Why I never hire brilliant men
A transcript of a fascinating article from February 1924:
Why I never hire brilliant men
Interesting not only for its controversial topic, but for its description of business operations in the 1910s and 20s.
Archive for Blog
Getting real
“We’re having a baby.”
Today that turned from an abstract concept into solid reality with our first ultrasound of the wee one.
“We’re having a baby.” A baby! Tiny thing. An amalgamation of our respective genetic makeups. In one flash of amazement we looked at the screen and saw a tiny grey blob and the rapid fluttering of its heartbeat.
I must say, and note that I’m attempting to be impartial here, that it must be the cutest grey blob that I’ve ever seen. Seriously. If there were grey blob cuteness awards we’d be forced to clean off the mantlepiece to make room for the grand prize.
Apparently going for a clean win by nailing the performance judging, we caught a glimpse of it head on and saw it wiggling its little arms doing a simply adorable little dance. Yes my child the cute dancing grey blob. Aww.
Free programming tips are worth every penny
Wil Shipley shares some great tips on programming and program design
How do Chinese characters work?
What’s a good way to understand the complex system of how Chinese characters actually work? Design it from the ground up using English as a starting point.
If English was written like Chinese
This article does a fantastic job of explaining not only how written Chinese works, but describes the logic behind it. The article covers everything from pictographs to radicals to homophones to the incorporation of foreign words. Rather than going through the, admittedly esoteric, process of introducing the reader to actual Chinese characters; English is translated into a character based writing system.
Tag Cloud tweaked
Ok! I’ve modified the tag cloud plugin to up the size of more recently used tags and drop the size of less recently used tags. If a tag is little used and hasn’t been used a while it’s dropped off the cloud altogether.
Have I mentioned how much I love Ruby?
Zero Punctuation Fanboy
Links to great reviews of games by Zero Punctuation, for your browsing pleasure:And, for good measure, here’s a link to Yahtzee’s blog: Fully Ramblomatic
Youtube embedded links aren't valid XHTML
FYI, the embedded links that youtube provides aren’t valid xhtml.
Youtube:<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/QpdCi5XpCsE"> </param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"> </param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/QpdCi5XpCsE" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>
Valid:
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/QpdCi5XpCsE"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/QpdCi5XpCsE" /></object>
Thanks to hwa2u.com for posting the valid code.
New Theme
Unless your browser’s cache doesn’t know when to quit, you should notice a nice new look for my site. Now including one of my favorite web interfaces, the tag cloud.
Developing a theme using liquid markup was surprisingly quick and easy. Rather than being horrified as when I first examined the code behind a Wordpress theme I was pleasantly surprised at the logical nature of the system. As an example, let’s look at how the web browser title is generated:
<title>{{ site.title }} - {% if article %} {{ article.title }} {% else %} {{ site.subtitle }} {% endif %}</title>
Pretty straightforward. But let’s start at the basics. The browser title is required to be surrounded by <title></title>, so that’s written out. But now, rather than writing out the title of my site I simply tell the site to put in the title that I’ve given it with {{ site.title }}. Further, I can apply a bit of display logic and tell the site that, “If the web site vistor is currently reading a specific article, then put that article’s title in the browser title; otherwise put in the site’s subtitle.” Nice.
How about this:
<div id="tagcloud">
{% for tag in site.tags %}
{{ tag | yatagcloud }}
{% endfor %}
</div>
Oh yeah, that’s all the code that generates the tag cloud. The site knows that each article has tags, and it keeps a running list of all of them. In the above code chunk I tell the site to iterate over every tag that it knows about and refer it to ‘yatagcloud’. ‘yatagcloud’ is the method installed by the ‘yet another tag cloud’ plugin and it handles all the messy business of getting the number of articles using the tag and applying the proper styling, etc.
I followed the recent clockwork object’s guide to creating a Mephisto theme using liquid and didn’t really have any troubles. If it weren’t for the guide this theme wouldn’t exist. I read it, decided that it looked like too much fun to pass up, and decided to design a theme for my site. Since I started with my previous theme, the whole process took a couple days of off and on coding.
I still have some tweaking and modification that I’d like to do. Specifically I want to modify the tag cloud so that it modifies the tags as a function of time in addition to use. Tags used more recently will be bumped up a level or two. Tags that haven’t been used in a while will be dropped a level or two. This way the cloud really will be a floating list of the things that I’ve been thinking (or at least blogging) about.
The cake is a lie
The awesome Portal is getting some well deserved recognition:- Slashdot covers it with the importance of Portal
- Gamers with Jobs has an article, Portal
- MTV Multiplayer makes a good case for Portal having the move of the year, Never Mind Game Of The Year, “Portal” Has The MOVE Of The Year
- Of course there is the requisite Penny Arcade comic with corresponding blog post
I wish I had a portal gun
In case you’ve never heard of Portal, here’s the introduction that Valve spread around the internet last year.
Mind bending right? Here’s a clip of how the game starts.
And a sample of one of the levels after you have the fully activated portal gun (able to shoot two portals).
In case you can’t tell, I really like this game. The portal mechanic is just so addictive. Machine gun turret getting you down? Pop out and shoot a portal above it, then shoot a second portal under a heavy block. Block falls through, crushes turret. It’s such an inventive game mechanic.
The only downside is that the game is quite short and is essentially an extended introduction to the portal mechanic itself. I really hope that Valve develops this into a full fledged game soon.
If you want to check out the portal action but don’t have the Orange Box you can play this 2d flash version of the game.
If you don’t mind some minor spoilers, you can listen to the hilarious song sung by the AI from the game in this video. I’ve been listening to it all morning, highly addictive.
Right or Left?
At first I could only see her spinning counter-clockwise, then she switched and I could only see her spinning clockwise. Now I can switch her spin back and forth with relative ease. What does that mean?
Same for Sarah, except she started off seeing her spin clockwise.
To the Beach!
Yay! A weekend at Long Beach (North Carolina) at this nice little number. Mmm, beachy relaxation.
Smackdown
Yeah! We had a good crowd on Halo 3 last night. I’m starting to get the hang of the multiplayer.
Donald and I dominated King of the Hill in multi-teams (four teams of two). We had quickly fallen to fourth place before we realized that we didn’t have to stand on the glowing point to maintain ownership of the “hill”, just to claim it. (In KoTH you get 1 point per second you own the hill.) We came back from a pretty heavy deficit (and fourth place) to claim our victory. It’s all about the teamwork.
Then Bud and Joe (Terri’s dad and brother-in-law, respectively) logged on and we switched to big team battles (two teams of 4-5) where we continued to lay smackdowns.
One of the really nifty things about Halo 3 is that you form “parties” of your friends. So Donald, Bud, Joe, and I were able to stay together as a group even as we switched game modes, servers, etc. The way it works is that one person is the party leader and the others all join. Then the party goes where the leader selects. So we could all go into theater mode and comment on fun replays, or all go into multiplayer, or all go play the single player campaign, etc. Very nice.
South Korea's Cheering Technology
We are beaten, we can never match this. Our crowd demo technology peaked with invention of two sided placards.
The cheering section of this South Korean crowd is wearing a jacket with a different color on the front and back, a third color on the inside flaps, and they do shading by sitting or standing.