Bag of Beans

This a funny post comparing the personalities of different programming languages.

BASIC - The horny divorcee that lives next door. Her specialty is seducing young boys and it seems she is always readily available for them. She teaches them many amazing things, or at least they seem amazing because it is their) first experience. She is not that young herself, but because she was their first lover the boys always remember her fondly. Her cooking and sewing skills are mediocre, but largely irrelevant, it’s the frolicking that the boys like. The opinion that adults have of Mrs. BASIC is varied. Shockingly, some fathers actually introduce their own sons to this immoral woman! But generally the more righteous adults try to correct the badly influenced young men by introducing them to well behaved women like Miss Pascal.

• Link (via Digg)

A Damn Interesting article on what would really happen to a human body exposed to hard vacuum.

As is true with many subjects, this representation in popular culture does not reflect the reality of exposure to outer space. Ever since humanity first began to probe outside of our protective atmosphere, a number of live organisms have been exposed to vacuum, both deliberately and otherwise. By combining these experiences with our knowledge of outer space, scientists have a pretty clear idea of what would happen if an unprotected human slipped into the cold, airless void.

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A candid rant by a Microsoft developer on Microsoft bureaucracy.

I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006.

The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should’ve been designed, implemented and tested in a week. To my happy surprise (where “happy” is the freude in schadenfreude), Joel Spolsky wrote an article about my feature.

I would like to try to explain how this steaming turd happened.

• Link (via reddit)
• Joel Spolsky’s article is here

This is a fascinating article on traffic patterns and how the habits of a single driver can help cure traffic jams. The article spans several pages, but it is well worth the read.

I live in Seattle and my two daily commutes last about 45 minutes. (That’s when I’m lucky; sometimes it’s more like two hours each.) This has given me an immense amount of time for watching the interesting patterns in the cars. Boredom led me to fantasize about the traffic being like a flowing liquid, with cars acting as giant water molecules. Over many months I slowly realized that this was not just a fantasy. Why had I never noticed all the “traffic fluid dynamics” out there? Once my brain became sensitized to it, I started seeing quite a variety of interesting things occurring. Eventually I started using my car to poke at the flowing traffic. Observation eventually leads to experimentation, no? There are amazing things you can do as an “amateur traffic dynamicist.” You can drive like an “anti-rubbernecker” and erase slowdowns created by other drivers. But first, some basic phenomena.

I believe this is a video of the incident mentioned in the article, where several students organized a protest of the low speed limit. They created a rolling barrier across the highway, forcing everyone behind them to drive the speed limit!

• Link (via reddit)

The Daily WTF has some more short examples of hilariously bad or entertaining code.

Nikita Zhuk thought there might be a deeper, more fundamental lack of understanding when she came across this question posted on Experts Exchange …

hi all,

IntTemp = Int((255 * Rnd()) + 1)

I used above ASP.NET code. Problem is in ” Rnd() “
Rnd() value is changing everytime.

What is the alternative for Rnd()?
OR How will stop Rnd() value changes at everytime?

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Make Magazine has posted a great list of open source hardware and software for Makers.

There are hundreds of gift guides this holiday season filled with junk you can buy - but a lot of time you actually don’t own it, you can’t improve upon it, you can’t share it or make it better, you certainly can’t post the plans, schematics and source code either. We want to change that, we’ve put together our picks of interesting open source hardware projects, open source software, services and things that have the Maker-spirit of open source. Some are kits, some are open software projects that you’ll need to build hardware for before gifting, and some are just support for the projects/groups that do open source. Included in this guide are things you can get from the MAKE store too (we try and have as many open source goods as possible).

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This BMW commercial features some pretty amazing wind-powered kinetic sculptures.

• Link (via Digg)

This may not be that practical, but it is an interesting way to do multiplication visually by using intersecting lines.

• Video (via reddit)

Take this online test to see how well you can distinguish musical pitches and tones.

While working at the music and neuroimaging lab at Beth Israel/Harvard Medical School in Boston, I developed a quick online way to screen for the tonedeafness. It actually turned out to be a pretty good test to check for overall pitch perception ability. The test is purposefully made very hard, so excellent musicians rarely score above 80% correct. Give it a try!

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The test you are about to take was used as a screening test to roughly characterize patient’s pitch discrimination and musical memory abilities. Even though musical memory is strongly tested here, we have found that people who are tonedeaf tend to have normal musical memories.

• Link (via Digg)

The Escapist has written an article on the world’s most hated copy protection.

In any forum topic about StarForce, embittered players across the spectrum speak in one voice about crippled operating systems and ruined CD drives. Many players report they bought honest, legal copies of StarForce-protected games, could not make them run and finally, in desperation, visited pirate sites to download no-CD cracks or warez versions. A dominant theme in these posts is resentment toward StarForce and game publishers for screwing up their customers’ computers without warning. Publisher representatives seldom post to apologize or ask details.

