Bag of Beans

A Flickr photographer has taken some pictures of the locations in Sydney, Australia that were used to film The Matrix.

• Sydney Matrix locations set on Flickr (via Digg)

This article on MSDN introduces a number of useful add-ins for Visual Studio.

In this article, I introduce you to some of the best Visual Studio add-ins available today that can be downloaded for free. I walk through using each of the add-ins, but because I am covering so many I only have room to introduce you to the basic functionality.

• Link (via Digg)

Wired has posted an article that explains why lithium-ion batteries explode, and what might replace them in the future.

But such technical excuses sidestep the fact that flammability and heat intolerance are long-standing problems that have plagued Li-ion batteries since they were invented almost 30 years ago. And as devices have gotten smaller in size but richer in features, things have only worsened. Forced to produce more energy in less space, Li-ions die faster (as early iPod owners found when their batteries wore out long before their players did), and their propensity for thermal runaway greatly increases.

• Link (via Digg)

This is a rather interesting post on the current state of the software industry, and it has sparked a lively discussion in the comments section.

These things are fairly typical of the modern relationship with computers. I’ve gotten so used to it that I didn’t really think about how odd this is until this morning, when I read somebody on LiveJournal talking about a video game crash, saying “I should know better than to purchase a game before the first patch is out…” Then it hit me: Has there ever been a bigger con job pulled on consumers than the modern software industry?

• Link

Lifehacker has collected together some of the more useful config tweaks for Firefox 2.

The Firefox homepage calls the web browser “fully customizable to your online life,” and that’s not just marketing claptrap. Beyond the extensive options available in its menus and dialogs, there’s a lengthy set of advanced Firefox preferences that can customize the browser to your specific needs. Sure, your brother-in-law’s not likely to edit Firefox’s default configuration, but you? You’re a power surfer and you want your web browser your way.

• Link
• Here’s another useful guide to tweaking Firefox 1 & 2

A workaround has already been found to bypass the IE7 Windows validation check during install.

You must have Windows XP Service Pack-2 (SP2) in order to install Internet Explorer 7.0. But still you will face a problem while installing this new Internet Explorer if your copy of Windows XP is not a genuine (non-pirated) one, since IE 7.0 installation requires genuine windows validation!!! So what to do??? Don’t worry… There are some tricky steps through which you can install IE 7.0 even in your pirated copy of windows XP bypassing the genuine windows validation.

• Link (via Lifehacker)

This is a handy site with instructions and animations for tying many different knots. Note that you need to enable Javascript for the animations to work properly.

• Link (via Cool Tools)

Check out these photo galleries of frighteningly bad home improvement projects.

• Gallery 1
• Gallery 2
• (via Boing Boing)

Engadget has put up part 1 of a how-to for building an HD projector.

Been eyeballing those sweet new high definition projectors? So have we. We’re not going to feel guilty for it either, we know what we like. But if your wallet is a little light from your last Engadget inspired shopping session you might dig our how-to latest project. In Today’s how-to, we’ll start taking a look at building your own HD projector… from an LCD Monitor. This isn’t one to be missed.

Building your own projector isn’t a new idea. Disassemble a desktop LCD display, put a really, really bright light behind it and add some optics and voila! you’ve got a projector. The real question: is it worth it? Since you might be a little leery of dropping several hundred dollars on parts and gutting a nice display because people you don’t know on an online forum said so, we’re going to do it for you.

• Link (via hack a day)

I just had to post this. This is one of the oddest videos I’ve seen.

• Link (via Digg)

An article on how some early, extremely high-speed photographs were taken.

During the early days of atomic bomb experiments in the 1940s, nuclear weapons scientists had some difficulty studying the growth of nuclear fireballs in test detonations. These fireballs expanded so rapidly that even the best cameras of that time were unable to capture anything more than a blurry, over-exposed frame for the first several seconds of the explosion.

Before long a professor of electrical engineering from MIT named Harold Eugene “Doc” Edgerton invented the rapatronic camera, a device capable of capturing images from the fleeting instant directly following a nuclear explosion. These single-use cameras were able to snap a photo one ten-millionth of a second after detonation from about seven miles away, with an exposure time of as little as ten nanoseconds. At that instant, a typical fireball had already reached about 100 feet in diameter, with temperatures three times hotter than the surface of the sun.

• Link

Eric Gunnerson’s list of programming no-no’s.

Some people have remarked that all of these are judgement calls, and really more a matter of aesthetics than actual sins.

That is true. I didn’t include things like “naming your variables i, j, & k” as sins, because I don’t think that’s a real problem in most of the code I’m likely to have to deal with, and there really isn’t much argument over whether it’s a good idea or not.

It perhaps would have been better to title this series, “Seven things Eric would really prefer that you don’t do in code that he has to work with”, but that is both ungainly and lacking the vitality of a post with the term “sin” in it.

• Sin #7 - Excessive Coupling
• Sin #6 - Inappropriately Clever Code
• Sin #5 - Deferred Refactoring
• Sin #4 - Premature Optimization
• Sin #3 - Overuse of Virtual
• Sin #2 - Overuse of Inheritance
• Sin #1 - Premature Generalization

Dana Hanna, who calls himself a Software Jedi, is writing a windows application a day for 30 days. He has already finished 25 apps. A number of the apps are actually quite useful, like the Jedi Window Dock which allows you to dock a bunch of applications into a single tabbed window. And best of all, all of the C# source code is available under the GPL.

I plan on writing an application everyday for 30 days straight. May the world benefit from the purposeful destruction of my personal life. I’m writing apps as of 9/15/2006.

• An App A Day blog
• Apps

Update: The Software Jedi has created a new website to host the applications he created, here.

Steve Yegge has written a long but entertaining rant on the problems with the “Agile” programming fad, as well as providing a fascinating look inside Google culture.

You know. Chumps. That’s the word I’m looking for. My bad-cholesterol view was that Agile Methodologies are for chumps.

But I’ve had a lot of opportunity to observe various flavors of Agile-ism in action lately, and I now think I was only about 90% right. It turns out there’s a good kind of Agile, although it’s taken me a long time to be able to see it clearly amidst all the hype and kowtowing and moaning feverishly about scrums and whatnot. I have a pretty clear picture of it now.

• Link (via reddit)

Some useful tools to keep your data away from prying eyes.

Everyone wants to be a badass. Whether you want to admit it or not, if you are a self respecting geek, you want to protect your sensitive information in a way so the CIA can’t even read it. You probably wouldn’t look, considering you live in your basement
and don’t have anything to hide besides that gigantic Mountain Dew Machine and the codes for free Whopper Sandwiches. So I’ve looked for you.

• Link (via Digg)