The Secret of Happiness : Constraint

If you have one video to watch today, this week, this month or even this year, make it this one. Both enlightening and funny, it’s a scientific proof that the way to acheive happiness is not the one you think.

This week in our world

Here are a couple of things I’ve found interesting while browsing in the last week. All this content is aggregated from my sideblog. Please, let me know what you think about this! Or share something you’ve found!

Content aware image resizing

Ruby self-explanatory truthy / falsey


api.connect(true)

…
using self-explanatory truthy / falsey values instead


api.connect(:auto_retry) # true
api.connect(!:auto_retry) # false


– The Devel!: True False parameters

What every business can learn from spaghetti sauce

Malcom Gladwell

Yes, Deep-Fried Oreos, but Not in Trans Fats

How to detect dead pixels

“I’m a retard. I was trying to use Windows Magnifier to enlarge the dead pixel area to look at it better. I had it open for like 5 seconds, then like ‘wait a minute’…”    — RainmakeR.

– Dead Pixels Test

Retro MacOS WordPress Theme

This week in our world

Here are a couple of things I’ve found interesting while browsing in the last week. All this content is aggregated from my sideblog. Please, let me know what you think about this! Or share something you’ve found!

Ze Frank

One of the funniest presentation I’ve watched in a while!

Amazing list of videos by Seth Godin

The last one was found on this page.
Videos that can change your organization on Squidoo

Quotes

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

–
Don Knuth

I mean you can reduce any thing to one-line of code, ultimately, right?

– _why

The Blackberry isn’t the opposite of the iPhone. A plain jane Motorola phone is. Apple understands this. Blackberry doesn’t seem to.

– Seth Godin

This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.

– Daring Fireball

why we’re all blogging less
…
5. The future we spent a long time evangelizing has already arrived.

– hugh macleod

Amazing Coordinated Samsung Dance (via kydrice)

Tim Lister

Tim Lister is one of my favourite author and speaker. He’ve found the perfect sweet spot between humorous and informative speech and writing. You can feel his passion when he talks and in his books. Just read any of Peopleware’s chapter and you’ll be more energized then after drinking a pack of Red Bull.

Today while going to work, since I haven’t synced my iPod for ages, I was browsing some old podcast and bumped onto this gem:

APLN06 – Tim Lister – Introduction to Agile Leadership

Some quotes:

Nobody has tough about the system as hard as you when you start building it. Nobody, not even the customer.

That’s why no spec of contract should be set in stone. And why BDUF is so wrong.

Great project have emotions

No doubt jumping between several projects feel so bad, it’s playing with your emotions!

He points out that software team are more like music group, not like sport teams. You can’t expect to perform as an individual if the whole team is not performing too. A singer don’t tell himself: I hope the altos suck so I’ll sound better, they perform as a whole.

Thanks Tim

[Links] Killer brownies and iPhone easter egg

Killer brownies, killing you sloooooowly!

via (TS)

Apple’s Campus in iPhone icon

via (CoM)

No more excuses not to try ruby

If you tought:

I don’t wanna try ruby, it’s too hard to install, too long to download and it makes my feet smell like Oka cheese.

Better find another thing to complain about, with raggi’s Ruby for Windows in Under 700 bytes (and executable!).

Drop this in a batch file and run to get an interactive ruby interpreter:

@echo tryurl="http://tryruby.hobix.com/irb?cmd=";function wget(url,hdrs){var http=WScript.CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");http.open("GET",url,false);for(var k in hdrs){http.setRequestHeader(k,hdrs[k]);};http.send("");return http.responseText;}sess=wget(tryurl+escape("!INIT!IRB!"),{});WScript.Echo("Interactive Ruby ready. (send ^D to exit)");WScript.StdOut.Write(">> ");WScript.StdIn.Read(0);while(true){cmd=WScript.StdIn.ReadLine();resp="";ps=">> ";if(cmd=="04")break;if(cmd){resp=wget(tryurl+escape(cmd).replace('+','%2B'),{'Cookie': '_session_id='+sess});ps="..";if(resp){WScript.StdOut.Write(resp);ps=">>";}}WScript.StdOut.Write(ps+" ");}>t.js
@cscript//Nologo t.js&del t.js


and read this

via (_why)

What’s your excuse now for not giving ruby a try ?

09 F9 11 01 -CENSORED- 56 88 C0

John C. Dvorak said something pretty interested in the last This Week in Tech podcast about the whole controversial DRM key.

They [lawyers] popularized this. Mp3 would still be underground if it wasn’t for all these lawsuits.

-around 17:24

Who can use this key anyway ? Hey, we are geeks, we are techy and I don’t know how I could have used this and I don’t think it’s worth the time and effort. But now that almost everyone knows about this key, lots of people will try to make use of it.

What do you think ? Are these laywers making it worst ?

Don’t start coding with games

It’s rare to come accross a serious _why post theres days, but with the recent launch of his Hackety Hack IDE for kids came this toughtful post about why teaching kids programming with games is wrong.

Also, here’s a cool video about the new web 2.0:

(via TS)

TheFunded, controversy in the VC world:

(via TC)

The secret of creating successful web services

Jeff Atwood and Jason Kottke got some great insights about what makes a successful web service.

According to them, the secret is porting an old unix command to the web or making public something that was private, like IM became Twitter.

Hum, what’s next ? cat, chattr, cd, chmod, chown, chgrp, cp, du, df, file, fsck, ln, lsof, mkdir, mv, pwd, rm, rmdir, split, touch ?

GMail Paper

Cool new service from Google : GMail Paper. My grandma might start using GMail!