February 2012
10 posts
Coding tricks of game developers →
Dodgy Coder lists 16 anecdotes and hints from game programmers:
If you’ve got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you’ve had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific “crunch” (also known as a “death march”),...
Telephone numbers are a disgrace to our... →
Andreas Klinger: Telephone numbers are a disgrace to our generation:
Addressbooks show what happens when technology providers start to make money too quickly and to easily. They get lazy and stop fixing underlying problems in their concepts.
If you think about it telephone numbers are IP addresses and Address books are your local /etc/hosts. You spend ages to type any potential IP...
Winter Tweed Run →
The second annual Winter Tweed Run was organized yesterday in Helsinki in almost arctic temperatures which froze some of the bicycles to the extent non-functionality.
Photoset of the event by Krista Keltainen
Cosmonaut Couture: Russian Photo Shoot Makes Space... →
Fashion photographer Arthur Elgort created a Cold War propaganda pastiche with Natalia Semanova in the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center for Russian Vogue. Great looking photo set.
January 2012
24 posts
Apple Outsider » Hollywood Still Hates You →
Apple Outsider nails it:
iTunes changed the music industry because it was more convenient than stealing. Most people made the value judgment that ten bucks for a clean, legal digital album was worth the alternative of fishing around for files that may or may not be damaged or infected.
Hollywood continues to completely ignore that lesson. It continues to punish the people who play by the...
Google reminds Android developers that the Menu... →
The Verge:
In a new post on its Android Developers Blog today, Google is giving devs tips on how to better prepare their apps for a brave, Menu button-less future. Honeycomb started the revolution by introducing the so-called “action bar” at the tops of applications and by killing physical buttons in favor of soft, reconfigurable ones, but that was strictly a tablet affair — the...
Does Google accurately guess your age and gender? →
No-one is probably shocked of google tracking their behavior and profiling them:
Slate: Does Google Accurately Guess Your Age and Gender?
Find out what Google guesses is your age and gender. These “inferred demographics” are based on the websites you visit and are tracked by a Google cookie; they are used for advertising purposes
Alas, Google was not able to guess my age and just resulted...
The President's challenge - O'Reilly Radar →
A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of... →
Malware writers' bug tracking system →
The best indicator that malware business is lucrative and serious business: Script-kiddies have evolved to enterprises conscious of their customer satisfaction and the software is no longer designed by the same people who use it.
Krebs on Security
The proprietors of a new ZeuS Trojan variant are marketing their malware as a social network that lets customers file bug reports, suggest and...
Process does not exit for it's parts
About a year ago I was was walking around in the Old Market Hall in Helsinki and decided to have a coffee. The cafe there was a small one fitting roughly 20 or so customers and had two waiters —or baristas, how ever you want to call them— so the staff-to-client ratio was high. The waiters were doing what many service staff are doing: maintaining the chain. One was washing the dishes and the other...
Facebook Begins News Feed Ads Rollout →
Soon in a browser tab near you:
Facebook began a slow rollout of ads to the news feed today, but the units are not called Sponsored Stories - as some anticipated. Instead, according to the Palo Alto, CA-based digital giant, they are labeled “Featured” to distinguish them from earned media messaging that users sometimes see.
Cow Clicker →
Classic example of satire becoming more successful than it’s message.
Leigh Alexander of Kotaku on Cow Clicker:
This is the story of a person whose joke project became more successful than the one on which he lavished love and intellect, the climate that caused that to happen and how ultimately he decided to learn from it instead of becoming upset.
Cow Clicker was never supposed to...
How Doctors Die →
Interesting article on resuscitation and end-of-life treatment from a doctor’s point of view.
Ken Murray: How Doctors Die
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of...
Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design →
Vitsoe on Dieter Rams’ ten principles for good design
Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design?
As good design cannot be measured in a...
"vi was written for a world that doesn't exist... →
Bill Joy for Linux mag interview:
[Creating vi] was really hard to do because you’ve got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That’s also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow.
9600...
The Windows Blog: The US Says Goodbye to IE6 →
Time to pop open the champagne because, based on the latest data from Net Applications, IE6 usage in the US has now officially dropped below 1%!
Why all TV hardware is awful →
This is one of the —many— reasons I refuse to get a TV and stick to real displays.
Matthew Garrett:
[When you connect TV to a computer] [y]our 1920x1080 TV takes a 1920x1080 signal, chops the edges off it and then stretches the rest to fit the screen because of decisions made in the 1930s.
The fact is that nine of the current TVs is suitable to be used mainly with a computer and...
Learn To Code →
Daniel Jalkut:
What it boils down to is that programming is both incredibly simple and impossibly hard, like so many important things in life. There was a time when nobody knew how to write literary prose. The geniuses who invented it shared their special tool with a few friends, and they relished in their private, elite communications. Eventually monks, politicians, and academics joined the...
What Happens When You Give Thousands of Stickers... →
The Atlantic: What Americans (and World) Keep... →
December 2011
3 posts
Security Researcher Dan Rosenberg on Carrier IQ →
Comes with a table outlining what metrics are gathered and how they can be used.
Carrier IQ interview: inside the brave new world... →
November 2011
2 posts
October 2011
9 posts
iOS 5 vs. iOS 4 UI detail changes →
Why payment isn't the killer app of NFC →
Janne Jalkanentalks about the challenges of NFC, their usage on mobile phones and potential applications.
But herein lies the problem: if we have a replacement technology, and the amount of money in the system stays the same, then multiple players means less money for everyone.
What this all means is that NFC payments are a big boy’s game. In order to get your payment application on...
NYTimes: Corporations, People and Truth →
Gary Gutting:
Does it make sense to be loyal to a corporation as either a customer or as an employee? More generally, even granted that corporations are not fully persons in the way that individuals are, do they have some important moral standing in our society?
My answer to all these questions is no, because corporations have no core dedication to fundamental human values. —...
AllThingsD: How Do You Tell the Difference Between... →
Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month... →
Andy Baio: In 1987, Apple released this concept video for Knowledge Navigator, a voice-based assistant combined with a touchscreen tablet computer.
… 24 years later it’s reality and available for everyone to carry around with you.
You Love Your iPhone. Literally. →
According to Martin Lindstom in NYT we’re literally addicted to our smartphones:
So are our smartphones addictive, medically speaking? Some psychologists suggest that using our iPhones and BlackBerrys may tap into the same associative learning pathways in the brain that make other compulsive behaviors — like gambling — so addictive. As with addiction to drugs or cigarettes or food, the...
September 2011
16 posts
The iPad singlehandedly ruins the Finnish economy →
Sami Viitamäki:
[I]nstead of celebrating wins and looking into future opportunities, one single device (coming from a Nokia rival) is demonized and blamed for basically bringing down our dear country’s whole economy
I agree with the author and would add that the mindset has generally been programmed to retain the status quo which is seen across the society.
Finland should just ignore...
Oracle may have the best press release in a while →
Oracle’s press release is a gem in the world of corporate press releases. I also like how Oracle speaks about Oracle in third person.
Oracle Issues Statement:
“After HP agreed to acquire Autonomy for over $11.7 billion dollars, Oracle commented that Autonomy had been ‘shopped’ to Oracle as well, but Oracle wasn’t interested because the price was way too high. Mike Lynch,...