Monday Links from Grimsvotn Vol. LXXIII

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Monday Links from Grimsvotn Vol. LXXIII

I'll take a quick break from flinging ash into the air to post these:

Tom West; engineer was the soul of Data General’s new machine - Tom West, protagonist of Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer Prize winning 1981 book about the creation of the Eagle minicomputer, The Soul of a New Machine, died last Thursday. Bonus links: Evan Ratliff talks to West and other members of the Eagle team in this December 2000 Wired retrospective; and his daughter Jessamyn posted this moving tweet.
Trading fear for photos on a stricken plane - "I realized the plane, an Airbus A330, had a big problem. I was afraid because I thought we would die... I started to adjust my camera, which was hanging around my neck. I set the ISO higher, set the white balance, checked the battery was full and saw I had around 300 clicks for the rest of the memory card. I started to take pictures." Reuters photojournalist Beawiharta naturally turns to photography when facing death.
historypin - "Pin your history to the world." Neat Google Maps mashup allowing people to attach old photos to their position on Earth, and superimpose them on StreetView's modern view of the same place.
An Honest Blog Post - Richard J. Seddon describes his diagnosis of, and treatment for, cancer. "'You'd like to know your odds?' 'Yes,' I answered immediately, expecting a high number, I don't know why. '35%,' it hit me like a brick wall. 'That's not very high,' I managed to say. 'No, it's not very high,' he agreed solemnly." He'll send you one of "a bunch of stupid cartoons" (e.g. Tintin's Last Supper) in return for your donation of £2 to Cancer Research via his Just Giving page.
Resign Patterns - Michael Duell's humorous 1997 take on Design Patterns has started circulating again: "The Compromise Pattern is used to balance the forces of schedule vs. quality. The result is software of inferior quality that is still late."
MacRecipes - "Have you ever wondered in how many different episodes MacGyver has made an arc welder (answer: 3 times in episodes 6, 52, and 87)?" All of MacGyver's ingenious recipes listed by episode and cross-referenced by category.
How to be an outstanding communicator - "The message from recruitment agencies, employer surveys and the like is familiar, loud and clear: you must be an outstanding communicator if you want to get to the top of your profession." Leaving aside the fact that no recruitment agency ever delivered a clear message, here's a collection of useful tips from Martin Shovel.
Internet Medieval Sourcebook - "The goal here then has been to construct an Internet Medieval Sourcebook from available public domain and copy-permitted texts. The problem with many of the Internet available texts is that they are too bulky for classroom assignment. For instance, all of Pope Gregory I's letters are available, but in one 500 page document. The Internet Medieval Sourcebook then is in two major parts. The first is made up of fairly short classroom sized extracts, derived from public domain sources or copy-permitted translations, the second is composed of the full documents, or WWW links to the full documents." All your mediaeval document needs catered for since 1996.
Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide' - Daniel J. Solove examines the nothing-to-hide argument and explains why it is wrong. "The deeper problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of secrecy. In contrast, understanding privacy as a plurality of related issues demonstrates that the disclosure of bad things is just one among many difficulties caused by government security measures... Government information-gathering programs are problematic even if no information that people want to hide is uncovered."
Pictures from the Daily Mail - randomly juxtaposed, these already rather strange pictures become gloriously surreal