Monday Links from the Bench: Vol. V

[Andy2]

Aprreciated Nick. Keep 'em coming.

WHS +

[Xenophon]

Good stuff, NF!

[OwlHoot]

Aprreciated Nick. Keep 'em coming.

Very much WHS

[TimberWolf]

[*]Big Spanish Castle - a very neat optical illusion. (You need JS enabled for the image rollover.)[/LIST]

Happy invoicing

Nice, I've not seen that one before. This is an interesting one too (especially the A and B squares). The first time I saw a similar example I had to copy the picture into an an image editor before I fully believed it.

[ctdctd]

[*]Big Spanish Castle - a very neat optical illusion. (You need JS enabled for the image rollover.)

- just when I thought I controlled my brain (most of the time)

[realityhack]

Aprreciated Nick. Keep 'em coming.

+1

I enjoy these threads. It'd be nice to collate quirky/useful links like this - our favourite favourites, into one thread.

Ta NF.

[NickFitz]

Aprreciated Nick. Keep 'em coming.

Will do

I'd been wondering if anybody reads these things...

Still, what's an hour or so out of my life - if nothing else, I sometimes dig up stuff I'd meant to return to but forgotten about. It's good to share

[HairyArsedBloke]

Hey, it might be worth a try if you're not getting those interviews:

Very true. As the commentator puts it

You'll notice he doesn't recite past achievements. He doesn't mention the painting of the altarpiece for the Chapel of St Bernard; he doesn't provide a laundry list of past bombs he's built; he doesn't cite his prior employment in artist Andrea di Cione's studio.

No, he does none of these things, because those are about his achievements, and not about the Duke's needs.

Instead, he sells his prospective employer on what he can do for him.

I need to write some sales stuff soon. I'm going to book mark that.

[Sysman]

Aprreciated Nick. Keep 'em coming.

[OwlHoot]

:::

Leonardo da Vinci's CV

:::

Hey, it might be worth a try if you're not getting those interviews:

The Da Vinci Code CV

(referenced from the page Nick cited)

Most Illustrious Proprietor, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled developers of applications of business, and that the invention and operation of the said programs are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Company, showing your Management my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.

1. I have a sort of extremely light and strong functions and modules, adapted to be most easily ftp'd, and with them you may pursue, and at any time combine them with others, secure and indestructible by standard mean time to failure of hardware and denial of service, easy and convenient to compile and catalog. Also methods of unzipping and storing the data of the customers.

2. I know how, when a website is besieged, to shard data onto the cloud, and make endless variety of mirrors, and fault tolerant disks and RAIDs, and other machines pertaining to such concerns.

3. If, by reason of the volume of the data, or the structure of the btrees and its indexes, it is impossible, when conducting a search, to avail oneself of sub-second response time, I have methods for benchmarking every process or other function, even if it were interpreted, etc.

4. Again, I have kinds of functions; most convenient and easy to ftp; and with these I can spawn lots of data almost resembling a torrent; and with the download of these cause great terror to the competitor, to his great detriment and confusion.

5. And if the processing should be on the desktop I have apps of many machines most efficient for data entry and reporting; and utilities which will satisfy the needs of the most demanding customers and users and consumers.

6. I have means by secret and tortuous scripts and modules, made without leaving tracks, to generate source code, even if it were needed to run on a client or a server.

7. I will make secure firewalls, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the hackers with their utilities, there is no body of crackers so great but they would break them. And behind these, software could run quite unhurt and without any hindrance.

8. In case of need I will make big properties, methods, and collections and useful forms, out of the common type.

9. Where the operation of compiling might fail, I would contrive scripts, functions, routines, and other parameter driven processes of marvellous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of data entry, reporting, and storage.

10. In times of low revenue I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in maintenance and the refactoring of code public and private; and in guiding data from one warehouse to another.

11. I can carry out code in Javascript, PHP, or C, and also I can do in network administration whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.

Again, the intranet app may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of all your customers of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Google.

And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your data center, or in whatever place may please your Businessperson - to whom I comment myself with the utmost humility, etc.

[NickFitz]

A little late today, but the unbroken run of success (first, second, third, fourth) continues with another selection of things weird, wonderful, and/or wise to peruse in the interwebs:

• N-1 Experimental Research - a wall with over 100 clocks, set to different times; every twelve hours, the hands form an arrangement that spells out the artist's message.
  
  
  
• 300&65 Ampersands - an ampersand from a different typeface for every day of 2010 (hover the mouse pointer over the ampersand for a tooltip telling you the name of the face).
  
  
  
• Leonardo da Vinci's CV - "I will make covered chariots, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the enemy with their artillery, there is no body of men so great but they would break them. Plenty cheapness!"
  
  
  
• Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell to Make Us Miserable - "Either printer ink is made from unicorn blood or we're all getting screwed." There are lots of other great comics over at The Oatmeal - don't miss "Five Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth."
  
  
  
• The top 5 dumbest things Web developers do today - great list from Chris Jason.
  
  
  
• Equal Height Columns in CSS - with the absolute minimum of superfluous markup and one little tweak to get IE6 into line, it works. It can even be used in a subsection of a page rather than for the primary page layout, and doing so made one client of mine very happy.
  
  
  
• Jan. 1984: How critics reviewed the Mac - "Anybody who could write a good application on a 128K Mac deserves a medal" - Bill Gates. When you're reading reviews of the iPad, you might want to bear these quotes in mind.
  
  
  
• Why specs matter - "Most developers are morons, and the rest are assholes." Mark Pilgrim hits the nail on the head, as usual.
  
  
  
• Big Spanish Castle - a very neat optical illusion. (You need JS enabled for the image rollover.)
  
  
  
• The Crackpot Index - "A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics... 10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school, as if this were evidence of sanity."
  
  
  

Happy invoicing