Jon Simpson

The Karate Kid ruined the modern world

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:54:02 +0000

We have a vague idea in our head of the “price” of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at their job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong.

Accomplishing worthwhile things isn’t just a little harder than people think; it’s ten or twenty times harder.

Nice essay on ‘effort shock’, from the Editor of cracked.com. It’s very true - the idea that it can take 10+ years to become an ‘expert’ at something doesn’t really fit with the ‘training montage’ images we’re surrounded with of instant progress. The (perhaps dated) trend in programming books titled “X in 24 hours/21 days” is another symptom of this condition.

Super Mario Bros on an 8x8 LED matrix

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:45:18 +0000

Neat Arduino project building a Mario-ish game using the 8x8 matrix display. I wonder if there would a nice way to architect the scrolling levels & static player character using occam.

The Big Red Word vs. the Little Green Man

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:45:23 +0000

Interesting piece about Fire Exit signs here and in the US. Of course, there’s no drive to unify or change the US signage because it’s as ingrained as ours… Also, a bigger problem:

Solomon points out that when the NFPA investigates fires, it never encounters circumstances “where someone says I didn’t know where the exit was because I didn’t know… what the exit sign was. When they don’t know where the exit is, it’s because there was no signage there whatsoever.”

Logorama

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:46:59 +0000

I’d seen the trailer for Logorama last week before the Oscars, but this is the whole thing. Definitely worth a watch, and deserving of its Best Animated Short Film award. Scary how many of the brands and logotypes you recognize as you watch.

Official Gmail Blog: Fast new windows

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:05:10 +0000

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to make this work in Internet Explorer, so to see the speed-up, you’ll need to be using Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari, or Google Chrome.

The Gmail ‘Loading…’ progress bar when popping out a window had been quite annoying, so it’s nice to see it gone. Interesting to see Google providing a better experience for non-IE users, I wonder if this is aimed at putting pressure on Microsoft to add support for the underlying implementation features in IE.

iPhone's Missing Feed Reader

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:37:16 +0000

Interesting look at the current crop of iPhone App and Web-based feed readers for the iPhone. Given that I’m using Fever for RSS, I have used its mobile interface once or twice and been reasonably happy. The piece starts with:

I spend a prodigious amount of time reading on my iPhone.

… and I think this is my core issue with RSS reading on the iPhone - I just don’t want to read articles or news with a screen of that size. Maybe the iPad will be more compelling, but I’d imagine the desktop versions of Fever and Google Reader will be more than adequate there.

The one exception to reading on the iPhone is probably Instapaper - the effort that’s expended on formatting things as legibly as possible makes it just about bearable.

The A4 and the A8: secrets of the iPad's brain

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:25:30 +0000

Piece from Ars Technica about the Apple A4 chip in the iPad, with speculation/informed guesswork.

the A4 is a 1GHz custom SoC with a single Cortex A8 core and a PowerVR SGX GPU

The author seems to attribute the quiet on Apple’s part about the architecture to the fact that its a relatively mundane part - I think it’s more in line with their general strategy of worrying about what things do, not how they are achieved.

Like, Python

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:42:23 +0000

I think hello world in Like, Python says it all:

#!usr/bin/python
# My first Like, Python script!
yo just print like "hello world" bro

This could be fairly neat to show students that syntax really is just syntax. Or extremely dangerous to the legibility of future assignment submissions.

One day at the car dealer: Toyota with no heat; Mercedes with no GPS

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 06:05:41 +0000

If people remember their $25,000 Toyota with no heat or $35,000 Mercedes with no GPS they might be a lot more willing to try a new brand.

Technology in cars is at a strange place. There’s no good reason for it to be a £2,000 option to have the computer in your car talk properly to the computer in your pocket full of MP3’s - just that the market allows it. I’d love the current status quo to be under fire on this front, I think some brands working hard to put cutting edge tech in their entire range (Korean automakers perhaps?) could put the hurt on Mercedes, BMW & co. to stop charging astronomical sums for such functionality.

Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 03:34:15 +0000

Merlin Mann on priorities:

Once you know a tree is falling on you, you don’t take a meeting to drill down on strategies viz. arboreal exit strategies. You just run.