• Link
• Boycott Starforce keeps a running blog and has a list of games and publishers that continue to use StarForce
• Another site urging you to boycott StarForce-protected games
• Boing Boing’s reaction to being bullied with legal threats for criticizing StarForce
• At least one publisher has dumped StarForce due to the public outcry and a $5 million lawsuit brought on by gamers with crippled machines

The PortableApps Suite has just reached 1.0. This is a useful collection of open source programs for Windows that you can run directly off of a USB flash drive.

PortableApps Suiteâ„¢ is a collection of portable apps including a web browser, email client, office suite, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client, antivirus, sudoku game, backup utility and integrated menu, all preconfigured to work portably. Just drop it on your portable device and you’re ready to go.

• Link (via Lifehacker)

Leah Culver funded the purchase of a new Macbook Pro by selling ad space on the cover for $150 per square inch. The ads were then laser etched at her workplace.

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)
• Cool video of the laser etching process
• Backstory

Related:

• How to make $1M in 4 months

A 17-year-old amateur scientist has built his own Fusor.

In the basement of his parents’ Oakland Township home, tucked away in an area most aren’t privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two years and 1,000 hours to research and build — a large, intricate machine that , on a small scale, creates nuclear fusion.

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In fact, on www.fusor.net, the Stoney Creek senior is ranked as the 18th amateur in the world to create nuclear fusion. So, how does he do it?

Pointing to the steel chamber where all the magic happens, Thiago said on Friday that this piece of the puzzle serves as a vacuum. The air is sucked out and into a filter.

Then, deuterium gas — a form of hydrogen — is injected into the vacuum. About 40,000 volts of electricity are charged into the chamber from a piece of equipment taken from an old mammogram machine. As the machine runs, the atoms in the chamber are attracted to the center and soon — ta da — nuclear fusion.

• Link (via Slashdot)
• The Radioactive Boy Scout is a gripping account of another teen who almost succeeded in building a much more dangerous breeder reactor without anyone’s knowledge.

This is a fantastic homemade computer project. Look at the schematic for this thing. Yikes!

This is an actual computer, built completely from scratch. I began the project in the spring of 2006, while I was taking a course on microcomputers. My Z80 system will remain a work in progress as long as I can think of new things to add to it.

The current specs are:

2MHz 8 bit Zilog Z80 processor
56 KB static RAM (7 x 8k x 8 )
8 KB EEPROM
1 Mb Flash Memory “hard drive”
Interrupt controller with 8 interrupt levels
20 character x 2 line backlit LCD with contrast control
RS232 serial port
2 programmable timers
Programmable beeper
8X DIP switch and 8X LED’s for general purpose I/O
Strobe button for clocked input from the DIP switches
Parallel port programming interface with parity

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I do all the programming on my PC, using Z80 assembly. I wrote a simple drag and drop utility in C++ that uploads the assembled code into the microcomputer’s memory.

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)

A thought-provoking article on the difference between a master and an expert.

The main thing I noticed about the experts I’ve encountered is they are into impressing you with their abilities. They are usually incredibly good, but their need for recognition gets in the way of mastery. Everything they do is an attempt to prove themselves and in order to do this they must perform like an actor on stage. There’s nothing wrong with this, and I don’t think the expert can become a master without going through this stage in life. At some point though, the expert becomes comfortable with themselves or fed up with impressing everyone and starts to look inward to the core of their art.

• Link (via reddit)

Here’s an interesting write up for a project to build a Cintiq-like interactive pen tablet.

This is hybrid screen/graphics tablet which makes me drool. The price however makes me weep, £2000ish for the 20” version. They also do a thing called the PL at 17” for a more reasonable £500ish. Occasionally they appear on the site in their bargain basement ex-demo section. Still hard for me to justify though.

Then I had one of those “spang” moments. None of the tech involved is new and all is readily available second hand, it’s just a matter of putting it together. My Wacom at work will happily operate with the stylus off the surface, after that it’s just an LCD screen, right? Anyhow where’s the fun in just buying something?

The finished product:

• Link (via hack a day)

Here’s a great site that highlights some really useful open source applications for windows with short, concise write ups.

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Here’s a comparison of which of the most popular BitTorrent sites have the most torrents indexed, and which has the best features.

When I first began to use BitTorrent in 2004 there was little question as to which indexing site to use. Today, Suprnova is long gone and we are left with an array of diverse options. This is a comparison of today’s ten most used BitTorrent sites according to Alexa.com.

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Until another coder steps up for The Software Jedi’s An App A Day challenge, one programmer has just started An App A Week.

• An App A Week home
• An App A Day home
• The Software Jedi home

A physical explanation of the benefits of flying in formation.

The majority of the benefit goes to the birds further aft, but the front bird does still gain some reduction in drag. The presence of the two birds flanking the leader helps to dissipate the downwash off the lead bird’s wingtips and reduces the induced drag this bird experiences. These two flanking birds also benefit from a similar reduction in drag if outboard birds flank them as well. In other words, the birds in the middle of each of the lines forming the V are in the best position. These birds benefit from the upwash off the lead birds as well as off the trailing birds. This additional bonus means that birds in the middle experience less drag than either the lead bird or the bird at the end of each line.

• Link (via Neatorama)