2006

Joel Spolsky on why you need to be alone to be productive. You build up concentration for 15 minutes, and you lose it in a second when interrupted.

Based on advice from Thomas Knoll, Michael suggests overexposing digital camera shots. This is because the on the CCD of digital cameras, the bright tones have the highest colour resolution. So you can darken images later and retain the colours well, but you can’t brighten without losing data.

If you have a bunch of projects you could do, and want to decide which ones to take up, I was taught a rule: if a project has positive net present value, do it. That is, find out how much money you have to put in (& when), and how much you’ll get out (& when). Adjust for money today being worth more than money tomorrow. If it makes a profit, just do it. ...

Pegasus on why Even numbered booths in toilets are better. This is one of those things I’ve endlessly thought about, but never got around to writing about. Comments pegasus 8 Dec 2006 2:29 pm: Hey thanks man :) ritzkini 9 Jan 2007 9:49 am: Same here !!! thought abt it so many times !!

Video demo of Sony’s digital desktop. This converts your physical desktop (you know, the one where you keep paper and staplers) into a digital desktop. You can drag and drop on to the physical desktop. You have to see it to understand!

UTSUNOMIYA, Japan, Dec 1998. I was on a project with Honda R&D at Utsunomiya, Japan. And I’m vegetarian. The next day, Yoshioka-san – our counterpart at Honda – took us to the canteen and introduced me to the chef. Knowing that “vegetarian” in Japan includes eating fish and birds, I took the chef aside. “I’m vegetarian,” I emphasised. “Hai. Vegetarian.” “I don’t eat fish.” “Ah, so. No fish.” “I don’t eat chicken. No birds.” ...

Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better. Normally, I don’t like 77 tips (as opposed to just 7). But these are very good. Comments Sheila Topstone 5 Dec 2006 7:28 am: Top Consolidators is a new group of student loan experts dedicated to getting you the best rate, or the plan that best fits your financial goals. We are the most aggresive Student Loan Consolidation Company on the web. ILMA 12 Dec 2006 4:37 pm: Hi! My name is ILMA. I study in class 7. I have a problem. Previously I was able to learn everything faster, but now it became difficult for me to learn faster and better. Please tell me any trick/tip for this problem.I will be very thankful to you.

Here are the top 1000 most popular movies on the Internet Movie database, along with their ratings and number of votes. I've also marked whether I've seen them or not, as of today. This list, incidentally, is part of my source for the post on popular lousy movies. Here is the Excel list of Top 1000 movies on IMDb. Comments Arch 1 Dec 2006 10:14 am: Your site is too good.I browse thru so many blogs every other day, but hav found nothing as entertaining and as informative as this one. U must be really gifted fella…Y dont u post some pics of ur kid … err 1 Dec 2006 10:04 pm: is to do. S Anand 1 Dec 2006 10:35 pm: Thanks, Arch. I haven’t gotten around to posting any family stuff. No specific reason. Maybe I will… Michelle 5 Dec 2006 12:36 pm: You have been writing movies, do you have top 10 books? DeuceLee 11 Dec 2009 2:37 am: Hi, I really love your imdb top 1000. Seriously it’s great info. Can you get an updated version from imdb and swivel? Looks like it’s been a while (2006). :-) Andreas Beer 20 Oct 2010 4:38 pm: Dude, you seriously should watch Yojimbo! Masterpiece! :D

My digital camera conked off. The cover that holds the battery fell off, and I can’t use it any more. I went back to my buying principles, and prepared an Excel sheet to choose my next camera. Here’s what I was looking for: Low-light photography. Flashes are lousy. This effectively means I need ISO control. Shutter speed control. I sometimes take really long exposure (3-10s) snaps, and sometimes can’t afford the blur (1/250s). Long battery life. My current camera consumed batteries like crazy. Fast start-up. By the time I got my earlier camera out and it started, it was too late. RAW mode. Gives me more control in Photoshop. I didn’t care about: ...

Here’s a “music video” with brilliant video editing.

Here are dialogues from famous English movies. Can you guess which movie they are from? (Don't forget The in front of some movies.) Comments Vivek 28 Jun 2010 7:31 pm: Excellent collections ANAND.. !!! hats off 2 u :) Cris 6 Dec 2010 2:18 am: Nice but how do we get the right answers??? Cool job. Rishi 26 Aug 2011 5:08 pm: Nice Quiz ………..?? how to get the answers…???

I am selecting a CRM package for a bank. I asked my colleagues how they’d gone about it, and got 8 responses. Every single one of them had the same weighting approach: Take a huge list of criteria, assign weights, score each package, calculate a weighted-average score, pick the highest one. As I mentioned earlier, I think weighting is a lousy method. (See Errors in multicriteria decision making.) You can’t say “I picked this package because it has X, Y and Z features, which the others don’t.” You can only say, “Oh, overall, it has the highest score…” ...

If you plot all movies by their number-of-votes on IMDb and their rating on IMDb, you get the chart below. Movies with more votes usually have a higher rating. I was interested two things: Which are the unpopular, but good (highly-rated), movies? Which are the popular, but lousy, movies? The answer to the first question is: there are no unpopular good movies. The cluster of dots on the top-left (in red) are not movies – they’re TV shows (Band of Brothers, Pride and Prejudice, Arrested Development). ...

If you create a file in Windows Notepad with the string “bush hid the facts”, save it and reopen it, it shows you boxes. Same with “this app can break”. Here’s why. It has nothing to do with George Bush or Microsoft. It’s just that these strings are in ASCII, but they also constitute valid Unicode strings, and Notepad guesses (wrongly) that they are in fact Chinese Unicode files.

I haven’t been blogging the last 6-7 weeks. This is partly because I’ve been averaging 1 book or movie per day, but mostly because I ran out of things to say. I will start again soon. In the meantime, this is an announcement I heard when travelling on the Jubilee line. (The train had halted at North Greenwich.) “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re being held at this station for a while. This is because, you’re not going to believe this, but we’re slightly early! We’re not due at North Greenwich for another 60 seconds. Once again, I apologise for the delay, which is because we’re early. ...

Wooden sculptures that move with the wind. These look more like huge insects than scuptures, really. Catch the videos of Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures on YouTube.

A timeline of Microsoft, Google and Yahoo acquisitions.

Programming theorems. The likelihood of Perl being involved in a system is directly proportional to the length of time the system has been in maintenance. Every 5 minutes you spend writing code in a new language is more useful than 5 hours reading blog posts about how great the language is. Think twice before presuming that CSV is a nice little easy file format. (see Leon)

The O’Reilly Code Quiz shows a snippet of code and asks you to guess which book it could be from (given a choice of 4). It’s addictive.

The myth of prodigy. Precociousness as a child is no indicator of future success.