Great piece of writing by Merlin that I’d somehow missed, luckily fresh again by its inclusion as ‘greeked’ text in the icon for the latest version of Instapaper.

Also my first exposure to the term ‘mud room’.

Fighting Engineers: Robots, Anecdotes, and Data

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 03:27:17 +0000

Interesting (as always) post on Mark Guzdial’s Computing Ed. blog about the danger of anecdotes shaping practice. I was particularly caught by this quote:

We find that Lego Robots don’t change girls attitudes about computing, doesn’t make them more interested in STEM fields, and doesn’t make them see themselves as doing computing. We find that PICO Crickets and Scratch do.

Reminded me of the SIGCSE 2009 paper “Do LEGO® Mindstorms® motivate students in CS1”. The article lends a nice balance to thoughts on the topic.

On switching away from Core Data

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 03:14:48 +0000

Were this a Mac app only, Core Data would probably have been fine. But it runs on iPhones too, and that’s where performance optimization becomes so much more critical.

Using Core Data on the iPhone can slow things down dramatically, especially with large datasets for operations that need to be as cheap as possible. I’ve used Core Data on the iPhone just to stick to the ‘correct’ & well documented form - bookmarking this for when things need go faster.

Death in the Atlantic: The Last Four Minutes of Air France Flight 447

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:29:43 +0000

Detailed analysis of one of the more mysterious air crashes of recent times. The following line at the end of the article really hit me though:

For several years now, Airbus has offered its customers a special safety program - called “Buss” — at a cost of €300,000 per aircraft. If the airspeed indicator fails, this software shows pilots the angle at which they must point the plane.

It boggles the mind that this is an ‘optional extra’.

Mimeo and the Kleptopus King

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:01:50 +0000

Mimeo collects carts to upscale himself and the game world and enables switching between acquired resolutions to solve platforming puzzles.

Super cool idea, the game also has three separate soundtracks to go with the three graphic levels that you move between with power ups. I’ve been using Inman’s Fever for a while now, and it’s a really thoughtfully designed product. Can’t wait to see the final product for Mimeo.

Convert filenames to lowercase (Bash one-liner)

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 01:54:50 +0000

One-liner to lowercase the filenames of all files in the current directory:

for f in *; do mv $f `echo $f | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`; done

Parallel programming is hard. Right?

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:59:57 +0000

This article claims the real difficulty in parallel programming is choosing the correct granularity at which to decompose the problem. I’d like to think we can decompose problems in a maximally parallel way, and let the runtime figure out where to avoid actual parallelism.

Worth reading the counterpoint in the comments from Jonathan May.

KitKats of the World

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:50:28 +0000

100+ different varieties of KitKat from around the world. I’d probably have the Pineapple.

[via BoingBoing]

To Grow a Company, You Need to be Good at Killing Things

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 02:25:05 +0000

This does not mean you shouldn’t start things - you can start lots of new things as long as you kill them.

I think this is a very important idea with anything where it’s easy to perceive the cost of retention as negligible (especially with continued growth in storage and bandwidth) - asking hard questions about ‘killing things’.

I’ve often felt the real and mental overheads that occur because of the preservation mentality, and it can really help to cut back cruft to leave a solid, simplified core of things worth caring about.

NYT's blogs are set to be paywalled

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 04:32:57 +0000

The moderator, Staci Kramer, then asked Nisenholtz whether that meant there wasn’t something very weird going on as a result: that if you follow a link to a NYT story from a NYT blog, then that counts towards your quota, while if you follow a link to a NYT story from any other blog, then it doesn’t.

The subtext from this article seems to be that the NYT are trying to simultaneously have a paywall and let links in to drive traffic. Which, rather logically, leaves them in very strange situations about internal vs external linking and who to barricade from what. Their policy of allowing article views via Google referrers has already been causing this kind of strange, I’ve tended to just copy and paste article urls into Google when I hit the subscribers-only message…

Will be interesting to see how the paywalls roll out across News Corp by 2011.

PyCon 2010 Videos

me@jonsimpson.co.uk (Jon) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 04:15:06 +0000

Videos from this year’s PyCon - the lightning talks are a nice set of hooks for the longer talks. Bookmarked, I’d like to come back to quite a few of these in the future.