There’s a Star Trek wiki, almost 26,000 articles.
Category: tech
A video of Merlin Mann talking to Google employees about Inbox Zero, e-mail management philosophy and technique. “Before you get good, you have to stop sucking.” For the past two weeks, I’ve gone to bed with an empty inbox. It feels great. And now that I’ve got a good Seinfeld streak going (thx, Austin), I don’t want to break it.
Lately there have been a couple good interviews with William Gibson in anticipation of his book, Spook Country. From his talk with the College Crier:
One of the assumptions that I had was that science fiction is necessarily always about the day in which it was written. And that was my conviction from having read a lot of old science fiction. 19th century science fiction obviously expresses all of the concerns and the neuroses of the 19th century and science fiction from the 1940’s is the 1940’s. George Orwell’s 1984 is really 1948, the year in which he wrote it. It can’t be about the future. It’s about where the person who wrote it thought their present was, because you can’t envision a future without having some sort of conviction, whether you express it or not in the text, about where your present is.
And recently on Amazon:
The thing that limits you with Google is what you can think of to google, really. There’s some kind of personal best limitation on it, unless you get lucky and something you google throws up something you’ve never seen before. You’re still really inside some annotated version of your own head.
Mark Hurst just published a book to get you back on track: Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload. Could be a good one.
I like Andy Rutledge’s little essay on quiet structure: “Quiet structure is achieved when you deÄìemphasize the structural elements; the containing boxes, structural lines, bullets, structural color elements, etcĶ and bring a rhythmical consistency to the layout.” A good grid is a powerful thing.
Mike Davidson has a simple solution to spend less time dealing with e-mail overload: “Every e-mail I send to anyone, regardless of subject or recipient, will be five sentences or less.”
The Oregonian newspaper is publishing its daily photos on Flickr. It’s looks like they’re consistently geotagging them, too. I absolutely love it. [via matt]
A long essay exploring Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies.
I just found Moon River a few days ago. A blog with lots of old books, maps, design stuff. Right up my alley.
The Turk was a novelty chess-playing machine hoax. It first debuted in 1770 and toured for almost a century. I was surprised it had such a rich history.
A pretty cool collection of experimental thumb pianos. I always wanted to make an mbira (aka thumb piano aka kalimba) since I found out they existed. Just one of those projects I forgot about that I need to re-add to my list. I saw Bob Becker play one in concert at PASIC one year, I think back in 2001. Of course, because Bob Becker is who he is, it was amazing.
The makers of Splenda have bought off hundreds of negative domain names, like splendakills.com. Is it just their paranoia or should I be concerned? [via torrez]
I’m pretty much fascinated with the Whitney Music Box, which explores some of the ideas in John Whitney’s 1959 book Digital Harmony. I like the microtonal variation, and the sine wave harmonics are cool because harmonics are inherently cool. Jim Bumgardner wrote more about this project and some of the mathematics of the patterns in his blog.
“The Cinema Redux project explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time. The end result is a kind of unique fingerprint for that film. A sort of movie DNA showing the colour hues as well as the rhythm of the editing process.”
Twittervision lets me act like Big Brother, and other people do all the work. I just absorb the data.
Web Typography Sucks, a pretty cool presentation at SXSW Interactive this week.
Dreaming in Code (review: 4.5/5)
“Software is a heap of trouble”. That’s the abridged version of this book.
You’ll find the full story in Scott Rosenberg‘s fantastic Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software. One part of the tale follows the progress of the Open Source Applications Foundation project called Chandler; the other wends back through the history of computer science and software development. The story takes a good chunk of paper, around 350 pages + notes. None of it is terribly technical.
Chandler started with Mitch Kapor (known for Lotus 1-2-3, among other things) and the dream of the ultimate personal information organizer. E-mail, scheduling, calendars, notes, workgroup sharing & more, all in one cohesive and flexible system. In light of Rosenberg’s Law and its corollary (“Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. And the only software that’s worth making is software that does something new.”), Chandler has proven a daunting task. It’s been over 4 years since Rosenberg started observing the OSAF team. As of this writing, Chandler is currently still only in version 0.7alpha4.
That creeping glacier of code raises the question: is it the team or just the nature of the job? Probably both. Rosenberg uses the hiccups and foibles of the OSAF team to explore some of the recurring issues of software development: the inherent mental difficulty of abstraction on a mass scale, the programmer’s tendency to “glance at existing code and declare authoritatively that they could do it themselves, faster, easier, and better,” the mythical man month, attempting progress without planning, the discouraging truth of Hofstadter’s Law, and the need to reinvent the wheel (and fire and stonecutting and agriculture, etc.). Luckily, Rosenberg doesn’t pose the Chandler team so much as the butt of the joke but the foil for the argument: software is hard.
One interesting thread in this book is the idea of programming as creative writing. Quoting Richard Gabriel:
We should train developers the way we train creative people like poets and artisits… What do people do when they’re being trained, for example, to get a master of fine arts in poetry? They study great works of poetry. Do we do that in our software engineering disciplines? No. You don’t look at the source code for great pieces of software. Or look at the architecture of great pieces of software. You don’t look at their design. You don’t study the lives of great software designers. So you don’t study the literature of the thing you’re trying to build.
The software industry doesn’t have a strong sense of history. Part of that lack is cultural—many just don’t care that much—and part of that is a necessary commercial evil whereby code is protected to protect profits. But I love that idea of the literature of software, the somewhat hidden heritage. This brings to mind the idea of artist qua collector and the idea of amassing influence. But for better or worse, there’s already way too much to learn just to keep up with the present. So the programmers plug on “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” if you’ll pardon the drama.
Interview with Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield. Interesting ideas there about being at the forefront of photojournalism, as the Flickr community can be much more agile than the press.
Mark Larson 
