It’s better than rayyy-ee-ayyy-nnn

17 Jul 2009  around lunchtime  Matt Winckler

…even on your wedding day!

I used to think Amazon Kindles were kind of neat, in an abstract “I’d probably never spend the money” sort of way. Today, though, I’m pretty convinced that I’ll never buy one due to the heavy-handed reminder that you don’t actually own any of those e-books you purchase from Amazon, you just license them. And Amazon might buy that license back from you at any time, without warning, as they just did in the case of a particular (dead) author whose publisher decided to pull its content from the Kindle store.

Of course, who could the author possibly be but George Orwell, and the titles pulled: Animal Farm and 1984.

Not a joke, but so hilariously ironic that you have to wonder if it was staged.

A little esprit de corps

19 Jun 2009  in mid-morning  Matt Winckler

I am gratified to learn that developers are born brave.

Of course, were we to unceremoniously carry this picture’s metaphor to its logical (yet bitter) end, we would realize that the developer’s only brave because he put the rat there in the first place. So perhaps the correct conclusion is that developers are born scary.

I’ll take either one.

Seen someplace

12 Jun 2009  around evening time  Matt Winckler

Command-line Russian roulette:

[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo '*click*'

I like it.

Some design pleasantness

11 Jun 2009  in mid-morning  Matt Winckler

I’ve landed at Marc Grabanski’s site a few times on the business end of Google searches about jQuery, and every time I end up there I find myself wishing I could come up with a blog title image like his. Take a look. I love it.

The other, similar illustration style I like a lot is exemplified by Joyent. I freely admit to having clicked all over their site just to find all the pictures of their cast of characters, even though I have pretty much nothing to do with what the company offers (again–landed there after a Google search of a technical problem). I particularly commend the developer and the support staff.

Egotistical roller coaster

05 Jun 2009  just before lunchtime  Matt Winckler

If you’re a programmer, there is no excuse for not knowing about Stack Overflow. I’ve never seen such a high signal-to-noise ratio combined with such fast responses to programming-related questions. It seems to take me longer to compose a question than it does for the answer to show up in response to it. (Of course, this may merely indicate that I’m a simpleton asking stupid questions. Don’t tell anyone.) I like to give back to the community that helps me out, so although I don’t have time to slavishly answer questions all day long (the way the SO community seems to), I do my best to browse the unanswered questions for a softball that a hack like me can handle. The drawback to this is that browsing the questions that go unanswered for any significant period of time is a major blow to the ego. There are some seriously smart people out there!

So in order to get my programming ego back in line, I usually have to browse over to The Daily WTF for a few minutes. Following that, I feel much better about myself, and everything balances out.