Argo (2012) — 6/10

Ben Affleck directs and stars alongside John Goodman, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin and Zeljko Ivanek in this movie about the CIA pretending to make a movie in order to smuggle US-embassy employees out of Iran during the hostage crisis. The cast is good and the idea isn’t bad but the execution is a bit slow, especially in the second act, where I felt that they didn’t sustain the suspense well at all. The direction and cinematography were quite good, but not exceptional for... [More]

A little while ago, I wrote about my experiences with the SBB automated ticket machines. The online experience is somewhat better but still has some mysterious bugs and omissions—it’s hard to believe that this software has been in use for years—and by millions of users.

Where’s the Zürich Hauptbahnhof?

One example comes from the list of suggestions returned when a user types in the “from” or “to” field in the route finder. One day, I entered what I thought was an easy match, one of the... [More]

This diagram of the branches of economics by Zach Weiner (SMBC) sums it up very nicely.

SMBC 2013-09-19

I was recently given the book The Next 100 Years (2009) by George Friedman by a friend. After the first few dozen pages, I’d made so many quizzical notes that I had to look up the author, because I’d never heard of him. It turns out that he’s “the founder, chief intelligence officer, financial overseer, and CEO of the private intelligence corporation STRATFOR, a global intelligence company founded in 1996”, according to Wikipedia. That helped set the context for the book a bit better.

There... [More]

Opera has officially released their first desktop browser based on the Blink engine (forked from WebKit). The vision behind Opera 15 and beyond by Sebastien Baberowski (Desktop Team) explains how Opera 15…

…is dead on arrival.[1]

Choose your market

For years, Opera has held a steady 1.7–2% of the desktop browser market. This seems small but comprises dozens of millions of users. More capitalist heads have clearly prevailed at Opera. They’ve struck out for a more lucrative market. Instead of catering to the 2% of niche, expert... [More]

The helpful page, Ignoring files (GitHub), taught me something I didn’t know: there’s a file you can use to ignore files in your local Git repository without changing anyone else’s repository.

Just to recap, here are the ways to ignore a file:

• Global .gitignore: you can designate basic exclusion directives that apply to all repositories on your system. This file is not committed to any repository or shared with others. Execute git config –global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global to set the file... [More]

The article Girl buys water, spends night in jail by Dylan Stableford (Yahoo! News) describes an utterly lunatic crime-stopping scene:

“[…] the student, [20-year–old] Elizabeth Daly, was walking to her car on April 11 at approximately 10:15 p.m. with a box of sparkling water […] when the agents—six men and one woman, all in plainclothes—approached suspecting the box […] to be a 12-pack of beer. One jumped on the hood of her SUV; another pulled out a gun […]”

Seven agents. Tailing and taking down a college student... [More]

I’ve been using CSS since its inception and use many parts of the CSS3 specification for both personal work and work I do for Encodo. Recently, I read about some length units I’d never heard of in the article CSS viewport units: vw, vh, vmin and vmax by Chris Mills (Dev.Opera).

• 1vw: 1% of viewport width
• 1vh: 1% of viewport height
• 1vmin: 1vw or 1vh, whatever is smallest
• 1vmax: 1vw or 1vh, whatever is largest

These should be eminently useful for responsive designs. While there is wide support for these new units, that... [More]

From the article Rand Paul’s Confederacy Scandal Is Not an Anomaly – Libertarianism Is a ‘Philosophy’ That Papers Over Deep Racism in America by Thom Hartmann (AlterNet),

“So now comes a political philosophy—libertarianism—that says everything is fine, everything is equal, and government should get the hell out of the way. […] Of course, […] most [libertarians] probably don’t see how their “get rid of government” policies prop up institutional bigotry, but the reality is that when you blast government as... [More]”

SMBC puts some very interesting words in the wizard’s mouth that explains his role quite well. After Dorothy and Co. have revealed him to be a fraud—a mere man rather than the all-powerful wizard they’d imagined him to be—he says,

“[…] Now then, you can either persist in your dull revelation, or you can close the curtain and return to your world where good and power can allow without wicked dross, and where the broken vessels of your lives can be made whole by the caprice of an... [More]”

Recently, the post What’s the most intellectual joke you know? (Reddit) got a lot of play and a tremendous number of suggestions. I dug through what were rated the top 500 replies and extracted and collated my favorites.

Computer Science

• There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

• The programmer’s wife tells him: “Run to the store and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.”

  The programmer comes home with 12 loaves... [More]

The following story tells tale of a day spent with the ongoing user-experience (UX) catastrophe that is the interface of the SBB/ZVV automated ticket machines.

While it’s certainly possible that our experiences are unique and that others can easily purchase their perhaps simpler tickets, we have found that veering ever-so-slightly from the beaten path leads into some very deep and dark weeds.

Even were we to accept that the fault for the confusion engendered by the UI lay entirely with us,... [More]

The post Please share your hidden OS X features or tips and tricks (StackExchange) yielded a treasure trove of keyboard shortcuts, some of which I knew and many that I’d never heard of or had long ago forgotten.

I collected, condensed and organized the ones I found the most useful below.

