November 2009
56 posts
Little Room
The White Stripes
Little Room, from The White Stripes album, White Blood Cells
It's (soon to be) A Painting
I began working on a little Raphael powered painting app on the train in Japan a few weeks ago. I ended up doing quite a lot of work on it at Railscamp last weekend. I’ve registered the domain itsapainting.com and hope to chuck it up there shortly, but for now it’s living on Github. Here’s a little screencast of it painting something absolutely gorgeous.
Play
Play
“And meanwhile, altogether elsewhere, ice sheets melt, deserts grow, forests burn, crops fail, hunger deepens, storms intensify, diseases spread and the prospects of our children, grandchildren and generations to come grow dimmer, and hotter, by the day.”
—Worldchanging: Bright Green: Unwritten Stories Reveal New Climate Scandal!
“I get up after hitting the snooze button a minimum of six times. I make a coffee, then sit in the shower drinking it and smoking cigarettes until the initial agony of knowing I have to spend another day with my coworkers dissipates.”
—hitting the snooze button a minimum of six times
“
Dear Maggie,
I understand the need for conformity. Without a concise set of rules to follow we would probably all have to resort to common sense. Discipline is the key to conformity and it is important that we learn not to question authority at an early age. Just this week I found a Sue Townsend novel in Seb’s bag that I do not believe is on the school approved reading list. Do not concern yourself about it making its way to the school yard though as we attended a community book burning last night. Although one lady tried to ruin the atmosphere with comments regarding Mayan codices and the Alexandrian Libraries, I mentioned to the High Magus that I had overheard her discussing spells to turn the village cow’s milk sour and the mob took care of the rest.
Regards, David.
” —I am able to move small objects with my mind.Not quite black enough.
Setting: a conference call discussing the latest site updates.
Client:
You know the picture of the black man on the site, the one in rotation with the other pictures?
Us:
Yes, we know the one - what’s the matter?
Client:
Well he’s just not quite black enough.
Client:
We want a shiny black man on our website.
WTF?!
Play
Exactly.
- Simon: Anyone else would be able to see the opportunity I am presenting but not you. You have to be a fucking smart arse about it. All I was asking for was a logo and a few pie charts which would have taken you a few fucking hours.
- David: Actually, you were asking me to design a logotype which would have taken me a few hours and fifteen years experience. For free.
- Source: http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p.html
Play
“We’re using setTimeout to introduce an artificial two second delay to each request. Run the benchmark again—I get 49.68 requests a second, with every single request taking between 2012 and 2022 ms. With a two second delay, the best possible performance for 1000 requests 100 at a time is 1000 requests / (1000 / 100) * 2 seconds = 50 requests a second. Node hits it pretty much bang on the nose.”
—Node.js is genuinely exciting
“
That said, having participated in this bad behavior, I noticed something else about the way it felt to put something on that wall. The twitterwall subverted twitter’s more symmetric conversation model of communication. Posting to the wall was like creating and sharing a public secret about the speaker (a little like political grafiti except it wasn’t anonymous).
The wall made a spectacle of the crowd’s impatience and anxiety feeding on the speaker’s inability to respond. That spectacle united us not as a single group receiving challenging ideas from a thoughtful orator but as quite separate individuals struggling to listen, read, respond, and make sense of the event. We moved from web conference to twitter circus.
” —apophenia: spectacle at Web2.0 Expo… from my perspective
“The problem with a public-facing Twitter stream in events like this is that it FORCES the audience to pay attention the backchannel. So even audience members who want to focus on the content get distracted. Most folks can’t multitask that well. And even if I had been slower and less dense, my talks are notoriously too content-filled to make multi-tasking possible for the multi-tasking challenged. This is precisely why I use very simplistic slides that evokes images for the visual types in the room without adding another layer of content. But the Twitter stream fundamentally adds another layer of content that the audience can’t ignore, that I can’t control. And that I cannot even see.”
—apophenia: spectacle at Web2.0 Expo… from my perspective
“Curious gulls on Sanibel Island, Florida. Meet my friend, “Gull-i-Bel”!!! (Photo and caption by Richard Rush)”
—National Geographic’s International Photography Contest 2009 - The Big Picture - Boston.com
“Taken at Kwena Croc Farm in South Africa (Photo and caption by Wayne Holloway)”
—National Geographic’s International Photography Contest 2009 - The Big Picture - Boston.com
