Interesting Links for 1-11-2011

[andrewducker]

• Richard Feynman on the disease which computer programmers are infected with.
  
  (tags: programming computers quote RichardFeynman )
• Met police using surveillance system to monitor mobile phones
  
  (tags: surveillance mobile police uk spying london )
• A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs - beautiful and touching.
  
  (tags: stevejobs apple eulogy inspiration death life )
• Hobbiton set report spoiler analysis. I HAVE BEEN EARWORMED BY THE HOBBIT MUSIC AND IT WILL! NOT! STOP!
  
  (tags: thehobbit movies spoilers )
• Coronation Street to be the first UK show to feature paid product placement
  
  (tags: productplacement advertising uk TV )
• Vincent Tabak porn decision was correct - common sense from everyone!
  
  (tags: porn crime uk )
• Scottish government reintroduces alcohol pricing bill
  
  (tags: alcohol prices scotland politics )
• Technical aptitude: Do women score lower because they just aren't interested?
  
  (tags: aptitude intelligence Technology gender )
• Only 3% of traffic on the Three mobile network is phone calls.
  
  (tags: 3G data network MobilePhones )
• If growth's the problem, are more ARMs the answer?
  
  (tags: ARM business uk technology )

Comments

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Minor point from that BBC Jo Yeates story:

Does anyone else think that using the word "porn" instead of "pornography" throughout a serious news report is a little slovenly, linguistically speaking?

Or am I just being an old fart?

[andrewducker]

It looks to me like linguistic drift. Using the full word probably feels overly-scientific to most people. I don't see it used often outside of academic work.

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

My disease kept me up until 1.30am this morning programming and until 3am lying in bed thinking about programming. Truth be told, it has been a while since that's happened :)

[andrewducker]

Oh, cool. Something exciting?

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

Prototyping a sand simulation particle system. Seeing how many particles I can get on an iPhone before it falls over. Sadly the iPhone simulator doesn't throttle the CPU to give vaguely accurate results. So I have to mentally divide the framerate by 4 or 5 to guesstimate.

I'll leave you to decide whether it's exciting :D

[andrewducker]

Squeezing performance out of code is always gripping - sitting there staring at bottlenecks and trying different things out is the major part of the fun for me.

[star-tourmaline.livejournal.com]

The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful.

[andrewducker]

They really are.

He says, off to fix a bug in the feed posting code...

[camies.livejournal.com]

They will insist on branding murderers as 'loners', won't they? (it's in the 'Killer had no childhood friends' story linked to further down the BBC story's page) Although Tabak had a girlfriend etc. he was apparently a 'loner' and 'introverted' as a child and didn't like the town he lived in in Holland (was he obliged to?) I'm not condoning the murderer at all, just pointing out the apparent implication that people who prefer their own company are going to up and kill people.

[andrewducker]

Have you ever noticed how murder victims had _all_ the friends, while murderers turn out never to have had any?

[ajr.livejournal.com]

A usability comment rather than a content comment: the blank lines you've added between the links and the tags break my brain. They make the bulleted list look upside-down (IYSWIM), and make me read the touching pairs instead of the proper pairs, so I briefly wonder why the tags don't match the link.

I can understand the blank lines might make it easier for people to scan the list of links, especially on days when you have lots of them, but my own preference would be for "link/tags/blank" rather than "link/blank/tags", as far as formatting goes.

[andrewducker]

The blank space is a bug - it's supposed to go Title,Description,Tags. And I rarely use the description field. But Delicious suddenly started feeding through a blank line for the description, even when there wasn't one. I fixed it last night, so today's should be ok.