a recipie you don't want

For reasons which will be obvious to my colleagues but which will remain unspoken here, I have been thinking a bit about what contributes to project failures. Lee Braithwaite wrote an excellent blog entry on the subject.

What I've Learned from Failure

"The next thing I've learned from my failures is something familiar to the test-driven development crowd. It's mandatory to fail early. You need to know you're in trouble right away. That's essential when taking over an existing project or starting something new. You have to find out how you're doing within weeks. Not quarters, not months. The longer you wait, the more inertia the failure will have."

new ways of newsing

This post is a bit dry, but I am rushed...

Reddit and Digg are two different ways of looking at getting news updates. I've been reading slashdot for a while (note the low user number of 66162), but I'm always on the lookout for other means of getting "cool" stories from the internets to read during my limited available browsing time.

Digg:
"Digg is a technology news website that employs non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do."

Reddit:
"A source for what's new and popular on the web -- customized for you. We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. All of the content on reddit is from users who are rewarded for good submissions (and punished for bad ones) by their peers. You decide what appears on your front page and which submissions rise to fame or fall into obscurity."

Sorry for the PR dump from their sites. :-/ I'm pretty sure that Reddit is a product of Paul Graham's Y-Combinator, but I wasn't able to (quickly) determine if that was also true for Digg.

recursion can be bad

Bizarre self-referential warning sign: This sign over an escalator apparently warns people not to bump their head on the sign.

See the source link on BoingBoing for the possible (but boring) logical explanations.

I find this very amusing although I have difficulty putting my finger on exactly why...

genetically superior keyboards

Here's a cool article where an evolutionary algorithm is used to "breed" a better keyboard layout.

How one guy developed the ideal keyboard layout using an evolutionary algorithm

"But Dvorak designed his layout in the 1930's without the aid of computers. It contains a couple annoying features that lead to common errors in my typing -- namely the placement of Y and B). Could a modern evolutionary algorithm and a huge input sample discover a better arrangement? I had to give it a try. The results surprised me!"

more movie ticket slide in 05

This is a nice summary of the year in movie theatres: Cinema tickets slide... again (from Ars Technica)

"Just as in a classic cyclical tragedy, movie theater operators have responded by raising costs. Fewer people come to the movies, and so tickets and concessions get more expensive. While numbers for 2005 are not yet in, in recent years the movie theater industry has managed to increase revenues despite dwindling numbers. This won't work forever, and there are signs that it is already failing."