Awaiting bug reports at the moment, so I might as well post these now:
Happy invoicing!
- How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web - "Reviving an old computer is like restoring a classic car: there’s a thrill from bringing the ancient into the modern world. So it was with my first “real” computer, my Mac Plus, when I decided to bring it forward three decades and introduce it to the modern web." Via a serial connection to a Raspberry Pi, and after replacing the inevitable failed capacitor, Jeff Keacher gets online with an 8MHz CPU and 4MB of RAM.
- Snoozers are, in fact, losers - Maria Konnikova on recent insights into the irksome business of waking up: "It may seem like you’re giving yourself a few extra minutes to collect your thoughts. But what you’re actually doing is making the wake-up process more difficult and drawn out. If you manage to drift off again, you are likely plunging your brain back into the beginning of the sleep cycle, which is the worst point to be woken up—and the harder we feel it is for us to wake up, the worse we think we’ve slept."
- Something is rotten in the Denver airport - "There was really no need to build the airport in the first place… unless you needed a construction project up above to mask a larger construction project happening down below. And this is where the conspiracies begin." Weird murals, a sculpture that killed its artist, a mysterious "New World Airport Commission"… meanwhile, for balance: The Denver International Airport Conspiracy - "When I reached the booth, I asked the woman behind the desk if she could tell me about the conspiracy theories, and I’ll be damned if she wouldn’t talk to me about it! Was Jim right? Not exactly. They gave me the contact information for the media office. It was clear by the way she rolled her eyes when I mentioned the conspiracy theories that I was not the first person to ask about them."
- My “Doom” 20th Anniversary Stories - "The way I got into the software business (besides learning to code) was to use every piece of software I could find and send the developers tons and tons of notes and bug reports. It turns out developers liked this, and it gained me a lot of opportunities. One of them was porting Doom and Quake to NEXTSTEP." Doom was twenty years old this past weekend; Wil Shipley reminisces about his involvement.
- Government Is The Wrong Customer For A Software Project - "Software development… requires high levels of trust among the parties involved, and lots of open and honest communication. That's not what governments do. Governments specialise in cultures driven by fear, blame, bureaucracy and secrecy. Couple that with a case of the Peter Principle on steroids, where the least qualified wield the most power and influence, and you've got the customer from hell."
- There’s a Reason They Call Them ‘Crazy Ants’ - "They arrived at Mike the Hog-a-Nator’s house a few months after he first saw them at the cardiologist’s office. One day his air conditioning stopped working. A musty smell seeped from the vents in his living-room floor. So he powered up his Shop-Vac to clear them. By the time he was done, he’d sucked out five gallons of ants." Never mind killer bees, these ants are taking over neighbourhoods in Texas.
- Extreme Programming, a Reflection - "In my hand I am holding a little white book that, fourteen years ago, changed the software world forever. The title of that book is: Extreme Programming Explained; and the subtitle is: Embrace Change. The author is Kent Beck, and the copyright date is 1999." Thoughts on the influence XP has had on the modern software development industry.
- The Story Behind the First Ransom Note in American History - "“Oh, honey, these are love letters,” Flynn said. Rebecca untied them and began reading the first one: “Mr Ros, be not uneasy, you son charley bruster be all writ we is got him and no powers on earth can deliver out of our hand.”" The story of an 1874 kidnapping, and the mystery of how the ransom letters ended up in a Philadelphia family's basement.
- Failing to Get Traction and (Almost) Giving up on the Road to My First $1,000 in Revenue - Ruben of Bidsketch counters survivorship bias with some tales of the struggles involved in getting his business off the ground: "I ended up getting a bit of traffic in the first few days, then quickly dropped to about 1 visit a day. I had just wasted a month building this. The worst part was that if I couldn’t even convince people to use a free tool, how was I ever going to get them to pay for one?"
- Art of Face - Photographer Alexander Khokhlov paints faces, then photographs them. (Otherwise he'd be face-painter Alexander Khokhlov.)
Happy invoicing!
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