19/03/2012
- Just an update, the Aardvark documentary linked on the last post: really subpar, focuses mostly on random “geekness” of the employees but not on the startup itself (which would’ve been a lot better in my opinion);
- People are organizing a C Conference, really curious on seeing how this shapes up;
- TED now has an education oriented series, including even a video presented by Adam Savage;
- Adding syntax highlighting to static pages using Python and Pygments, useful (at least for me);
- A really straightforward Ruby refresher, much quicker than googling, but still misses quite a bunch on introspection;
- A TED talk on Copyright Math, shows quite nicely to the public how this industry has completely gone bonkers;
Comments
14/03/2012
- “Why critics of Rails have it all wrong” contains a defense of Rails 3 and also updated status on the cutting edge of Rails and Ruby itself;
- Xiph’s Monty explains why 24/192 music downloads are a bad idea, really awesome post, and a good read for anyone interested in music compression;
- “Aardvark’d: Twelve weeks with geeks” is a documentary on the life of a startup company. Now available online;
- TIL there is a Coffee Pot Control protocol and also that a Coffee Pot was the inspiration for the first webcam;
- “Clear for iPhone: Review and Feature Proposal” is a really nice post about the new iOS ToDo list application Clear.
27/02/2012
- Computer Go players are getting better, unfortunately not in the way we expected;
- Someone got the list of books that Alan Turing checked out from his school library. Alice being there made me smile;
- What’s the current week number in several programming languages. Useful;
- Nice post on whether Chess students should try to learn from class player games;
- Codecademy got $2.5 million in investment, but is it worthy it? Lots of discussion going on recently on the topic of teaching programming;
- Speaking of which, nice idea about how to introduce Javascript programming via games;
15/02/2012
- “How browsers work”, a good overview based on source code from WebKit and Gecko;
- “Inventing on Principle”, cool presentation by Bret Victor on the inventor’s way of life. The demos are really cool, and some of them have art by the guy who did the art for Braid;
- L5, new crowdfunded sci-fi series, being distributed in the same way as the awesome Pioneer One;
- Software programs specifically designed to screw-up authors on Amazon? Sadly, it seems so.
- Is zsh really better than bash? I’ve never taken the plunge, but am seriously considering trying it out now. The oh-my-zsh project in particular seems quite nice.
12/02/2012
- Cambridge offers a “Usability of Programming Languages” course, unfortunately with no online videos so far.
- Full online book on jQuery, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license;
- Sabbatical, notes from a Google employee;
- Chess Tempo is an amazing site helping with tactics and endgame training;
- Speaking of Chess tactics, Ward Farnsworth’s “Predator at the Chessboard” is an amazing resource available for free online;
- Really nice interview with Andrei Alexandrescu, creator of D;
- This guide on “How to make the perfect tea” was linked to by Neil Gaiman. Gotta try this when winter comes.
06/12/2011
- Greg Wilson does an amazing presentation about evidences on Software Development methodologies;
- He also published a book called Making Software, which is a result of the work presented above. On my reading list;
- Kindle Fire Usability review. Truth be told, 4 users is an extremely small universe for a proper study, but it does provide some nice thoughts;
- Here-document, a name for something which I did not know had a name;
- A Haskell Tutorial (in video with slides available) by Simon P. Jones;
- A new design for Epiphany: Web. Removing almost everything from the chrome, doesn’t look so good to me as of now, I much prefer to have my tabs visible (or almost visible) at any time, instead of switching to a different context everytime;
- Gill Dyslexic and Mono Dyslexic are a pair of fonts targeted at dyslexic people. Surprisingly it works quite well for non-dyslexic people;
- AddressSanitizer, a new tool based on LLVM to detect memory-related errors in C/C++ programs. Much lighter than Valgrind.
30/11/2011
- jwz discovers a VC falsely using his example at Netscape in order to lure naïve entrepreneurs;
- south provides easier schema and data migrations for Django projects. Manually changing it is a pain in the ass, specially when you start dealing with a production database;
- A mini-series on the NeXT computers. Eagerly waiting the next installments;
- A guide on writing e-mail which will be read on mobile devices;
- SOGo, a groupware that uses GNUstep for its implementation;
- The LibreOffice project is considering improvements for its UI. One of the first proposals is Citrus, which seems heavily influenced by the Ribbon;
- LLVM 3.0 is about to be released, and a few very interesting posts are being published on the official blog. So far the ones available detail the Type System Rewrite and the Exception Handling redesign;
- A list of 4 books to learn design the hard way. Already own the first one :)
22/11/2011
- Engineers versus Managers. Oversimplified and generalized, but has some pretty good points;
- GCC now has support for Transactional Memory. I haven’t taken a good look at this yet, but I really need to blog about the whole TM field in the near future;
- Cotton Candy is a computer running Android inside an USB stick. WTB;
- Amazing attempt of solving the problem of having remote employees. It obviously does not scale;
- Campinas now has its own chapter of the Interaction Design Association. No real content on the site there right now, but more will appear soon;
- Neil Gaiman pep-talk for NaNoWriMo writers. Amazingly well written.
15/11/2011
- Lennart and Kay created an skeleton library called libabc, quite useful if you’re going to create a library from scratch;
- Stackoverflow has some posts that should probably become Wikipedia entries. This list of freely available programming books is an example;
- iOS inspires me: a showcase of good design on iOS systems;
- Interview with Donald Knuth. It’s somewhat old, but has some pretty amazing insight into his work and his ideas. He is a very humble guy, far more than he should be by his contribution to the field;
- A brief rant on the future of Interaction Design. Properly bitchslapping a lot of things being said about our “future”;
- The Go programming language turns two. Having a 1.0 release early in 2012 will probably increase quite a bit their reach;
- This site has an amazing quantity of awesome stuff. Sounds like I’m overreacting? Go over the list and see for yourself. Really proper name.
02/11/2011
- Amazing site with reviews of board games for iPad.
- Ziggy’s Games published a list showing income stats for their Android games. Somewhat depressing actually :P
- Speaking of Android, apkudo promises to test your application on hundreds of different devices. For free. Should be really helpful with porting, specially with so many different Android devices out there.
- Interesting article showing which things are bigger than Turbo Pascal 3.02. Oddly enough, even the Turbo Pascal Wikipedia article is a part of said list.
- Netflix CEO talking about lessons learnt. The whole Quickster debacle was ridiculous. But one thing that is not being widely talked about is that this is also the guy responsible for bringing Netflix out to the rest of the world.
- Trying out Literate Programming again, this time with noweb.
- GammaRay, really awesome application for examining internals of Qt applications using introspection.
- Tips on getting media coverage for your game. A few substitutions there and this becomes simply Tips on getting media coverage.
- The Prosaic DIY Reality of Software Houses, written by the creator of the Scrivener application. A really nice thing is that problems such as distribution, which used to be quite problematic just a few years ago, are becoming extinct now.