flying molehill

weekly reel

Ronan — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

You there? Well hello, you look great today.

Getting Real, the no-nonsense webmaker's guide by 37signals, is now a free PDF. Read. It. Now.
NYT confirms Stuxnet was built by the U.S. and Israel.
"[...] make your mantra “screw the power users”. Unless power users are your primary customers, catering to them will only hurt your product."
Income inequality, as seen from space (1), (2) visualize the striking correlation between wealth and neighborhood tree-density. via BoingBoing
Technology Is At Its Very Best When It’s Invisible, another excellent followup to Learn to code and Jeff Atwood's "Please Don't Learn to Code". via Planet Mozilla
Worskpace (2007-2011) is a beautiful collection of, uh, workspaces. via BoingBoing
Maybe someday they'll realize banning firearms too is a good idea. But anyway, yeah sure NYC, go and ban large sugared drinks.
The Open Goldberg Variations, by Kimiko Ishizaka, via BoingBoing
Classical Objections (against video games, television, the radio, the newspaper, and every new media ever invented)

weekly reel

Ronan — Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Say wow:

"[...] every design decision that you make, as an engineer, affects the way that people behave toward your creation, so you should tend toward design decisions that encourage positive behavior in users [...]. You don’t engineer your systems with the belief that none of your computers will ever break. That’s insane; you KNOW they’re going to break. So don’t assume that your users will never break the rules. Build in graceful failure as often as possible, whether you’re designing a user interface or a security policy." An excellent story about pragmatic/forgiving engineering applied to airplanes ashtray regulation. via BoingBoing
Shake! Fold! Paper towel 101. via DF
Doctorow on the flaws of nerd political disengagement.
"Intelligence is the combination of knowing a lot about a little while you also know a little about a lot." Seth Godin knows his catchy-writing.
More on why you should learn to program. Mike Loudikes sums the thing up pretty well: [...] coding does force engagement with technology on a level other than pure ignorance. Coding is a part of cultural competence, even if you never do it professionally. Alsup is a modern hero. To which Jeff Atwood answers thoughtfully. Excellent exchange.
Is my credit card stolen?, via planet mozilla / Michelle Levesque.
Manatee and kid, via BoingBoing.
XKCD's hat man kickstarts his kickstarter project.
The art of shadow and light, via trivium
Reggie Watts beatboxing and confusing the audience at TED, via waxylinks
Linescape is a little experimental 1D game made for the Mini Ludum Dare 34. via waxylinks

se réveiller

Ronan — Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Grève étudiante qui dure.

Passage en force d'une loi honteuse réprimant la manifestation.

Mouvement qui dépasse la protestation étudiante, en devient une crise sociale, et s'élargit à la classe moyenne.

Qui se réveille, s'affirme, et prend chaque soir à 20h les rues d'assaut de façon aussi joyeuse que participative, grâce aux mêmes manifestations à casseroles que celles qui ont servi la population Chilienne face à Pinochet.

C'est intéressant ce qui se passe au Québec en ce moment.

Casseroles - Montréal, 24 Mai 2012 sur Vimeo.

weekly reel

Ronan — Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

News news news in early May:

Recursive Drawing, awesome. via waxylinks
Hartverdrahtet, amazing 4k intro.
"When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn't really link. The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, 'walled gardens', and although sometimes beautiful, they were small, stifling gardens." Why Publishers Don't Like Apps, excellent synthesis of the web-vs-apps debate. via kottke
I like board games exactly because of all that. via kottke
Trying to moralize pirates just does not work, when will they understand? Reminds me of this classic DVD: Customer vs. Pirate chart.
Respectable bicycle horn. Like the comments.

weekly reel

Ronan — Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Howdy, geeks! This week,

Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!, Stephen King argues for more taxes for the extremely rich. via boingboing
Stop criminalizing addicts and let them get high in safe conditions. via boingboing
More Rafe Colburn on people, hiring and competitive advantage: "Companies that put obstacles in the way of people solving problems find that the first rate employees look for other jobs, and that second rate employees devote their time to using Facebook rather than looking for ways to make things better. The most effective way to gain a competitive advantage at a company is to create a culture where employees are free to use as much of their brain as they want to build value for the company."
[bug:component-cockpit] user interface causes crashes?, new insight on the Air France crash suggests the way the sticks control the plane is an important part of the series of human and technical problems leading to the crash. via kottke
Music for programming is an awesome resource for music good enough to be listened to, while still letting you concentrate on a task. via waxy links. The K+D Sessions, by Kruder & Dorfmeister, are also great.
"We can't send email more than 500 miles", via kottke
GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism, simplicity for simplicity's sake is not desirable. via planet mozilla

weekly reel

Ronan — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Here we go again! This week,

Michael Abrash on the Valve approach to creative businesses. via kottke
Valve, again: The Valve Employee Handbook, an essential read to reflect on the value of the traditional managerial structure for information workers. via rc3.org
Stephen O'Grady reminds us about the benefits of having a company engineering blog. still via rc3.org
Panda three-way, Lynn Beisner re-examines the rite of passage that is “first sex” after learning her son lost his virginity in a three-way with an older couple. via Trivium
Best of the demoscene: a selection on Metafilter, and Scene.org awards. via waxy links
The devaluation of everything, humans crave moar moar moaaar. via kottke
Go right, via waxy links
Danah Boyd on everything, from social media to privacy to freedom to technology to geek culture.
"Don't negotiate with terrorists", the founder of fark.com tells the story of how he fought and beat a patent troll. via waxy links
More patents absurdity? Here you are. via boingboing
Lift Off: The Last Rocket Development Diary, inspiring ebook documenting something great being built. via DF
Obama slow jams the news, and makes Frenchmen like me depressed about their humdrum political scene.
Facts is dead; he'll be mourned. American-centric, but not American-specific. Worth the read. via kottke
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal #2589, on presidents and economic responsibility.
Nested: universe → galactic supercluster → galaxy → galactic center → black hole → inside the black hole → white hole → universe, and many many other combinations. via Trivium
The Wrath of Grapes, maybe-not-so-nonsense proposal: using the drinking tendencies of presidents to question their humanity. via df

weekly reel

Ronan — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

YAY. Now that I can just switch to my text editor to prepare a post, the barrier to blog is lower than ever! Let's get my weekly reel habit back rolling. In this week's information diet:

The beautiful OST of Dear Esther, by Jessica Curry is out. Dear Esther is a haunting game where you wander around a possibly desert island, recollecting pieces of a lost story. via IGM.
"We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear". via boingboing.
Farbrausch releases the source code for several tools and productions, including fr-041: debris. For those new to the demoscene: demoparties are geek gatherings where participants compete to develop the most impressive "demo", showcasing their code & art skills. For example, the aforelinked YouTube video is actually produced by a 64KB executable, which is about the size of an email.
Elderly, unresponsive man in a nursing home is transformed by music. Poignant.
retina.js is an open source script that makes it easy to serve high-resolution images to devices with retina displays. via onethingwell
Twitter Innovator's Patent Agreement. Way to go! Hoping it stands on solid legal ground. via waxy links. Also, kottke mentions Red Hat has had a similar policy in place for many years.
I'm no big Facebook supporter, but Zuck has a certain management style I like when it comes to dealing with board meetings. via DF. Where's the Like button, again?
Larry Ellison lying to a judge, episode MXXXIV, this time about Java on the Android case.
Cat alarm clock, love cats / hate them at 5AM. Meow, could be a Simon's cat episode.
Relative size of great grey owl's body to feathers, never be intimidated again by an owl.

autohotkey

Ronan — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

When using Windows, AutoHotkey is a great help to fluidify your workflow. Mountains of little annoyances and nice-to-haves can be implemented in a few lines of AHK. Those rarely win code beauty contests, but they are easy to make, easy to improve, and have little overhead. In short: they *work*.

I collected/improved/built a number of them, and figured I should share the love. So here is a gist of my autohotkey.ahk, and below a breakdown of the contents, ordered by importance to me:

Launch or toggle program, because Alt-Tab is not direct enough, and doesn't launch what is not launched. Firefox? Ctrl+Alt+I, always. Outlook? Ctrl+Alt+O, always. Etc. Windows equivalent to my little marathon X script. Theoritically replaced by the Windows 7 'Win+Number' shortcuts, but those are too much of a stretch for my left hand, and they depend on the window order.
Paste as pure text, sometimes I want to paste the funny red-text-with-yellow-highlighting formatting from email I receive, sometimes I don't. Alternative to PureText.
Archive Outlook message, cannot use Outlook without that.
Hotstrings, speed-up typing of repetitive text and expand abbreviations.
Toggle hidden files in Windows Explorer and Middle-click on title bar to minimize, ports of GNOME features that make much sense. Dragging windows with Alt+Click is another nice GNOME feature, but no AHK script matches the features of AltDrag (resizing, constrained resizing, snapping, ponies), try it!
Disable annoying keyboard keys like F1, "Launch Mail", etc. No longer fall into depression because Windows Help loads for twenty seconds after you hit F1 instead of Escape.
Move window to other monitor / Maximize window / Close window, bring window management shortcuts closer to the keyboard rest position.
Open in Chrome/IE and Resize current window to standard sizes, useful when designing web sites.
Insert <code></code> or surround selected text with it, be kind with your colleagues: use this to always do the effort of separating code from text in the HTML/Wikitext/Markdown you write.
Increase/lower/mute volume, laptops using non-mechanical surfaces to manage volume suck.
Clear console log with Ctrl+L and exit it with Ctrl+D, *nix style.
Process killer, at the tip of your mouse pointer and without process manager. Bang bang.
Reduce mouse sensitivity temporarily, useful when making pixel-precise selections
Meta, a few things to make AutoHotkey script writing easier

Notes:

For scripts that are not mine, the code gives credit where credit is due by indicating original author/URL in each script header. If I missed some, sorry, feel free to point me to the missing information. Or just fork, modify and pullrequest the gist.
Do yourself a favor and use an editor that supports AHK syntax. SublimeText doesn't, and I couldn't find a good user-made language definition, so I just use this one for Notepad++.
AutoHotkey_L is a custom build that is currently more actively maintained than the official build, consider giving it a try.

good engineering

Ronan — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This week I've been asking myself what good engineering is. For now, I see three important things:

Trade-offs. Without them, you end up producing Homer's car. Throw requirements in a saucer, say yes to everything, hope it flies. It doesn't.
Iteration. Getting "everything right by next week" is doomed to spectacular failure. Instead, get a defined bit right by tomorrow, then another specific chunk the day after, and another one. Plus, iterations will force you to care about your process.
Platform. The social benefits of good engineering should exceed its technical added value. The bland architect designs a park by methodically arranging trees and benches on a map. The inspired architect designs a place where people talk, have picnics and fall in love.

so that should work

Ronan — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Whee! Stuff I just added:

Comments, powered by Disqus
Compatibility with the Reader feature of Safari, following these guidelines