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Interesting links of this week:

How To Easily Share Your Wireless Connection in Ubuntu 9.10

Epic win

Getting over the barriers to wiki adoption

What follows is usually an excuse for why the speaker feels that a wiki isn't a worthwhile tool for collaboration in his or her environment. I use the word "excuse" deliberately, because rarely does anyone articulate an actual business reason, such as a lack of need. When I ask deeper questions, I invariably find that the objection isn't to the wiki technology itself, but instead to the concept of collaborative authoring and a perceived loss of control over the content.

This column will change your life: Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do

Ever wondered why your friends seem so much more popular than you are? There's a reason for that.

Why is Everybody So Angry about Apple's iPad?

About sums it up. It will be great for quite a lot of people, and won't be "the thing" for users that want more control. I really only hope that it won't be the beginning of closing down *all* computers, as that will seriously hamper tinkerers. Tinkerers that are our future developers/hackers/programmers (think about how you started with IT).

Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All

I have a major pet peeve that I need to confess. I go insane when I hear programmers talking about statistics like they know shit when it’s clearly obvious they do not. I’ve been studying it for years and years and still don’t think I know anything. This article is my call for all programmers to finally learn enough about statistics to at least know they don’t know shit. I have no idea why, but their confidence in their lacking knowledge is only surpassed by their lack of confidence in their personal appearance.

Interesting links of this week:

A Day in America According to a (Baffled) Foreigner

And you know it's true...

​Modern browsers for modern applications

Hear hear. Go Google :)

Is the iPad the harbinger of doom for personal computing?

Good piece on the iPad being a device to bring closed computer systems to the masses. Will this mean the beginning of the end of open systems where you are the master of your hardware?

What bothers me is that in terms of openness, the iPad is the same as the iPhone, but in terms of form factor, the iPad is essentially a general purpose computer. So it strikes me as a sort of Trojan horse that acculturates users to closed platforms as a viable alternative to open platforms, and not just when it comes to phones (which are closed pretty much across the board). The question we must ask ourselves as computer users is whether the tradeoff in freedom we make to enjoy Apple’s superior user experience is worth it.

Guitar Hero hits the Commodore 64

*wets pants*

Why GPSes suck, and what to do about it

I'm the lead of the GPSD project, a service daemon that monitors GPS receivers on serial or USB ports and provides TPV (time-position-velocity) reports in a simple format on on a well-known Internet port. GPSD makes this job looks easy. But it’s not — oh, it's decidedly not — and thereby hangs an entertaining tale of hacker ingenuity versus multiple layers of suck.

Interesting links of this week:

We Are Just a Tiny Station in the Milky Way Subway Map - Milky way transit authority

Good way of visualising our Milky Way galaxy and the tiny spot our little solar system is taking in.

[Dutch] Privacy Barometer - De actuele stand van de politiek over privacy

Site about our policians' stance on privacy etc.

Why Can't Programmers.. Program?

Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in a under a couple of minutes. Want to know something scary? The majority of comp sci graduates can't. I've also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution.

[Dutch] Lieve Majesteit

Great rebuttal to our Queen's rejection of modern communication media in her Christmas speech last year.

Interesting links of this week:

in Bb 2.0 - a collaborative music/spoken word project

Awesome pieces of music; works really well when you combine some of the movies and let them jam together. Meshes together magically.

First-Person Tetris

Awesomeness

Talk Urbex - Exploring decaying abandoned architecture

Awesome pictures

Will You Go to Duct Tape Prom With Me?

Wow, elaborate

PHP Must Die

I like php for quickly putting a webapp together, but things/bugs like these don't help. Might need to spend more time developing with Django/Python

Russian Underground Submarine Base

Impressive

10 Awesome Uses of Augmented Reality Marketing

Very interesting

Zarro boogs

So that's where that bugzilla statement comes from

Interesting links of this week:

250 animales que no existirían sin Photoshop

Nice collection of 250 animals that wouldn't exist without that notorious tool

60 Humorous Print Advertisements to Tickle Your Bones

Teehee (not all SFW)

Lost: The Last Supper

The ones from the other series are quite nice too

COLOURlovers: Color Trends and Palettes

Also, patterns. Great site for when you're trying to find inspiration for a design.

SimpleRip: Ripping/Encoding DVDs to Xvid with Mencoder

Handy web-based tool to generate the command line for converting movies to xvid

Enable Windows 7 god mode!

That's actually quite handy. If you use windows seven, that is.

Interesting links of this week:

[YouTube] It Could Be Worse

It could be raining

Let's stop talking about "backups"

Are you going to be able to restore them?

American Apparel Ads: the 50 Hottest in Company History

That's what you call mature advertisement. I like it.

[YouTube] RF plane with on-board camera flies through fireworks

Fun stuff. Everybody wants to shoot at planes with fireworks ;)

[Silverlight] Designing the Windows 7 Desktop Experience

Too bad it's a silverlight video, but moonlight should do the job. Interesting presentation by Stephan Hoefnagels about how the user experience designers went on their way to make windows7 a better place. I think they even succeeded in their endeavour, which means that windows7 actually is a version that gets out your face like it should. Good stuff.

The Death Of The Blog Post

Let's face it: the classic blog post is boring. Barring the text and images, each one generally has the exact same layout. We see little originality from one post to the next. Of course, consistency and branding are extremely important to consider when designing a website or blog, but what about individuality? Does a blog post about kittens deserve the same layout as one about CSS hacks?