Art

The portfolio of Christian Hecker has sci-fi concept hardware and environments.

As does the portfolio of Dr. CM Wong.

I’ve been listening to Frisky Radio at work a lot. It’s electronic dance music with an emphasis on progressive house and tech house.

I like these hyperrealistic sculptures. The hyperrealism movement as a whole is fascinating to me.

Interesting vintage products for your home. Check out the “unusual objects” section.

Web Design

Acorn is a great Mac image editor, with free and $50 versions. I feel like I’m late to the game on this one, but I only recently gave up on the frustrating Mac ports of GIMP.

Turn your Macbook’s track pad into a pen tablet with Inklet.

The origin of the HTML img tag, as proposed in 1993.

I always have at least one free font site bookmarked for these link dumps.

Programming

I haven’t used LÖVE, a framework for making 2d games in Lua, but their simple and well-documented API makes it sound really appealing.

Speaking of game development frameworks, Unity recently released a free version of their very comprehensive and mature 3d game development platform.

Nodejs lets you write a web server in JavaScript with event-based IO. I have a few projects in mind that might be good guinea pigs for this framework.

A liberal regex for matching URLs. The URL syntax is too complex for most half-assed patterns to be sufficient.

Checking if a JavaScript object is an Array is actually not simple. Here is an analysis and useful solution.

Here is some advice on hiring programmers. I’ve felt since the beginning of my career that the typical interview process is deeply flawed, but am only recently getting an idea of what I’d rather do instead.

Useful

My preferred weather site. Can the cluttered and unhelpful weather.com just give up their domain name to them?

There is a lot of software to record audio playing on your computer. So far I think Audio Hijack Pro works the best for me.

If you have anything on your computer that should be encrypted, but isn’t, set up TrueCrypt right away.

Fun

The oddly-named VVVVVV is a nice puzzle/platform game that reminds me of other independent concept platformers like Braid.

Captain Forever is a simple but engaging game that lets you salvage parts and upgrade your ship in real time as you play against bigger and more complex adversaries.

A comprehensive analysis of the choose-your-own-adventure style of interactive fiction, along with novels you can read along with a visualization of your progress through the decision tree.

Inform is a surprisingly interesting development environment for Zork-like interactive fiction.

More

Unskippable is a funny MST3K-like series humorously commenting on video game introductions.

An interesting article about the problems with making the world of graduate education more practical.

TweetNoteBook is silly, but I want one.

Ever dreamed of making galaxies collide in the comfort of your own home?

A good overview of the American craft vodka scene.

Cracked continues to be an interesting source of information.

I was breaking my own rule for awhile on this blog.

Every website should explain what it is, right off the bat.

I’ve added a new “Welcome” blurb to the right to amend this oversight.

It is easy to forget this rule, since this information is so obvious to the designer. But it is crucial: if a new visitor doesn’t know what a site is for, and can’t find out quickly, they’ll often just leave.

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The man purse. The murse. This oft-reviled accessory should, judging by its function, enjoy ubiquity among the possession-conveying public. Incomprehensibly, it is a taboo of sorts. Well, it’s 2010. This year, nothing is sacred. Not even society’s most enduring conventions.

What defines a man purse, anyway? One would think that it would be a purse worn by a man, but oftentimes the stately messenger bag, when perceived to be sufficiently emasculating in style or stature, is considered a man purse as well. This broader category may be the intent of the term “man bag” but I will use the terms interchangeably here. We’re all in this together.

To be entirely clear, here is a picture of myself with my second-favorite manpurse.

Look at this stately man. Note the splendor. Why, surely nothing is amiss here.

Yet still the eyes of many see the above as analogous to what follows:

That’s right. Small bags are for ladies.

Forget it. The sexes are equal now. Men can wear little bags, and women can wear cowboy hats.

Let’s say you appreciate that attire does not define your sexuality. Kudos! But you’re still not convinced of the man purse’s practicality. Let me show you what I have in my bag today.

Glasses, sunglasses, headphones, book, pen. Sometimes there will be a hat and gloves, outgoing mail, and other such sundries. This is the very image of convenience and efficiency. A backpack, briefcase, or messenger bag would be excessive. The additional bulk would be an uncomfortable addition. On the other hand, simply stuffing the pockets of a coat would be insufficient and, I dare say, unsightly.

Further, there are altruistic reasons to sport the man purse. On a public subway, for example, space is at a premium. As you stuff your body and possessions into a crowded train, behind you there may be a human being whose truancy could have resulted from your selfish use of a bulky bag.

I trust this convinces any but the most bigoted of naysayers. And to those who need no converting: Right on. But still, while it might feel like the world is your oyster, every time you take a swig of water from the bottle in your bag you must remember those who sacrificed their dignity to earn you that privilege. They are mankind’s greatest heroes.

I just stopped by OpenOffice.org to download their fine software. I hadn’t seen their site for awhile, and while the current design is pretty nice, they made one tragic error that I can’t help but point out. Here is the current design:

Everything you’d come to the site for, laid with convenient icons. However, for some reason, each of the main links in the body of the page is an entire sentence. If I’m looking for the download link, I just need to see “Download”. The sentences add nothing, but they do make it harder to scan the page, since they distract from the key terms. Further, each line already has an explanation beneath it, if you’re really not sure what the links do. I would have done it more like this:

Much better. If you came here to get help, visually scanning the page will reveal the “Help” link instantly, instead of a couple seconds later. In web design, seconds matter.

Back in college, I had a professor pose an interesting question on an exam. It was worded like this:

“On the back of this paper, write out every keystroke and mouseclick you would take to add five spaces at the beginning of the first 10 lines of a file in a text editor.”

Naturally, some people protested. But he insisted that the literal meaning of the question was to be carried out.

Some students assumed it was a trick question that they didn’t understand, and wrote nothing. Some students write out the entirety of what was necessary to do this in Notepad:

space, space, space, space, space, down, home, space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space, down, home,space, space, space, space, space

At the time, I had been learning Vim at the professor’s advice. So, feeling very clever, I wrote this on the back of my paper:

:1,10s/^/     /

In a few days, when the exam was returned, students noticed that the this question had not been graded. The professor answered them:

“Your reward for getting it right is not having to write out an entire page of text to do something trivially simple. If you haven’t followed my advice and learned a good text editor, you waste this much time a hundred times over every time you write a program.”

Invaluable advice for any programmer. Use good tools, and get really good at using them.

[Image Credit]