Links

Here’s a “music video” with brilliant video editing.

If you create a file in Windows Notepad with the string “bush hid the facts”, save it and reopen it, it shows you boxes. Same with “this app can break”. Here’s why. It has nothing to do with George Bush or Microsoft. It’s just that these strings are in ASCII, but they also constitute valid Unicode strings, and Notepad guesses (wrongly) that they are in fact Chinese Unicode files.

Wooden sculptures that move with the wind. These look more like huge insects than scuptures, really. Catch the videos of Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures on YouTube.

A timeline of Microsoft, Google and Yahoo acquisitions.

Programming theorems.

The likelihood of Perl being involved in a system is directly proportional to the length of time the system has been in maintenance.

Every 5 minutes you spend writing code in a new language is more useful than 5 hours reading blog posts about how great the language is.

Think twice before presuming that CSV is a nice little easy file format. (see Leon)

The O’Reilly Code Quiz shows a snippet of code and asks you to guess which book it could be from (given a choice of 4). It’s addictive.

The myth of prodigy. Precociousness as a child is no indicator of future success.

These are pavement drawings. They are NOT 3D objects. But it’s hard to believe. (Even the shadows are perfect.) See more at Julian Beaver’s site.

1.5 million internal e-mails of Enron were released after it collapsed, to help figure out why. The UC Berkeley Enron Email Analysis Project has some links analysing these emails. Check out the visual analysis.

Have a look at this infinite depth painting. You can zoom in forever. At some point, you realise, you’re back where you’re started. Almost like going around in circles, except that you’re zooming in.