Brian Pan

Nov
22nd

Sun

Time, apparently going for a 0.05% content ratio. (This was after the page randomly scrolled itself from the top to the bottom and back a few times. Solid work, Time.)

Nov
21st

Sat

Abstraction is powerful. What I’m really allergic to, and what I had a bad reaction to in the ’90s, was all the COBRA, COM, DCOM, object-oriented nonsense. Every startup of the day had some crazy thing that would take 200,000 method calls to start up and print “hello, world.” That’s a travesty; you don’t want to be a programmer associated with that sort of thing. At SGI, the kernel, of course, was where the real programmers with chest hair went, and there you couldn’t screw around. Kernel malloc was a new thing; we still used fixed-sized tables, and we panicked when we filled them up.

— grumpy old geek, Brendan Eich, Coders At Work

Nov
20th

Fri

Apple Store Checkouts

@siracusa: Confession: I loathe the free-roaming handheld checkout process at the Apple store. My kingdom for an orderly line!
@siracusa: A line is better because it's FIFO and takes minimal effort. With nomad checkout, buyers must chase down staff. Busy store makes it worse.
@gruber: I strongly suspect Apple got rid of the checkout lines in their stores not to improve it but to eliminate perception of queues.
@siracusa: There are lots of reasons to do it from Apple's perspective. "Forced milling" has many upsides to the seller.
@siracusa: Not to mention a more efficient use of staff (no dedicated cashiers).
@siracusa: I'm not saying eliminate nomad checkout. It's ideal for many cases. Lines are best for others. Both, please.
@nevenmrgan: Sure, make it a pref. You Windows user :P

Paul Graham: Apple's Mistake

Nov
18th

Wed

verbalized:

Artwork with a dreamy feel by Brooks Salzwedel.

Nov
17th

Tue

merlin:

Mel Blanc’s cartoon voices VIDEO

Nov
11th

Wed

Job well done, Bing!

Nov
6th

Fri

New desktop courtesy CornerSpeedPhoto

Oct
6th

Tue

I grew up in a college town, and one Halloween our doorbell rang and we opened the door expecting to see trickortreaters—but what was in front of our open door—was another door! Like, a full-on wooden door, that had a sign that said “Please knock.” So we did, and the door swung open to reveal a bunch of college dudes dressed as really old grandmothers, curlers in their hair, etc, who proceeded to coo over our “costumes” and tell us we were “such cute trick or treaters!” One even pinched my cheek. Then THEY gave US candy, closed their door, picked it up and walked to the next house.

— Are we too old to trick or treat? (via Merlin, A Whole Lotta Nothing) (via marco)

Oct
5th

Mon