Finder & Open/Save dialogs

• ⌘ + ⇧ + G shows a location bar where you can type a path (/ or ~ also works in Open/Save). This text field supports ~ for the home directory and has rudimentary tab-completion.
• ⌘... [More]

A little while back, I read about the mantis shrimp (Wikipedia) in a comic called Why the mantis shrimp is my new favorite animal (The Oatmeal). The comic is both amusing and informative, describing and depicting the shrimp’s unbelievable visual organs (here, citing Wikipedia):

“The midband region of the mantis shrimp’s eye is made up of six rows of specialized ommatidia. Four rows carry 16 differing sorts of photoreceptor pigments, 12 for colour sensitivity, others for colour filtering. The mantis shrimp has such good... [More]”

The following article was originally published on the Encodo blogs and is cross-published here.

The article Announcing the .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview provides an incredible amount of detail about a relatively exciting list of improvements for .NET developers.

x64 Edit & Continue

First and foremost, the Edit-and-Continue feature is now available for x64 builds as well as x86 builds. Whereas an appropriate cynical reaction is that “it’s about damn time they got that done”, another... [More]

It is difficult to imagine how democracy and capitalism are to work together. Democracy is ineffective in the presence of concentrated power; and capitalism acts to concentrate power.

I found the following analogies, offered in response to the U.S. Supreme Court striking down the preclearance clause of the Civil Rights Act—the stipulation that certain U.S. states with a long history of discriminatory voting practice have to “pre-clear” changes to voting law with the Federal government—entirely apropos.

Gibney has quite a good string of documentaries behind him, but We Steal Secrets seems to be a good deal shakier. I have not seen it, but it’s a documentary about WikiLeaks that focuses on the personal weaknesses and personality characteristics of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange without having interviewed either one of them, indeed without having interviewed anyone in the WikiLeaks organization. I reserve final judgment until I’ve seen it, but it doesn’t bode well.

Given that background,... [More]

A couple of days ago, Gleen Greenwald, constitutional and civil-rights lawyer, former Salon blogger and current Guardian blogger and columnist, revealed some top-secret U.S. documents that lay out in quite clear terms the degree to which U.S. government agencies are proud to be intercepting data from myriad sources.

Phone records, social-networking sites, large cloud-data providers, chat tools, video-calling software—almost anything you can think of—were mentioned as current and past... [More]

The following article was originally published on the Encodo blogs and is cross-published here.

Many improvements have been made to Microsoft’s Entity Framework (EF) since I last used it in production code. In fact, we’d last used it waaaaaay back in 2008 and 2009 when EF had just been released. Instead of EF, I’ve been using the Quino ORM whenever I can.

However, I’ve recently started working on a project where EF5 is used (EF6 is in the late stages of release, but is no longer generally... [More]

Web browsing has come a long way since earthli’s default style was originally created. It was high time to clean out the decade-old default style and apply some modern design ideas to it. Nothing radical, but any design of a certain age will end up being more appropriate for older browsers than more modern ones.

On the one hand, the style accumulates cruft engendered by browser limitations that no longer apply and, on the other, the basic layout no longer works well on the most common... [More]

It’s been raining a lot in Switzerland this year. The Tobelbach near Wetzikon was bound to be quite swollen with water after this Saturday so, despite the still-pounding rain, we took an evening walk to the Pfäffikersee to see just how drastic things had gotten.

A rainy day in Züri Oberland (YouTube)

The article Surprise! Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web by Peter Bright (Ars Technica) takes a (very) early look at asm.js, a compilation target that the Mozilla foundation is pushing as a way to bring high-performance C++/C applications (read: games) to browsers.

The tool chain is really, really cool. The Clang compiler has really come a long way and established itself as the new, more flexible compiler back-end to use (Apple’s XCode has been using it since version 3.2 and it’s been the default since... [More]

I’ve recently discovered (via Kottke.org) a deceptively simple game called GeoGuessr, which works as follows:

1. The game shows a random location using Google Streetview
2. The player has to click as close as possible to the location on the inset map
3. The game rates your guess based on distance from the actual location and comes up with a score (6500 points seems to be the maximum)
4. Repeat 5 times
5. Tally up the score

Depending on how you play, you may or may not care about the score. Kottke at the... [More]

1. Alien (1979) — 9/10
2. Hancock (2008) — 7/10
3. Daybreakers (2009) — 6/10
4. God Bless America (2011) — 5/10
5. The Cannonball Run (1981) — 6/10
6. Cannonball Run II (1984) — 3/10
7. Friends with Benefits (2011) — 8/10
8. Run, Fatboy, Run (2007) — 7/10

Alien (1979) — 9/10

The classic film, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Sigourney Weaver (Ripley), John Hurt and Tom Skerritt. It documents the journey of a commercial deep-space mining ship on its way to investigate an... [More]

I’ve been following Lee Camp, a stand-up comedian/activist/blogger for several months now. He’s always been quite good, but he’s hit his stride lately. His “Moment of Clarity” videos are short and interesting and often funny.

The following videos were posted while he’s on tour in the British Isles.

The Most Dangerous Discussion In The World? − MOC #232 by Lee Camp (YouTube)

Citing from the video description:

“There’s a discussion that most people aren’t having and that our media will never dare mention. If we never have it, we may all end up dead. […] So here it... [More]”

It’s Euro-Vision Song Contest time again. Semifinals part II tonight. Don’t judge me. It’s like a traffic accident; you can’t look away. There were a lot of contestants, but here are the ones I found noteworthy.

• Finland: What the hell Finland? A few years ago you win with Death/Gore-Metal band Lordi and now you descend into the depths of bubble-gum pop with Krista (who was literally wearing bubble-gum–colored boots)? How did that number even get off the ground? It was, however, one of the... [More]