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“when ever you have a new team member you have a new team”. Ross Mayfield is pretty accurate, in my experience, of the issues with distributed working.
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“In an effort to understand usability in the OSS world, I’ve researched the stories behind my favorite — and least favorite — OSS programs.”
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“Adventures in particpatory, interactive, rock’n’roll storytelling.” Guy’s talk in fulltext format. Nicely done, Guy.
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An animation painted on a many walls, and interacting with the space around it. Hypnotic, grotesque, beautiful.
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“Your lists of friends and connections on the social websites that you use, sometimes called your social graph, belongs to you. No one company should own who you know and how you know them.” This could be interesting!
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Having worked on AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT) a while back, I thought aspect-orientated programming (AOP) would be good topic […]. I’m not going to go into too much depth but hopefully it’ll highlight some of the possible uses of AOP.
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“The Language Switcher WordPress plugin allows you to create a bilingual or multi-lingual blog, using WordPress.” Feels a little fudgy to me, but it definitely works.
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“You need to mentally prepare yourself before starting a review by reminding yourself of the purpose of the review and the need for a critical, questioning attitude.” Nice article on how to make code reviews effective.
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Long, detailed, useful reference guide to all the areas that you can tighten the security of your Ralis application.
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Visualisation of logfile access – “if you can tail it, you can visualise it” – in Ruby and openGL.
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Lovely, gravity-bending flash game.
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“All three—the internet telephone firm, the video site and the social network—make almost no money. EBay’s disappointment with Skype is a timely reminder of where this fad might lead.” The Economist on EBay’s Skype “issue”…
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Communication is inescapable, irreversible, complicated, and contextual. Nice summation of many of the issues around communicating with other people. Reminds me how little I’m going to miss transatlantic teleconferencing.
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“All it takes is a single call to Rake and you’re backed up on Amazon’s redundant, secure systems.”
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The 2007 IF competiton games, all ready for download.
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“In discussion, we decided there is too much logic in the controller. We want to move the authorization into the correct place in our domain model. But where?”
Pastures New
06 October 2007
This week, after 18 months there, I left my job at Nature Publishing Group. I’m sad to go, of course; I’ll miss the friends I made whilst working there and the chance to work with many smart, engaged, talented people. I also had the opportunity to work on and help shape several exciting projects, most notably Nature Network and Nature Precedings.
It’s been an enjoyable ride, and I’m surprised at the sheer amount I learned in those eighteen months. For starters, I appear to have learned how to be a programmer in that time. I’ve also had the chance to stretch my design skills, notably in the design of interactions.
I knew from the start it would never last forever; one day, other opportunities would arise. It turned out that I was right.
On Monday, I start work at Headshift, making technological things to help people better engage with one another. It looks fun – and it looks challenging.
I can’t wait.
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“Fitts’s Law is Made of Lines” is a rough summary of this, but in short – a neat graphical explanation of Fitt’s Law, with some useful notes, too.
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“If you can’t tell how long a piece of code would take when you have the finished product available, what chance do you think you have before the first line of code is written?” If only I could show this article to so many of my old directors.
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“If you approach design not as embedding your story in the environment, but as creating an environment wherein users can create their own stories, then I’d say you’re on the right track.” Kars on playful IA again.
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Pimping Autotest for fun and profit. And Growl notification. Nice!
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“This feels like yet another death knell,” emailed an A&R executive at a major European label. “If the best band in the world doesn’t want a part of us, I’m not sure what’s left for this business.”
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|The news last week that Sony has dropped the game for European release, forcing gamers to import the multiregional US version, is sad. This is exactly the kind of title the system needs to be promoting…” You’re telling me. What are Sony smoking?
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Nice presentation reframing issues as design challenges, and questioning why designers aren’t solving design problems.
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“This code, extracted from the Rails codebase of dopplr.com, extends your User model with methods to pull in social network information from sites such as GMail, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and any site supporting appropriate Microformats.”
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The Processing book. I had a look at blackbeltjones’ a few nights ago – big, dense, heavy, paper like a bible. Quite a lovely book, really. Will probably buy it at some point.
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Fantastic conclusion to the TF2 interview. Lots of lovely stuff in here about design processes, being honest to users, and seeking out hard problems. A must-read for anyone who makes things, really.
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Inconsolata “…is a monospace font, designed for code listings and the like, in print”. It’s also rather attractive on the screen, and might be the first monospace with rounded characters I actually like.
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Gosh. I really can’t wait for that. There’s just something about tiny robots that gets me every time…
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“Designing playful IAs means taking care that you encourage discovery, support exploration and provide feedback on mastery.” Kars’ whole talk is great, really.
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DHH fills us in on the changes in Rails 2.0. Given the preview release is out now, the full version can’t be that far off. Big changes, too.