Posts

Lots of people are commenting on the Gun.io blog post The Government’s $200,000 Useless Android Application. Android developer Rich Jones stumbled across an application provided by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (an agency of the US government). In the end, he discovers that the government paid $96,000 to have a contractor build this buggy application that would take him around 6 hours to write. You really should read the whole thing – the steps he went through to get the details of the contract are interesting. ...

Susan Kare is the artist who created the original icons for the Macintosh. She started at Apple by designing proportional fonts but graduated to icon design. The degree to which her work made the original Macintosh software easier for humans to relate to can’t be overstated. The blog post features work from her original sketchbook, in which she designed icons on graph paper by using the squares as pixels.

At work, I’ve been experimenting with Apache Solr to see whether it’s the best choice for searching a very large data set that we need to access. The first step was to just set it up and put a little bit of data into it in order make sure that it meets our current and anticipated future requirements. Once I’d figured that out, the next step was to start loading lots of data into Solr to see how well it performs, and to test out import performance as well. ...

It’s becoming increasingly clear that while Facebook is a Web site, they don’t want to join the other Web sites in the pool we know as the Web. Anil Dash has the details and a way to encourage Facebook to change its behavior. First, he makes the case that Facebook is encouraging to drive its users away from the larger Web: Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users’ ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web. The evidence that this is true even for sites which embrace Facebook technologies is overwhelming, and the net result is that Facebook is gaslighting users into believing that visiting the web is dangerous or threatening. ...

Did you know that there’s a reverse lookup for Google Analytics IDs? I didn’t. Andy Baio has the details.

The New York Times ran an article this week about how beginning runners are not well served by the massive amounts of advice being offered on running form and running shoes. What do the doctors say? When it comes to running form, Dr. Bredeweg said, “we don’t know what is the right thing to do.” For example, he noted, forefoot strikers place less stress on their knees but more on their calves and Achilles tendons. ...

Right wingers like to blame our lack of economic growth on excessive government regulations. While I would agree that there are likely plenty of regulations on the books that could be repealed without harming consumers, the truth is that we have plenty of big problems with industries that are under-regulated and cases where regulations are not enforced. All too often, this occurs when the people who suffer are poor. Here are a couple of examples. ...

When is it OK to swear? Scott Hanselman takes on the issue of using profanity in conference presentations, blog posts, and other public communications. I find this interesting because he brings it up in light of the Don’t Give Your Users Shit Work blog post that I linked to the other day. The main reason I didn’t link to it in the first place was the title. I don’t normally use profanity here, and I wasn’t really sure about using it even in a direct quote. ...

Two guys come up with a good idea for a camera strap and start selling it. Competitor applies for a patent on a similar concept. Despite the fact that plenty of prior art exists that should prevent such a patent from being granted, it’s issued on November 1. On November 9, the small company announces that it’s discontinuing its products rather than risk a legal battle over the patent. Once again the real damage of the patent office failing to discharge its duty effectively is illustrated. ...

Before he created the awesome bookmark site Pinboard, Maciej Ceglowski was known primarily as a writer of incredibly good essays. For example, he recently wrote about the Arabic language, and in 2005, famously wrote the definitive essay criticizing the space shuttle program. Yesterday, he wrote a post on the Pinboard Blog criticizing the concept of the social graph. This paragraph really nails the inadequacies of computerized models of our human relationships: This obsession with modeling has led us into a social version of the Uncanny Valley, that weird phenomenon from computer graphics where the more faithfully you try to represent something human, the creepier it becomes. As the model becomes more expressive, we really start to notice the places where it fails. ...