December 2010 Entries
This is something that’s been bugging me for a while, and I finally realised that english.stackexchange.com would probably have something to say about it. It did, yay! Double yay as I agree with what’s written there. Link: What is the correct way to pluralize an acronym?
The mantra of CA Technologies' Donald Ferguson: Simplify – that title doesn’t really explain the reason for the link, but knowing my past involvement with IBM/Lotus, the quote might: When I was at IBM, I started a product called Websphere ... Because I had come from working on big mission-critical systems, I thought it needs to be scalable, reliable, have a single point of control ... It was too complex for people to master. I overdesigned it. It’s a great quote, that anyone who’s had to work with Websphere will no doubt appreciate. ...
I find these excerpts from Stack Overflow 2010 Analytics to be an interesting read – the browsers, operating systems and screen resolutions especially. It’s a pretty selective subset of the Internet audience, which means a lot of these trends probably don’t translate across to the greater public, however I think that’s part of what makes the numbers all the more interesting.
It’s sad but probably unsurprising that these top 50 passwords leaked from Gawker media show that in general we’re not getting any better with this whole “security” stuff.
Google Maps & Label Readability, Part 2 – a short and interesting read which acts as another reminder that good design is a subtle art.
…and you can download all of Geocities as a massive torrent. Some interesting opportunities for statistical analysis in that torrent – such as counting the number of usages of the blink tag and other such artifacts. The thing is, there’s an opportunity to do something amusing with this torrent, but right now I can’t quite see what that is.
Single software licence shared 774,651 times – it’s viral marketing at its best. I like the fact of a company taking a different approach to this sort of stuff, and seeing it as an opportunity.
An oldie, but still a useful reference: If you do this in an email, I hate you. Tags: Amusing
I see many of these videos in the future of youtube. Tags: Gaming, Amusing