I’ve surprised myself by becoming a huge fan of Layer Tennis. Every Friday, two graphic designers take turns creating images in a graphic design thrown down. The tool of choice is usually Photoshop, but this week’s battle is a Flash battle, and a couple of weeks ago there was an Illustrator battle.
There are 10 shots [...]
Tyler Cowen has a great post on the willingness of arguers on both sides of any debate to ascribe motivation to their interlocutors without any evidence of those motivations:
I’d like to propose a new research convention. Anytime a writer or blogger talks about what The Right or The Left (or some subset [...]
The mathematicians behind Baseball Reference, Pro Football Reference, and Basketball Reference are joining forces to launch a company to support their sites. All three sites were started as hobbies, but have grown to be as essential in their own areas as Wikipedia is in general. Baseball Reference was the original and motivated the creators of [...]
I have some code that opens a socket, sends a message, receives a response, and closes the socket. I need to add a timeout to shut down the socket connection if it takes longer than a specified duration. This code is written in Java, but this is a design question.
Sockets support a read timeout. To [...]
The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is going to offer free-form online storage in the next few months. They already provide specialized storage for email, documents, and pictures (via Picasa), so it’s no surprise that they’re moving into offering storage for everything else digital.
To go meta a bit, I wonder whether Google leaked this [...]
James Governor, riffing on Tim Bray’s blog post On Communication, coins the idea of a Cambrian explosion in forms of communication. Both posts are very much worth reading.
The question at hand is whether or not it’s difficult to decide which form of communication to use for a particular message. I think my answer would be, [...]
Back in April I talked about how I like the convention of using Command/Alt-n to navigate between tabs in an application. What I’ve learned is that Apple is not with me on this.
Safari maps Command-n to the bookmarks in the bookmark toolbar. Yuck. In Leopard, the Terminal application supports tabs, but unlike iTerm, the [...]
You know, I expect a certain level of idiocy from half-baked ad blocking shareware, but you’d hope for more from a big company that sells software bundled with millions of PCs. When it comes to Symantec, that’s not the case. Tony Spencer ran into a little problem with his classified ad application:
After getting [...]
URL shortening services have been much discussed this week because TinyURL blew up. Twitter uses TinyURL to reduce URL sizes, so most of the URLs people were putting in their tweets were broken. This is bad, and if Twitter continues to gain popularity, it’ll be worse. Plus there are the larger issues of putting an [...]
The big news of the day is that Amazon.com has officially released Kindle, its electronic book reader. The device sells for $399, and the default price for books is $9.99 apiece. You can also subscribe to newspapers on the Kindle — the New York Times is $13.99 a month, and the Wall Street Journal is [...]