Asides

Archived Posts from this Category

  • Writing is harder than hacking. They’re both hard to do well, but writing has an additonal element of panic that isn’t there in hacking.
    With hacking, you never have to worry how something is going to come out.
    Working on my thesis proposal this week; my thoughts exactly. (0)
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  • Weird Al’s video for “White & Nerdy” is brilliant, and an accurate lampooning of almost everyone I know. :) (0)
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  • The holidays and sunny days recently have put some of us in a productivity slump. I know I’ve been finding it hard to get back to some projects that were left half-finished last month, but I read an inspiring article today from writer Anne Lamott on getting the first draft out of the way. It’s a simple but terrific way to get yourself motoring on something that’s been languishing in your projects pile for a while. (0)
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  • Mike Ash offers some help on finding help, in fora like message boards and mailing lists. I answer a lot of technical questions from readers of my site, so I can sympathise. Also useful is the definition of the “help vampire.” Again, we probably all know them when we see them. In fact, I went to college with a few of them… (0)
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  • A gang of us went down to Punchestown for the weekend for the annual Oxegen festival, surrounded by people who apparently still buy albums. It was my first time camping, and got pretty wet and miserable, as you can see in the photos. Rodrigo y Gabriela were of course the highlight. (0)
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  • Paul Graham:
    What kind of book do you read and feel sad that there’s only half of it left, instead of being impressed that you’re half way through? That’s what you really like.
    The last time I experienced this feeling with a book was way back when I was reading Catch-22. More recently, it has happened with Lost, Watchmen and especially Firefly. (0)
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  • Joel Spolsky shares an amusing anecdote about his first review by Bill Gates from back when he was program manager of the Excel team. As I learned in a meeting last week, coming along prepared can make all the difference. Also, Bill Gates looks to be pulling an Alfred Nobel and is planning on funneling almost his entire fortune into philanthropic avenues. (3)
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  • Richard Feynman once gave a fine commencement address referred to as “Cargo Cult Science” (named for the anecdote about unfortunately deluded people in the South Pacific building runways out of straw and coconuts in the hope they would attract loaded cargo planes to land, long after the war had ended). In it he argues through example against any sort of fudging of numbers or spoofing of scientific results, pointing to their poisoning the pools of real, honest science. “Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” (0)
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  • Video game music: not just kid stuff is one of my favourite papers from a few years back, because it is arguing for something that I have long believed: writing music for devices with limited sound processing capabilities involves a different way of thinking about the composition. To play some sound effects on the NES, you had to momentarily disable the background music’s percussion channel (this channel itself being made up of intermittent bursts of static). I’ve always found it more interesting to design within restrictions (or “engaging constraint”), which I suppose is one of the resons I was attracted to web design all those years ago. (0)
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  • Will Wright’s new game, Spore, looks like an amazing project. Wright, the designer of both The Sims and before that, Sim City, approaches game design in a refreshing, thoughtful way that is rarely seen (or more probably, rarely documented) in the games industry. His talk at the Game Developer’s Conference, where Spore was first demoed, is instructive, entertaining and exciting. (0)
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  • Daniel Eatock, the designer of the ubiquitous Big Brother Eye logo, posts weekly photographic “conceptual observations” — interesting patterns and alignments of objects. Very interesting. (via) (0)
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