Boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead, try and realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Boy: The spoon effect will be added later using some sort of SGI workstation.
detonate.net/matrix(dead) via c2 wiki.
“We locked you up in jail for 25 years and you were innocent all along? That’ll be £80,000 please.” - Sunday Herald article on sick home office policy. via taz.
novel want ad, via coté’s blog.
Old trailers for “Wonderful Days” and “Appleseed” [try direct link].
Via slashdot: “How do you fit 1,000 horsepower into a compact engine? How do you keep a passenger car on the road at 250+ MPH?”… How the Bugatti Veyron Works [printable], from howstuffworks.com. I still couldn’t tell you the full story on how car engines work or how four-wheel drive works.
But I’d rather learn… Basic salsa steps animations at bustamove.com. For Ajay, they have wedding dances, too, but you have to pay (for the clips, that is).
Going to see Gilberto Gil tonight. US$6 / ticket.
eee, well done christian, first london marathon!. 4hr38m. He says the crowds made anything faster impossible. God bless crowds, eh. 4h38m? Definitely fast enough to play for Stoke.
“It is not uncommon for people to believe that no matter what task they may be engaged in, mere usage of UML somehow legitimizes their efforts or guarantees the value of the artifacts produced.”
Mmm. prettification. tool-wrangling. Do it on your own time.
A list of web-based colour tools.
Also, stock photos by colour.
BlueMarble - the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. close ups.
“This thing is clearly a chick magnet, and if you can’t get them on the first pass, you can always crank it up to 88 mph and go back in time to try it again!” Slashdot: Delorean Time Machine Replica Up For Auction
“Behind every disappointment, every let down, every pothole and every lost sock in the washing machine, there’s a Secret Government Department making sure your life is hell.” - B3TA challenge: Secret Government Departments.
(Warning, some content may offend.)
A few interesting things on slashdot at the end of last week:
fps in 96k (first-person shooter). Screenshots show some pretty-looking procedural textures (i.e. generated). Don’t know if there’s any audio.
Photo recognition software gives location - lost? take a pic of a building with your phonecam and send to get a location or directions back. (Limited lifetime)
Fascinating. An old post about an author who, when writing a new edition of his popular Oreilly PL/SQL manual, spiced up the sql examples using generally lefty political content. Didn’t go down well: I don’t like your examples!
The author argues that all tech books are full of politican content, because by not questioning the status quo they are reaffirming it. Nonetheless I can see that one set of examples would be more distracting than the others. Or engaging.
It’s on my todo list to search for studies of emotive content in learning material. Different when you’re practicing object modeling and you get given a juicy domain to sink your teeth into, than it is when you’re doing SQL inserts and better content is not going to help you practice anything other than google searches for topics you didn’t know about before.
Bill Venner’s Human-Oriented Architecture A Conversation with Luke Hohmann has this:
Bill Venners: “How prevalent is resume-driven design, choosing a technology based on what will pad out your resume?”
Luke Hohmann: “More prevalent than managers would expect, I’m sure. I’ve had to kill some projects that were just horrendously resume-driven design. My favorite example was a J2EE monstrosity for doing something that a relatively simple set of Perl scripts could have handled. I just walked in and said, “We can’t fix it. We have to kill it.” It was millions of dollars down the drain. A complete waste. I’m faced with that same situation with one of my clients right now. They’re embarking on what looks to be a really big J2EE project, and they’re absolutely convinced that this is the right thing for them to do. If someone would say, “The reason I want to do J2EE is because I want to learn it,” it would at least make some sense to me. As near as I can tell, though, J2EE has absolutely no value for what they’re doing. But neither would .NET or any other über-technology. They just don’t need that kind of huge infrastructure.”
Familiar…
My reasons for considering webwork2 over struts. A fairly good list of some struts weaknesses. I had a play with webwork2 but the documentation is not there (I don’t think their apparent wikification of their doc system has helped anyone to focus on completion of a doc).
Do Web search engines suppress controversy?
“This paper explores search engines’ bias by asking: Is a specific well–known controversy revealed in a simple search?” […] “The experiments suggest simple queries tend to overly present the “sunny side” of these topics, with minimal controversy. A more “Objective Web” is analyzed where: (a) Web page authors adopt research citation practices; (b) search engines balance organizational and analytic content; and, (c) searchers practice more wary multi–searching.”
(This is not talking about Google vs evil)
This and more well-written articles on the internet at firstmonday.org.
I’m going to try to be in Valladolid, Spain on 21st August, and in Glasgow either before or after that date for a bit. Book your easyjet flights now if you fancy meeting up. I will likely be flying to spain via portugal, so there’s also an option of meeting there and watching my portuguese fail miserably.