Links

Windows has a “Yes to all” in some of its dialogs – for example when replacing files. Here’s how you can simulate a “No to all”. (Just shift-click the “No” button).

xRez has some stunning, large (gigapixel-sized) panoramas that you can zoom into using the Google Maps interface. It’s similar to the Gigapixel project, I think.

Comments Chitra 14 Dec 2006 2:51 am: Hmmm…very busy view…. Anamika 12 Feb 2012 10:35 am: Oru yenthiratha pola ada ingey ulla vaalkai Ithu yengey poi solla, manam ishtapada villai Nam oora pola ooru illai…!

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.

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 !!

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

1.5 million internal e-mails of Enron were released after it collapsed, to help figure out why. The UC Berkeley Enron Email Analysis Project has some links analysing these emails. Check out the visual analysis. Comments Prakash Ayer 9 Oct 2006 3:03 pm: Hi Anand, Did you mean Enron instead of Amazon here? Take Care S Anand 9 Oct 2006 3:15 pm: Gosh, yes – sorry, typo on my side. (Wonder why that happened… must’ve been sleep-typing :-) Ravi 16 Oct 2006 6:51 pm: Along the same network visualization lines, http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html and http://liveplasma.com/ are pretty interesting too. Or if you like Digg, http://labs.digg.com/swarm/ works too. (drop me a line some time Anand - kumar (pulli) venkateswar (at) gmail (pulli) com) Irrexu 27 Oct 2006 5:06 am: Long time since you’ve posted any article on your site.. Anand, just a suggestion though.. I think you should start writing more about yourself and the latest in your life.. I am sure there are a lot of takers for that like me. Cheers!

These are pavement drawings. They are NOT 3D objects. But it’s hard to believe. (Even the shadows are perfect.) See more at Julian Beaver’s site. Comments Abbie 9 Oct 2006 12:00 pm: hey these are cool drawing they actualy look 3-D and like the come right out of the ground alex meneses 9 Oct 2006 12:00 pm: UNBELIEVABLE……AMAZING…..WISH I CAN SEE YOUR DRAWINGS IN PERSON….

Jason Kottke finds interesting code search hacks, ranging from the WinZip key generation algorithm to programmers who want a new job.

Have a look at this infinite depth painting. You can zoom in forever. At some point, you realise, you’re back where you’re started. Almost like going around in circles, except that you’re zooming in.

Cool abused amazon images.

Guy Kawasaki on Mumbai via Kaps @ DesiPundit