LOL learnt a new acronym today:
TIMTOWTDI is There is more than one way to do it
Also a motto of Perl =p
Archive for the 'Random' Category
A famous loose-cannon/American billionaire has a plan for unseating Google from its search-engine throne – and at a mere $1bn, his idea is significantly less expensive than the billions Microsoft is sinking into that Bing thing.
Broadcast.com co-founder and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban’s idea is simplicity itself: Just pay the top 1,000 websites a million bucks per to de-list themselves from Google.
Read the full article at The Register.
It all started when someone asked whether there’s a function to inverse a sign on integers:
Read when bored
It dawned on me that many applications still use the old 3.5 floppy disk icon for the save button. While it is almost second nature to us, what kind of impression would it have on someone who has never seen or used one before?
Bill Gates recently mentioned he is dumping facebook due to too many friend requests. This is a (hilarious) mock up of his facebook profile, courtesy of PC World:
No it was not a random color. According to Susannah Locke at Scienceline, surgeons in particular benefit from the colors green or blue as opposed to white for two reasons:
First, looking at blue or green can refresh a doctor’s vision of red things, including the bloody innards of a patient during surgery. The brain interprets colors relative to each other. If a surgeon stares at something that’s red and pink for too long, he becomes desensitized to it.
Just noticed that the audio in one of my videos on youtube has been disabled. The message says:
Your video, The Pencil, may have audio content from Diagon Alley and The Gringotts Vault by Harry Potter Soundtrack that is owned or licensed by WMG.
Brad Bird’s talk on innovation:
The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. … “You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.”
http://gigaom.com/2008/04/17/pixars-brad-bird-on-fostering-innovation/
Rushing for a few deadlines this week, I stayed over at the new maya lab to work. Usually my well trained sleep-deprived body would allow me to go on for 48 hours non-stop at a go, but I decided that this time, I would restrain myself and get at least a few hours of sleep each day.
An article by Esther Schindler discussing how it is often a good idea to start coding from scratch instead of trying to patch the big mess you created the last time when meeting a deadline.
Becoming a Great Programmer: Use Your Trash Can
I’ve come to believe that all great software is written three times. The first time you write it, it’s to see if your idea can work at all. It’s the digital equivalent of scratching something out on the back of the envelope, leaving out the fancy stuff and just concentrating on the basic feature or algorithm. Once you figure out that yes, this might be a good way to solve the problem, then you write the code a second time, to “make it work.” But it’s the third time you write the code, when you’ve had the opportunity to learn from the mistakes from the “try to make it work” phase, when your application will be the best it can be. (Well, almost. There’s often a 3.1, too. Even great software has a few bugs.)