October 2009
51 posts
“Simple and useful designs just don’t seem good enough when they are dead pixels....”
– Ryan Singer - (37signals)
Support Details | Tech support anger management →
This is just beautiful. Allows users (clients) to send all of their browser details to someone for help in diagnosing problems. Via benw:
A really neat interface to get useful system stats and browser set-up info from your users. Lots of useful applications for diagnosing support requests. (via David Emery.)
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“Life without knowledge is death in disguise.”
– Talib Kweli
'Crash' Director Paul Haggis Ditches Scientology →
Rather interesting letter witten from (director and screenwriter) Paul Haggis to (Church of Scientology national spokesman) Tommy Davis resigning his membership of the Church. Like Haggis, I’m amazed it took an intelligent man so long to see past the hypocrisy, and ridiculousness of the church’s behaviour.
Postmark – Email delivery in the cloud →
Postmark, a web service used for sending ‘transactional’ e-mails (such as ‘welcome’ or ‘confirmation’ messages) being developed by the folks at Wildbit — the guys behind the wonderful Beanstalk. Seems like a brilliant solution for web-app builders who don’t have their own properly configured mail server up and running.
Sentiment and Text Analysis: Lexalytics →
“Lexalytics provides companies with the ability to extract important metadata from numerous data sources to get straight to the relevant information.” Sounds a bit like OpenCalais but less businessy. Looks clever.
Jan Moir: A Warning From History →
Genius.
The death of language? →
Of the estimated 7,000 languages in the world, 133 of them are spoken by fewer than 10 people. Scary.
Teocuitlatl
The word for gold in the Mexica language Nahuatl.
It translates (literally) as ‘god excrement’.
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Zombieland
Directed by Ruben Fleisher (2009)
It has been a couple of weeks since I saw this, but what the hell, I’ll review it anyway.
I was all prepared to be underwhelmed by this movie: Shaun of the Dead style ‘zom-com’ with a gung-ho attitude that is the staple of such films from the other side of the Atlantic, and directed by the man who directed … err … well … not...
“Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not...”
– Joe Haldeman, The Forever War
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The White Tiger
By Aravind Adiga
Balram Halwai, the eponymous White Tiger — or a lump of half-baked clay as he describes himself (and, indeed, all entrepreneurs) — leads us on a journey through contemporary India, from humble beginnings as a tea-shop worker to the head of a successful business enjoying a regular (one-way) dialogue with the Chinese prime minister.
I’m not sure whether...
Momijigari
The Japanese tradition of going to visit scenic areas where leaves have turned red in the autumn.
“All reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general...”
– Joe Haldeman, The Forever War
Americans are fleeing religion as atheism surges →
“What’s really behind this surge of rationality in America?”
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The power of dogu
The British Museum, until 22 November 2009. Admission free
Dogū are small ceramic figures made during the Jōmon period of ancient Japan (~14,000–400 BC), whose precise purpose and significance are largely unknown, and whose design while following several definable trends, also exhibit incredible diversity.
I have to say I knew nothing about Dogū before chacing on this exhibition after some...
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WatchThe Candle Thieves - The Sunshine Song. You could possibly accuse it of being a little saccharine, but that would only mark you out as being a miserable git. Check out more on The Candle Thieves @ MySpace.
“He wants me to tell him something pretty.”
– Al Swearengen
Fossil Skeleton From Africa Predates Lucy →
A 4.4 million year old fossil skeleton — which has been assembled piece by piece over the last 15 years — ‘plausibly’ ancestral to Australopithecus and that may begin to show clues of the common ancestor of early hominids (including us). Fascinating.