Bag of Beans

A video for Portal’s end credits song filmed in Lego stop-motion!

More than 1300 individual pictures went into the making of this film. It is based off of the video game, Portal, and features the soundtrack from the game’s credits with an all lego cast.

• Link (via Joystiq)

One user has written a pretty funny post on their experiences with Vista, and “upgrading” to XP. Based on reports like these, I’m glad I skipped the Vista upgrade cycle altogether and went straight to XP.

In addition, I have noticed that when performing complex tasks such as viewing large images, or updating large spreadsheets, instead of the whole operating system locking down for several seconds, it now just locks down the application I am working on, allowing me to <gasp> Alt-Tab to another application and work on that. I am thrilled that Microsoft decided to add preemptive multitasking to their operating system, and for this reason alone I would strongly urge you to upgrade to XP.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Wired has a great series of articles on the new season of Futurama, and the story behind it.

Cohen has another reason to be happy. The segment he’s watching is from Futurama, the show that he codeveloped back in 1999 with Simpsons creator Matt Groening. (Cohen wrote and produced some of the animated sitcom’s most popular episodes.) With that pedigree, Futurama seemed like a can’t-fail proposition, but it was canceled five years ago. This footage, however, is new: Futurama is back in production, and the unexpected return is as curious as the story of its abrupt cancellation.

• Futurama Is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In
• The Geekiest Show on TV
• The Original Futurama
• Gallery: Behind the Scenes of Futurama

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has written an interesting and amusing article on why swears carry such an impact.

But perhaps the greatest mystery is why politicians, editors, and much of the public care so much. Clearly, the fear and loathing are not triggered by the concepts themselves, because the organs and activities they name have hundreds of polite synonyms. Nor are they triggered by the words’ sounds, since many of them have respectable homonyms in names for animals, actions, and even people. Many people feel that profanity is self-evidently corrupting, especially to the young. This claim is made despite the fact that everyone is familiar with the words, including most children, and that no one has ever spelled out how the mere hearing of a word could corrupt one’s morals.

• Link (via reddit)

This site has collected a large list of laws related to software development.

Inspired by Phil Haack’s article 19 Eponymous Laws of Software Development, I decided to collect laws, axioms and rules pertaining to mainstream software development and put them in a nice, easy-to-read table.

• Link (via Boing Boing)

Amusing banner ad from Microsoft.

• Link (via Compiler - Wired Blogs)

• Link [xkcd.com]

Rather than just sending back a memory dump, how would you like to be able to physically punish the developer that’s causing you so much anguish?

• Link (via Compiler - Wired Blogs)

Will this settle the debate once and for all? Probably not, but an amusing read nonetheless.

All hope is not lost though. An important issue regarding social norms is whether they are created to increase welfare. Are they society’s response to market failures? One such norm is tipping for service quality. Azar (2003) has shown that the norm of tipping increases social welfare. In this paper, we show conclusively that the social norm of leaving the toilet seat down after use decreases welfare and by doing that we hope to convince the reader that social norms are not always welfare enhancing. Hence, there is a case for scientifically examining social norms and educating the masses about the fallacy of following social norms blindly.

• Link (via Slashdot)

A very entertaining story when the author’s curiosity gets the better of her.

I mean, what kind of nanny state am I living in right now? I can’t even buy cold medicine anymore without the government all up in my shit? Why is my right to privacy being invaded in favor of incompetent police officers who lack the ability to catch drug dealers without spying on the average law abiding citizen?

Then, out of nowhere, I thought, I wonder what would happen if I tried to buy all the Nyquil on the shelf?

Would they laugh? Would they get angry? Would they sell it to me? Would they call the cops? Would they interrogate me until I told them what it was for?

• Link (via Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection)

Earlier this year, there were reports that U.S. Department of Defense contractors had been bugged with suspicious looking Canadian coins. Now we find out what the real culprit was.

The odd-looking — but harmless — “poppy coin” was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors travelling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as “anomalous” and “filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology,” according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

• Link (via Slashdot)

• Link [xkcd.com]

This site takes pictures of the fast food you actually get at the counter and compares them to the promotional images.

Each item was purchased, taken home, and photographed immediately. Nothing was tampered with, run over by a car, or anything of the sort. It is an accurate representation in every case. Shiny, neon-orange, liquefied pump-cheese, and all.

• Link (via Boing Boing)

Read ComputerWorld’s list of over-hyped failures of the tech industry.

Hype is the coin of the realm in the technology business. If you listen to vendors and the media, it may sometimes seem as though every new product, service, concept or even security threat will be the Next Big Thing. Some live up to all the fuss, but many don’t — and some fail spectacularly.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Space Invaders in stop-motion using humans as pixels. Brilliant!

• Link (via Boing Boing)

This is an amusing piece that claims that the destruction of the Death Star may have been part of a massive conspiracy!

Presented here are some of the results of my soul-searching regarding this painful event. Like many citizens, I have many questions that I would like answered: was the mighty Imperial government really too incompetent to prevent a handful of untrained nerf-herders from destroying one of their most prized assets? Or are they hiding something from us? Who was really behind the attack? Why did they want the Death Star destroyed? No matter what the answers, we have a problem.

• Link (via reddit)

This is quite an outrageous project posting at GetACoder.com. The budget is $1000-$3000! Good luck.

Hi,

So I’m posting for a rather large project. I need someone to program me a new OS (Operasting System) that looks different than Ms Windows XP etc. but has the same style. It does not need to run on a mac but all the other PCs. It’s supposed to have a stylish look with clear edges etc. And ITS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE JUST A REDESIGNED WINDOWS as I’m going to sell that operating system later on. It’s going to be called BlueOrb.

These are some important points :

It should have ALL THE FEATURES that Windows Xp Professional has.
ALL the files that run on Windows XP ust also run on the BlueOrb OS.
It must have a very user-friendly interface (like MS WINDOWS XP)
When it gets Installed, the user needs to insert a serial number.
It HAS to be HACKER SAFE!
It must be quick and good looking.

Note that I only accept quality work and do not want any quickly done BS.

greetz,

M.Reinhardt

Some of the followup comments are rather funny as well. allencolmes writes:

Hi. I can do this for you next week, when I plan on taking a break from a nonotech based / atomic fission driven search engine thats going to make larry page wet his pants. 6 days to code, 1 to rest. It will be written from scratch and completely original in design, so don’t worry about copyright bs. I plan to write the entire OS in C, and blindfolded, if its all the same to you. 100% secure will not be a problem either…In fact the OS will be designed to leverage jedi mind tricks to kill anyone that even thinks about breaking in. (i was thinking maybe make them chop off their feet and jump up and down until their empty would be fair). Anyways, I’m gonna smoke some more crack, maybe you should do the same. Thanks!

• Link (via UNEASYsilence)

• Link [xkcd.com]

This is a great song by Jonathan Coulton.

Check out the video by spiffworld on YouTube:

• Thing a Week 29 - Code Monkey (via net@nite podcast)
• YouTube video

Gizmodo has posted a great rant on people with more money than sense.

And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose.

Then you had the audacity to complain about broken phones, half-assed firmware that bricked your gear, and winner-takes-nothing arms races between the companies whose gear your bought and the hackers who had nothing better to do than try to fix it. Do you realize how ridiculous that is? Programmers with free time did more to help you get quality products than you ever did by buying the broken gear in the first place.

• Link