Indeed

Kitteh! (via Take your cute pills: Apple kitteh is a furry...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:39:56 -0800

Kitteh!

(via Take your cute pills: Apple kitteh is a furry little Mac fan)

What an excellent data analysis tool! Gary Flake: is Pivot a...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:38:23 -0800

What an excellent data analysis tool!

Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?

ferrydust: photoholic: “I want to go to there” « ...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:38:03 -0800

ferrydust:

photoholic: “I want to go to there” « KRISATOMIC

Winterfell?

I love the Song of Ice and Fire series.

Simple Desktops

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 11:40:56 -0800

Simple Desktops:

hdwallpaper:

hunsonisgroovy:

Simple Desktops is a collection of desktop wallpapers curated by Tom Watson designed to make your computer beautiful without distraction.

Love the graph. xkcd: Collatz Conjecture

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 11:39:59 -0800

Love the graph.

xkcd: Collatz Conjecture

Valve Mac faux ads

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:43:03 -0800

Valve Mac faux ads

"You know that Doritos has MSG, right?"

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:39:50 -0800

“You know that Doritos has MSG, right?”

triketora: theworldwelivein: Niagara Falls at Night (via olvwu...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:39:50 -0800

triketora:

theworldwelivein:

Niagara Falls at Night (via olvwu | 莫方)

Metagames and Containers – Sleepover

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:11:11 -0800

Metagames and Containers – Sleepover:

Steal this idea: using cookies, it’d be trivial to sort content into read and unread. This could aid both the reader who has returned to find a post they’ve read, and the reader who wants something new.

Mimeo and the Kleptopus King

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:14:06 -0800

Mimeo and the Kleptopus King:

I like this:

Before I get to Mimeo, I want to address my love of pixels. The aesthetics of Mimeo (and Horror Vacui before it) are not born solely from nostalgia. Good pixel art strikes the perfect balance between appreciable craftsmanship and the gestalt. A single pixel out of place, one too few or too many, ruins the illusion. There’s an unmuddied, economy of expression, the thankless result of the limitations of cartridge-based consoles.

And the game sounds awesome:

Mimeo (even the name) started as a Mario clone with a twist: instead of power-ups affecting the player, they affect the entire game world. A story and mythos quickly developed. The so-called Mimeoverse consists of two 16-bit demiverses sharing 32-bits between them. When the evil Kleptopus King, an 8-bit octopus with an inferiority complex, discovers a portal into Mimeo’s realm and begins to syphon off its bits, Mimeo is sucked in and down-sampled to 2-bit. So begins Mimeo’s quest to restore balance to the demiverses.

Book titles Tom Clancy bookmarked for future use when he took his first Computer Science class

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:06:52 -0800

mrgan:

Load Balancer

The Edge Case

Denial of Service

The End User

Greater or Less Than Zero

The Concrete Superclass

The Spaghetti Code (released under a pseudonym in 2004, to harsh reviews)

Slab Allocator

Greedy Algorithm

The Cardinal of the Kremlin (due to a misunderstanding)

Colonel Panic (also misheard)

Haha. Colonel Panic.

jingc: Things to Learn (via swissmiss) Something boring can...

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:06:52 -0800

jingc:

Things to Learn (via swissmiss)

Something boring can become beautiful if you look at it upside down.

Sometimes doing nothing can help you get good ideas.

Not everything has to have a good reason behind it.

I’m not sure I can do nothing anymore, but I’ll try.

jingc: Foldable Fractal 2.0 by Sanch (via dataisnature)

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:11:13 -0800

jingc:

Foldable Fractal 2.0 by Sanch (via dataisnature)

The Internet? Bah!

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:06:52 -0800

The Internet? Bah!:

jingc:

This Newsweek article from 1995 ended up in my inbox, to my amusement:

We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

And a final jab:

The truth i[s] no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

I’m sure I don’t need to point out the irony that this article is pretty much only available online now.

I had a good laugh reading this.

Not your father's PageRank

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:06:52 -0800

Not your father's PageRank:

Having years of algorithm development played back in one paragraph is breathtaking.

Steven Levy on how Google’s search algorithm has changed over the years.

Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.”

But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.”

Or in simpler terms, here’s a snippet of a conversation that Google might have with itself:

A rock is a rock. It’s also a stone, and it could be a boulder. Spell it “rokc” and it’s still a rock. But put “little” in front of it and it’s the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark. Unless Noah is around.

I know someone who would like this photo… chocolate

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 10:05:55 -0800

I know someone who would like this photo…

chocolate

What is it about the 50s? red and white straws

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:04:59 -0800

What is it about the 50s?

red and white straws

Strange, but I kind of understand it. xkcd: Devotion to Duty

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:03:55 -0800

Strange, but I kind of understand it.

xkcd: Devotion to Duty

Ahoy! Celebrity Cruise Lines welcomes an Apple Store on board

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 22:03:59 -0800

Ahoy! Celebrity Cruise Lines welcomes an Apple Store on board:

The Celebrity Cruise ship company has announced a new Internet Cafe on the new 2,850 passenger Celebrity Eclipse which sets sail in April. The iLounge, as Celebrity has named it, will include a mini Apple Store where passengers can buy MacBooks, iPods and other accessories.

Microsoft wants to give you a MacBook Pro

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:03:55 -0800

Microsoft wants to give you a MacBook Pro:

Huh.

Microsoft is running a pretty cool giveaway right now called Mac Office Loves You. The prize is none other than a 2.53Ghz 15” MacBook Pro with custom PMS cover and a copy of Office 2008 for Mac.