All back and knackered after an Easter Monday on the bouncy castle? Here's some gubbins to while away the evening:
Happy invoicing!
- The Gravitational Force in Angry Birds Space - "As anyone that has played the game can tell you, this air looking stuff surrounding an asteroid defines a region in which the angry birds will interact with the rock. If the bird is outside of this region, there will be no force on bird... But what about the time the bird is INSIDE this gravitational area? What kind of force is exerted on the bird? Is it like real gravity or something different?" Rhett Allain has equations, and what do equations mean? ANSWERS!
- How I Found the Human Being Behind Horse_ebooks, The Internet’s Favorite Spambot - "Horse_ebooks has 40,000 Twitter followers and a wildly passionate fanbase, but you're unlikely to see public appearances any time soon. Because Horse_ebooks is a robot. This is the story of Horse_ebooks, beloved online automaton, and how I tracked down its human master." I must admit, I follow Horse_ebooks: there's a surreal poetry in many of the random, truncated phrases it burbles to the world
- Yes, we built a Super Beetle with dual controls - A great project with which to enter a LeMons race: a Volkswagen which can be driven from both front seats simultaneously. "A right-hand drive steering box and pedal assembly was sourced from the UK. Another Super Beetle steering column was quickly found at a local junkyard and a piece of steel pipe from Home Depot made for an excellent mount... Next problem: how to make two sets of pedals work?" There's lots of photos of the work progressing
- Rear Window Timelapse - Jeff Desom has taken Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window and stitched together different shots to build a panorama of the view from said window, then spliced in all the activities seen in (roughly) the order they appear in the film to create this remarkable timelapse video:
More info at Jeff's site.
- Extravagant Cheating via Direct X - Also can be done with OpenGL, so not specifically a Microsoft thing. "Online PC gaming is known for being full of dirty cheaters. Cheats can be implemented through many methods from simple to impressively complex... Today I want to discuss a specific form of hacking and how it’s done. I hesitate to do so, but it’s usage is already widespread amongst hack creators and users. The damage is already dealt. By sharing knowledge of its inner workings hopefully that damage can be mitigated."
- New fighter jet camouflage schemes - "In recent years new advanced camo schemes have started appearing on fighter jets. One of the more intriguing is the Splinter camouflage. The rationale behind this camo is that it confuses an observer as to the distance of the aircraft, depth deception. It can also confuse the observer as to the direction the aircraft is moving." Similar to Dazzle camouflage, but more hi-tech and generally cooler looking
- Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice - "If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity. It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering. This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer. The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works." Excellent advice from Patrick McKenzie, of Bingo Card Creator micro-ISV fame.
- Attacked Because Her Daddy is a Cop - "My family includes a daughter, aged 9, called Amy. Those that berate me in the street do not see this aspect of my life... Occasionally these two vastly different aspects of my life come together." Disgusting attack on this police officer's child
- Exclusive: a behind-the-scenes look at Facebook release engineering - "Thanks to the film The Social Network, millions of people know the crazy story of Facebook's rise from dorm room project to second largest website in the world...I recently had a unique opportunity to visit Facebook headquarters and see that story in action. Facebook gave me an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the process it uses to deploy new functionality. I watched first-hand as the company's release engineers rolled out the new "timeline" feature for brand pages." PHP compiled to C++ to generate a 2.5GB executable deployed via the BitTorrent protocol... Oh my
- flux machine - "GIFs by Kevin Weir." Strange animated GIFs from old photographs; such as:
Happy invoicing!
Comment