Interview with Adam Savage
An interview with a Mythbuster. Did you know the show was an Australian concept? Or that they get gay fan mail? [icbm: dcs]
Alternate queries on results pages making it easier for future evilness?
John Battelle implies that the new search result page being testing by Google could make evilness easier in the future. The premise is that offering alternate queries might be useful now, but it would make it easier to insert paid listings later. I'm confused though, and John doesn't have a comment link in his RSS output, so I'll post it here. Surely if Google wanted to embrace evil later, they could just direct their coders to make it happen? They already know what keywords you're searching for (i.e. Adwords), couldn't they just roll those into the page in a way which looks like search results? I see no real way this positions for future evil. I've been keeping an eye on Google news recently, and there seems to be a propensity towards paranoia in a lot of people (for instance the gmail displaying Adwords thing). If people are bothered, why don't they just use another search engine? You can't tell me that MSN and Yahoo! are any less evil...
Where did SUVs come from?
I've always wondered where the SUV proliferation in the US came from. This article assures me that it's because the US federal government tried to make cars more fuel efficient. Interesting, if it's correct. Nick Hac. [icbm: work]
Want to be an acquisitions editor on Open Source topics
Because the Average Joe is looking for one. [icbm: home]
The channel seven defence
Your honour, they can't prove we didn't lie in our story. Arguing that you could have lied in a journalistic story as a defence? Either Channel 7 is populated with such morons that you shouldn't be watching, or they can't be trusted. Pick. [icbm: home]
Hackathons
Let your development team spend a day hacking on a feature they care about. Sounds like a great idea to me. I look around at a lot of the developers I know and they're running at 50% efficiency because they feel bored doing what the managers say they should the whole time, and the product suffers as a result. Is your company having trouble with staff churn? It's probably because you don't let your employees become passionate any more. [icbm: home]
Sydney Australia in Google Maps
Sydney, Australia is in Google Maps. Satellite imagery only, but it's a start. Via the Unofficial Google Weblog. [icbm: home]
Interesting technique for finding leaks in code
So, your code leaks and you need a technique for finding what object you're leaking, so grab a couple of addresses at random and dump them. Chances are, they're the object your leaking. This technique is so sexy in it's beauty. [icbm: home]
Ministry of re-shelving
Re-shelve copies of 1984 under "current affairs" or "politics" in your local bookshop. [icbm: work]
Random segue: how I came up with the original table of contents
One of the problems I grappled with early on with was how do you come up with a table of contents for a book? It's a complicated process, and it's really important. If the book doesn't flow, then people are left confused about what goes where, and the book is a lot less useful. Additionally, when you sit down to actually write, then you need to know what is covered where so that you can refer the reader to the right place to find out more about a specific topic -- even if you haven't covered that topic yet. So how did I come up with the first cut of the table of contents for the ImageMagick book? Well, I started by looking at all of the command line options to the various ImageMagick commands. I wrote this down on a stack of old business cards, and then distributed those cards in logical sounding piles on the floor. Those piles pretty much became the chapters that I originally submitted. That's the card mound. Anyway, once that was done, Matt (the editor) and I sat down and worked on the table of contents description until it flowed nicely, covered everything we…