GMail as your email server. It’s not complicated, I promise.
This is how you you log into GMail in Python:
import smtplib # The below code...
Cool quick demo. I’m surprised it’s that easy for the basic case.
More frames, less 3D noise
Post-Hobbit, my verdicts:
48fps - Worked quite well for the hobbit, and probably would for any well made fantasy/action/adventure. Takes a little while to get used to but some scenes/landscapes/characters really benefitted from it. The lack of motion blur does make some of the pans feel weird initially, but on the flip side it makes the action much easier to follow in battles/fight scenes.
New...
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