Intel has just presented a new kind of optical cable technology called “Light Peak”. At 10Gbps it is fast enough to handle any kind of wired data transfer currently in operation: networking, displays, storage, etc. As a bonus, it can transport several protocols at the same time, so multi-function devices only need a single cable (there is no word on whether the cables also carry electricity, though). Lastly, cables can be up to 100m long. Engadget has pictures of the connector which looks suspiciously (and pleasantly) Firewire-like.
Every now and then when following a TV series, an awkward kind of episode comes along: a frame story is used—rather heavy-handedly—as an excuse to sum up recent story lines by showing clips from past episodes. After just having watched one too many of those, I googled and found out that this kind of episode has a name, it’s called a “clip show”. The rationale for clip shows is as an introduction for newcomers to a series and to save production costs. A wikipedia article has more on this topic, including some history.
This is a great talk on how modern ideas about success put us under a lot of stress. Many of the points the speaker makes is how chance and fortune relativize many of our unforgiving ideals:
“Everyone can do anything” has to take into account that while some people do become very successful, it is also highly improbable that you will be one of them. The current prevalence of this idea is directly correlated to equally prevalent low self-esteem.
“You are responsible for yourself” puts many people on a constant emotional roller coaster because they own their successes as well as their failures.
In middle age England, poor people were considered “unfortunate” (=fortune played a role) whereas nowadays, they are often called “losers”, with far more (negative) personal connotations.
Great quote: “A snob is anyone who takes a small part of you and uses it to come to a complete vision of who you are.”
The answer to the question “what do you do” will often determine how much you are respected. So it is no surprise that people take career choices very seriously.
The talk “The surprising science of motivation” by Dan Pink makes a great case that incentives lead to worse performance for any moderately complicated task. Instead of this (extrinsic) motivation, Pink suggests to encourage intrinsic motivation via: autonomy, mastery (get better at what you do), purpose.
“Praising children's intelligence, far from boosting their self-esteem, encourages them to embrace self-defeating behaviors such as worrying about failure and avoiding risks,” said Dr. Dweck, lead author of the study. “However, when children are taught the value of concentrating, strategizing and working hard when dealing with academic challenges, this encourages them to sustain their motivation, performance and self-esteem.”
Praise of intelligence makes talent and success seem like magic, leading to a defeatist attitude when failing. Praise of effort gives you the feeling that things are fixable.
This bookmarklet adjusts the editor size to the current size of the browser window.
If you add a keyword to the bookmarklet, it does not even have to be directly accessible anywhere: Lifehacker explains the basics of keywords, Mozilla describes the "add a keyword for this search" feature.
This is great news and confirms my prior suspicions. Finally, one can safely target Java 6 on the Mac, as I expect PPC Macs to become slowly irrelevant and most users to upgrade to Snow Leopard.
Update 2009-08-29: We finally have more reliable confirmation that 32bit Macs will be able to run Java 6 on Snow Leopard. This is a big deal and I don’t understand why Apple hasn’t made this more public.
Update 2009-09-02:More information on this topic, including how-tos for getting Eclipse running with Java 6.
Don’t get me wrong: I love Blogger, otherwise my content wouldn't be here. The web application for managing posts is nearly perfect. But there are a few things that regularly annoy me. I list them in this blog post.
User interface
Resizable editing area: This is the simplest to fix and the most annoying non-feature. Editing long posts becomes quite challenging when the editing area is so small. If you search for this issue on the web, you’ll find that people have been asking for this for quite some time now.
Shortcuts: Having shortcut keys to, say, turn text bold speed up editing. If one does it via access keys, it is relatively painless to implement.
Navigation: After editing a blog post, it makes most sense to directly return to that blog post (or, even better, to where one invoked editing). Right now, especially because I sometimes publish a post to see what it looks like, I need too many clicks to get where I want to.
Make “Edit Posts” more accessible: it is a frequently used feature (much more so than “Settings” or “Layout”).
Insert images at the current cursor position: Right now, one usually needs cut and paste to move them to their correct place, because the are always inserted at the top.
Smart quotes, smart apostrophes: "smart" turns into “smart” and don't turns into don’t. This would be awfully nice to have, especially if it was configurable for different languages.
Markup
Tables: WYSIWYG editing for tables would be very useful.
Nested bullet lists: While nested bullet lists can be overdone, they are necessary, especially for shorter posts that need to be scanned quickly. Indenting an item via tab, outdenting it via shift-tab is how this is typically done.
Paragraph styles: pre, headings. pre is especially cumbersome when done directly in HTML, as the “Compose” editor changes pre content in unexpected ways (removes spaces etc.). It is an essential feature when writing about source code. Headings are relatively simple when adding them in HTML (you need to start at h4), but should still be GUI-accessible.
Breaking up long posts: Often it is nice to initially show a brief introduction and then continue into the full blog post by following a link. For feeds, having control over where content is broken up is handy, too.
Captions for images: With figure and legend in HTML 5, there will soon be standard markup for this. Blogger can already prepare for this by supporting captions now.
Spoilers: Hiding text and revealing it only on demand is a nice feature for quizzes and such. A work-around is to draw text in white. Then one needs to select it to see it.
Bugs
Special HTML characters: are handled strangely in round trips between “Compose” to “Edit Html”. Sometimes they are escaped, but brackets are not escaped when going from WYSIWYG to HTML and thus cause problems when going back. If one manually escapes angle brackets in HTML, the HTML entities are escaped and show up as ugly HTML code in WYSIWYG mode.
