Bryan Echo

Fibonacci Sequence and Love

This made me smile...

Its from xkcd.

Writing software

I love my job and most of the time I really enjoy writing software for a living.  Its a job that's unique, misunderstood and challenging.  I just read a really nice post from Joel Spolsky about what it is to write software.  He calls it a game of inches:

And as you fix more and more of these little details, as you polish and shape and shine and craft the little corners of your product, something magical happens. The inches add up to feet, the feet add up to yards, and the yards add up to miles. And you ship a truly great product.

The kind of product that feels great, that works intuitively, that blows people away. The kind of product where that one-in-a-million user doing that one-in-a-million unusual thing finds that not only does it work, but it's beautiful: even the janitor's closets of your software have marble floors and solid core oak doors and polished mahogany wainscoting.

And that's when you know it's great software.

link

I think this job is part writer, part craftsman, its part construction worker, and part artist.  It stimulates my mind in ways nothing else does.  I can't believe I've been doing it for ten years and its still pretty fun.

Upside-Down-Internet

This is awesome...! I just found a post where someone was tired of his neighbors stealing his wi-fi signal.  Instead of adding a password he wrote some code to mess with the pages they downloaded.  Its a great hack and shows how to create an upside down internet. ;-)

Upside-Down-Ternet

Photo mosaic

I found an interesting set of photo apps at: bighugelabs.com/flickr.  Here's a bunch of the photos from a hike a few weeks ago:

(photos posted on flickr)

Castle Dracula for sale!

From Slashdot I read yesterday that the real life castle of Vlad the Impaler is for sale.  It amuses me to find out that its owned by man named Dominic von Habsburg (great name!) a graphic designer living in the United States.  Its much too normal for Dracula's castle to be owned by a graphic designer...

Full Story

And for the curious I found a few pictures of the castle on Flickr:

Mail Experiments

I read this a few years ago but the link recently showed up on Digg and Boing Boing so I thought I'd post it here.  A group calling itself Improbable Research did experiments with the U.S. Postal Service testing the "delivery limitations".  They sent unusual items like a cow bone, a hammer, skis and recorded the results.  My favorite was the helium balloon, they wrote the address on it and argued it shouldn't need postage because it was lighter than air... 

Postal Experiments

The Swedish Fireproof Goat

I found this strange news from the swedish town of Gavle. Every year they build a giant (43 foot tall) straw goat for the Christmas season. There's a tradition of the goat getting destroyed. Over 40 years its been destroyed 22 times, including once getting hit by a car. For the first time this year the goat is fireproof. ;-)

Link

What spring is like on Jupiter and Mars

I can be pretty jaded sometimes about love and finding someone.  I also like to think I can be romantic and appreciate the big and small gestures involved in love.   It was nice to read about someone decorating her loves journey to school with art and phrases proclaiming her admiration and love.  It brought a smile to my face and I have to admit I'm not as jaded as I thought I was. ;-).

Link

RIP Google Answers

I read on the Google Blog that Google Answers is going to stop taking new questions.   I remember when the site started poking around and having some fun.  I enjoyed reading many of the questions. 

The question mentioned is funny: How many tyrannosaurs in a gallon of gasoline?

Windows Shutdown

I know most people won't find this interesting but over at JoelOnSoftware.com there's a few interesting posts about the shutdown menu option in Windows Vista.

Joel's Rant - Choices = Headaches (or why are there eight options on the shutdown menu?)
Microsoft Engineer Response - The Windows Shutdown Crapfest (it took 24 people to design this feature?)
Apple Answer - The Design of the Mac OS X Shutdown

There are two topics here.  First designing and writing software is hard.  For complex software like an operating system so many people are involved that it gets cumbersome.  I'm not really surprised by the description of the Microsoft design process.  I interviewed with Microsoft and that experience gave me a taste of the bureaucracy. 

I think this feeds into the second topic that providing options and lots of choices in software can confuse the user.  Everyone wants to make things simple but they have different ideas of what is necessary.  With the Microsoft approach so many  people are putting in their two cents that its not going to create something stripped down or simple.  Apple seems to have had the vision to take good ideas but filter out those that complicate or take away from the design. That's also the impression that I get from the iPod.