Links for 2005-12-01
Posted December 1, 2005 12:17 AM.
- An evening with Jon Stewart of the Daily Show - in London, in about a week! No idea if they have any tickets left, and I'm not going to be able to go because I'm in the US, but I can't imagine that it would be anything but pretty bloody awesome. Go if you have motor function anywhere.
- There's an entertaining web development kind of cartoon over at Scaryideas today And you know what it indicates to me - that you'd be much better having fewer people on a project and that communication is above all the most important element - hence rapid iterative multi-disciplinary work is best. Which I knew already!
- Nick Denton spells out the web apps and businesses that every start-up should be using... Some great stuff here, although much of it is more appropriate to the US than it is to us poor saps living in Start-Up Free Britain...
- Surprise! Computer scientists model the exclamation point I find myself newly interested in the science of the exclamation mark after joining Yahoo(!) I'll be honest, the brand's punctuation offends my grumpy old sod tendencies and desire to write non-offensive English... Perhaps science can help...
- Cameron Moll talks about 180 days of freelancing... I work freelance for a few months about four / five years ago and I was a disaster. I had no idea how to promote my work, manage cashflow. Total nightmare. I'm only now beginning to think that I'd be capable doing it properly.
- Interesting Psychology Today article on training yourself to wake up in the mornings... I've not had an alarm clock for about six years now, and I'm always awake at roughly the right time. If I have a special event I need to be up for, I look at the clock and visualise the hands turning around until the time I want to wake up, and then - alm
- Firefox 1.5 is launched And although I had some weird confusions trying to download it through Safari, I can state without question that the page works perfectly in Firefox 1
- Clearing out my Inbox of things to write about, I find that the BBC has been inadvertantly (geddit?) broadcasting product placements... "Companies are paying fees of up to £40,000 to advertise their products covertly on BBC programmes, often in breach of the corporation’s rules."
- Onlife - keeps track of pretty much everything you're doing, keeping an impromptu record of your life... I wanted to write about this when it came out, but as usual decided it needed a greater degree of depth than a linklog post and - as a result - wrote nothing. The idea is great. The execution is pretty good. It slowed down my mac a fair deal though.
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
That cartoon reminds me of a few of Louis Hellman cartoons particularly a christmas card he did a few years back which showed how the client, the architect, the quantity surveyour, the engineer etc. might view a christmas tree. But also the 'images of the architect' series, which you can kind of see here...
http://www.louishellman.co.uk/pages/shop2.html
→ Posted by: tom at December 1, 2005 8:48 AM
I first saw the Scaryideas cartoon when I was working in IT, which dates it to 1995 at the latest. I think it's worn well, except that - from talking to developers I've kept in touch with - vastly more attention is paid to formal procedures these days, to the point where adherence to procedures is the principal metric on which people are managed (ahead of anything relating to an end product, for instance). It makes a certain kind of sense - interchangeable 'resources' are easier to manage, and the more closely everyone follows the procedures, the more interchangeable they'll be - but it doesn't make for the most life-enhancing environment.
→ Posted by: Phil at December 1, 2005 10:03 AM
Regarding Onlife:
Haven't tried it yet - but doesn't Spotlight (OS X Tiger) kind of nullify the cross-application indexing feature?
And isn't that the most useful feature?
Keep it plain-text and use grep i say.
→ Posted by: anil at December 1, 2005 1:39 PM
No no - the main benefit is the complete day by day record of sites you've visited, songs you've played and documents you've had open. That stuff is so cool, it's untrue. Have a play!
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at December 1, 2005 4:22 PM
Jon Stewart comes to London: "I'm not going to be able to go because I'm in the US"
Typical, innit.
→ Posted by: shrinkwrapped at December 1, 2005 8:38 PM
You don't use an alarm clock? Does it not matter what time you get up or something?
I catch a train and I have a time I need to be in work. I don't think counting round the clock before going to sleep is going to stop me sleeping 5 minutes too long (my body could use the sleep!).
→ Posted by: Drew B's take on tech PR at December 1, 2005 10:29 PM
Regarding the product placement allegations in the Sunday Times article, BBC Editorial Policy have investigated this and found there was nothing in it.
For details see this press statement:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2005/10_october/24/product.shtml
→ Posted by: Nick Reynolds at December 2, 2005 10:54 AM