Monday Links from the Chippy, or maybe the Chinese, Vol. LXIV

[NickFitz]

Hopefully I'll never come across the bloke who wrote it again. Sajid Anwar, if you're out there...

I believe he posts as "MarillionFan" these days

[Freamon]

This chap perhaps?

Nah, not a chance that the guy I knew would ever be able to code anything that would get accepted onto CPAN.

[DaveB]

Sounds very familiar. Back in the .com era on one of my first programming jobs, I was given the task of deciphering a perl CGI script in which all the variables were successive letters of the alphabet. No variable had a name longer than 1 character, and no function calls were used. It was a good few hundred lines long. Haunts me to this day.

Hopefully I'll never come across the bloke who wrote it again. Sajid Anwar, if you're out there...

This chap perhaps?

[Freamon]

[*]The worst program I ever worked on - "Most contract jobs fade pretty quickly in memory after the work is done, but some you remember for the rest of your life. This is one of the latter variety." Jacques Mattheij's software horror story.

Sounds very familiar. Back in the .com era on one of my first programming jobs, I was given the task of deciphering a perl CGI script in which all the variables were successive letters of the alphabet. No variable had a name longer than 1 character, and no function calls were used. It was a good few hundred lines long. Haunts me to this day.

Hopefully I'll never come across the bloke who wrote it again. Sajid Anwar, if you're out there...

[OwlHoot]

The chippy! With your ticker.

I'd have a salad if I was you.

My first thought too.

(Good links BTW, as always)

[DaveB]

Someone go tell Wilmslow he needs to read this...

How to Get a Girl to Like You | The Content Farm

[DaveB]

How to Bury a Hooker in the Nevada Desert | The Content Farm

Excellent!

[stek]

This always amuses me!

Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About

[Halo Jones]

Oh this is DELICIOUS
Cheers Nick another corker of a list

WPS

[Pogle]

The World's Most Complex Architecture: Cardboard Columns With 16 Million Facets - "Michael Hansmeyer uses algorithms invented by Pixar and painstaking handicraft to generate columns with dizzying detail." Bonus links: Hansmeyer's own site about the columns project and his gallery thereof.






Happy invoicing!

Oh this is DELICIOUS
Cheers Nick another corker of a list

[d000hg]

Or at least a pickled onion to boost your veg intake

The Book Surgeon (15 pieces) - My Modern Metropolis

That's absolutely lovely.

[NickFitz]

The chippy! With your ticker.

I'd have a salad if I was you.

Salad?

I prefer food...

[MarillionFan]

The chippy! With your ticker.

I'd have a salad if I was you.

[NickFitz]

Now I've got this lot done I can start thinking about dinner. The chippy, I think...

• The Content Farm - "Informative articles about every topic, written by people with a passing knowledge." Excellent parody of those sites that consist of thinly-researched articles plastered with ads, designed solely to get traffic from Google.
  
  
• How to fake fingerprints - "In order to fake a fingerprint, one needs an original first... to retrieve someone elses fingerprint (in this case the fingerprint you want to forge) one should rely on well tested forensic research methods. Which is what's to be explained here." Handy hints on circumventing biometric systems from the Chaos Computer Club.
  
  
• Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience - "Over the past 30+ years as a consultant in the field generally known as human factors engineering (aka usability engineering), I have been asked by hundreds of clients why users don’t find their company’s software engaging... Surprisingly, it is a rare client indeed who asks the opposing question: why is an interface so engaging that users cannot stop interacting with it?" Charles L. Mauro examines the human factors that contribute to the enormous success of the popular game.
  
  
• Anatomy of a Crushing - Maciej Ceglowski (who has previously appeared in Monday Links with the tale of accidentally wandering into a top-secret aerospace research facility in Beijing, and with useful advice on eating steak in Argentina) details the engineering challenges he faced when his company, Pinboard, suddenly became the bookmarking site of choice for thousands of new users after the leak of a document suggesting Yahoo! might shut down delicious.com: "My Twitter client, normally a place where I might see ten or twenty daily mentions of Pinboard, had turned into a nonstop blur of updates. My inbox was making a kind of sustained pealing sound I had never heard before. It was going to be an interesting afternoon."
  
  
• The World's Most Complex Architecture: Cardboard Columns With 16 Million Facets - "Michael Hansmeyer uses algorithms invented by Pixar and painstaking handicraft to generate columns with dizzying detail." Bonus links: Hansmeyer's own site about the columns project and his gallery thereof.
  
  
• The worst program I ever worked on - "Most contract jobs fade pretty quickly in memory after the work is done, but some you remember for the rest of your life. This is one of the latter variety." Jacques Mattheij's software horror story.
  
  
• The Book Surgeon - "Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer carves one page at a time. Nothing inside the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or dictionaries is relocated or implanted, only removed." Awesome sculptures
  
  
• Life's Too Short for the Wrong Job - "I remember seeing this brilliant ad campaign a few years ago, but I only recently stumbled upon a full collection of pictures. This is hands down one of the most well planned and executed campaigns that I've ever seen." Awesome ad campaign for a German job site.
  
  
• Study of a Lifetime (PDF alert) - "In 1946, scientists started tracking thousands of British children born during one cold March week. On their 65th birthday, the study members find themselves more scientifically valuable then ever before." Brilliant article about the 1946 birth cohort study, the longest-running medical study ever undertaken.
  
  
• **** Yeah Internet Fridge - "Why doesn't my fridge have the internet yet?" Roo Reynolds curates a large collection of examples of fridges connected to the Internet. (Why do people have such an obsession with getting fridges online anyway?)

Happy invoicing!