Links

A cool psychology experiment. A student asks someone for directions. People carrying a door pass between them. Students switch. They check if the person giving directions has noticed that it’s a different person. Many people don’t notice the switch.

How hackers are using Google to pwn your site. Includes a very practical example of how to use Google Code Search to hack a MySQL account.

There are three English words ending in “-gry”. Two are “angry” and “hungry”. What is the third one?

See the answer.

This is the park in front of my office in the evening. Fog completely covered London this week. Visibility: 200 ft. Hypnotic.

Windows has a “Yes to all” in some of its dialogs — for example when replacing files. Here’s how you can simulate a “No to all”. (Just shift-click the “No” button).

xRez has some stunning, large (gigapixel-sized) panoramas that you can zoom into using the Google Maps interface. It’s similar to the Gigapixel project, I think.

Joel Spolsky on why you need to be alone to be productive. You build up concentration for 15 minutes, and you lose it in a second when interrupted.

Pegasus on why Even numbered booths in toilets are better. This is one of those things I’ve endlessly thought about, but never got around to writing about.

Based on advice from Thomas Knoll, Michael suggests overexposing digital camera shots. This is because the on the CCD of digital cameras, the bright tones have the highest colour resolution. So you can darken images later and retain the colours well, but you can’t brighten without losing data.