Despite my periodic criticisms of eBay (1, 2, 3) I remain a devoted user. One thing it’s great for is selling things that require a lot of explanation – because, unlike with a tag sale or classified ad, you don’t have to repeat that explanation to every potential buyer. You write it up once and eBay does the rest.
I’m pretty tough on my hardware, so when I sell things the “explanation” is often a laundry list of defects.
When I came across this set of outage notices on the Google AdSense site tonight I couldn’t resist turning them into a general-purpose, public access tool that apologizes for broken websites in 23 languages.
For example, let’s say you’re the webmaster for Happy Fun Ball Corporation and you accidentally overwrite the web server’s document root while backing up your ASCII art collection, and it’s the day of a global product launch. No problem!
This is amateur science at its best. Peter Klausler, an aficionado of the Dvorak keyboard layout, decided to see if there were better permutations of keys yet unrealized:
…I constructed a complicated function that measures the amount of “work” needed to touch-type a given text with a given layout.
Very good. But where does the primordial soup of keyboard layouts come from?
…4096 keyboard layouts compete with each other. The layouts in the initial pool are entirely random. In each generation, they all race to “type” a word list, and their per-word times are multiplied by the word frequencies in the input sample. After the race, the fastest half are kept. The pool is then repopulated by generating a single mutation for each survivor.
It’s become a user interface meme: the Big Green Download Button. I like it. (I’m surprised Django doesn’t have one yet!)
Download.com – the original?
CodeZoo
OpenOffice.org
Firefox (not quite compliant – no arrow)
Sourceforge (mentioned earlier)
Netscape (green-ish)
Opera
NewsGator Feedstation
Once or twice a year I get an e-mail from Brainbench urging me to come take some free certification tests. Unfortunately, a lot of the tests are really out of date. I am currently Brainbench-certified in Apache 1.3.12 and Python 1.5 – both of which were already 4+ years out of date when I took the tests last year. I think I’m proudest of my 99th-percentile “HTML 3.2 MASTER” certification. It’s very Web 1.0!
In 1981, I was 13 years old and teaching myself BASIC on my TRS-80 Model III from official Radio Shack manuals – accurate, comprehensive, and terminally bland.
Into that gray scene came the book Basic Computer Games: Microcomputer Edition (edited by David Ahl of Creative Computing magazine). It changed my life.
I can’t remember now where it came from. Neither my parents, nor my friends, nor my teachers knew much about the home computer scene. It’s possible that I found out about it in Creative Computing magazine and ordered it by mail, or “borrowed” it from somewhere and forgot to return it. The book, subtitled “101 great games to play on your home computer,” was 8-bit-nerd heaven. Pages and pages of program listings in tiny, all-caps, dot matrix type, with brief introductory paragraphs. Plus, funny illustrations of strangely plausible robots. Don’t underestimate the appeal of the robots.
