Code as Art + More

Sunday 27 January 2008 at 2:49 pm Cool - Code as Art. This is probably my favourite - requires Java.

My Nokia 770 is back from its WSOD and I've been using it off and on for the last few months. What is a little frustrating is that it doesn't do Bonjour. It does do UPnP though so I've been hunting around for a decent Mac OS X implementation - the best I've found is the commercial NiceCast server which is lightweight and simple to use. Not wanting to spend $$$ on something I'd only use occassionally I looked for open-source alternatives and came across Fuppes - there is no Fink or DarwinPorts package so I had to compile from scratch which was straightforward once you meet the pre-requisites (which thankfully do exist in Fink/DarwinPorts). Once its up and running it'll happily dish up audio, video and pictures to any UPnP device.

Interesting - How to recognise a good programmer.

Awesome - Fantastic metal sculptures.

Typing tutors used to be super popular 10-15 years ago (Mavis Beacon anyone?) - now you can improve your typing speed on the web.

If I had a spare room I'd fill it with thousands of coloured bouncy balls too.

Handy - Rules of Thumb. Some are a little hokey but some are useful.

Amusing - Books that make you dumb. Relates SAT scores to books people read - information culled from Facebook.

Google engineer discusses SQL, DBA's and MapReduce - Databases are hammers. MapReduce sounds pretty cool.

Interesting insight into real world DR/BCP/Incident Management - Five whys

Nassim Taleb, who invented the term, defines it thus: "A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations." Almost all internet outages are unexpected unexpecteds: extremely low-probability outlying surprises. They're the kind of things that happen so rarely it doesn't even make sense to use normal statistical methods like "mean time between failure." What's the "mean time between catastrophic floods in New Orleans?"

On a related note it turns out the Five Whys is an analysis technique for getting to the bottom of a problem.

Six Decisions Your IT People Shouldn't Make

Saturday 26 January 2008 at 12:58 pm Looks like a fascinating read - Six Decisions Your IT People Shouldn't Make.

The first three relate to strategy:
How much should we spend on IT?
Which business processes should receive our IT dollars?
Which IT capabilities need to be companywide?
The second three relate to execution:
How good do our IT services really need to be?
Which security and privacy risks will we accept?
Whom do we blame if an IT initiative fails?

Nice quote (emphasis is mine)

Senior managers often feel frustration--even exasperation--toward information technology and their IT departments. The managers complain that they don't see much business value from the high-priced systems they install, but they don't understand the technology well enough to manage it in detail. So they often leave IT people to make, by default, choices that affect the company's business strategy. The frequent result? Too many projects, a demoralized IT unit, and disappointing returns on IT investments.

To true.

Kiwi Music

Tuesday 22 January 2008 at 10:03 pm Found via this excellent Metafilter thread - You're just to obscure for me - excellent individual mp3's via Mixotheque and Kiwitapes (whole albums in fact).

Get them while you can and revel in classic Kiwi indie-pop.

Citation Needed + More

Thursday 03 January 2008 at 3:00 pm Great links from all over the interweb -

Amusing - A great sticker to place on signs making dubious claims. And on a similar note XKCD question the validity of presidential candidates.

Nifty - GrabFS on Leopard. Seems reasonably pointless but interesting in its use of some of the more esoteric OS X features.

I've heard of some interesting things about this movie and its soundtrack - 'Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait'. Fantastic review. I wonder if it would actually hold someone's interest if they weren't actually a football fan ?

I know a fair roster of science types - however none of them are committed enough to get scientific and mathematical tattoos.

Plenty of top ten lists doing the rounds at the moment but if you're a fan of independent gaming then you might enjoy some of these - 2007 Top 10 Games of the Year. Scavenger and Aquaria in particular look visually stunning.

And of course along with the new games there are the best remakes of 2007. 'Wizball' is definitely my favourite (and theres a Mac version) but 'Io' brings back fond memories too.

The ultimate web page background - Tiled Animated Gif. My eyes my eyes.

if you're going contracting, starting your own business or just want to be remembered try a metal business card. Alternatively try the slightly more geeky cdrom business card.

If you produce CD's for trade-shows you might find this solution interesting for the perennial problem of cutting CD's which end up with out of date software on them - Rogue Amoeba Live CD. The application icons in the CD actually check to see if they're the most recent version or not - if they are then they install from CD, if they're not they download and install from the web.

I'm trying to find a way to print out an a3 or a4 of this image but its worth poking around they dynamic image indicating how the US budget is carved up.

Being a terminally lazy sod prone to bouts of procrastination I find no problem with this manifesto Slow Down Now. 'Multi Tasking is a Moral Weakness' indeed