Links

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.

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)