Favorite Quotations from Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers
Coding Horror has a post asking people what their favorite programming quotations are. He throws a sideways reference to Programmers at Work, a book I recently finished reading. I’m one of those annoying people who writes in the margins of books, and one of the things I like to do is collect my favorite quotations so that I can remember them down the road.
These are my favorite quotes from Programmers at Work: Interviews with 19 Programmers Who Shaped the Computer Industry. It is a collection of interviews Susan Lammers did in the early 80s. You can read my full review of the book here.
What I learned in my first year of blogging
It’s hard to believe, but the blog is already one year old. It started as a lark, a way of reputation management, but it grew into something very different. Milestones are always a good time for reflection, so it is time for some more navel gazing.
Best of Feeds – 30 links – blog, design, productivity, lifehacks, geek, psychology
Best of Feeds is a weekly series where I link to the stuff I found interesting from my feed reader. Links are sorted based on how many people have bookmarked them on del.icio.us. They are posted on Twitter as they happen and then collected together in a single post on Saturday. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.
Contest: LOL My Cat and Win a T-Shirt
It’s time for some Friday Fun. I’m going to steal one of the contest prizes from my latest group writing project and put it towards a very good cause… I’m giving away a Dirty Microbe t-shirt to whomever can create the funniest LOLcat image macro of my cat.
UPDATE: The prizes have been given out.
LOLcats are the image macros that are featured on I Can Has Cheezburger? and have created such further spoofs as LOLgeeks and LOLtrek. On April 1st I wrote a “how to LOL cat” guide. You might be interested in this how to speak kitteh guide as well.
Electronic Civil Disobedience
People are calling the Digg user revolt the “Internet story of the year.” The Digg community fixated on the 32-bit encryption key for HD-DVDs protests against the site owners giving in to potential censorship requests by HD-DVD producers (who are also advertisers on the site) and censoring stories that published the key. You can read more coverage (and screenshots) at Mathew Ingram, Deep Jive Interests or TechCrunch. I first heard the story break at Paris Lemon. WinExtra might have the best post about this.
Digest for April 2007
Every month I publish a digest for subscribers who are would rather take their //engtech in infrequent chugs rather than frequent sips.
Subscribe to this digest using RSS.
April started off with a bang with WordPress.com using my April Fool’s idea :) My own attempt to head in a different direction with my April Fool’s LOLcats went well, with a surprising 6000-some hits. I am seriously wondering if my April Fool’s intersection between lolcats and wordpress indirectly led to ICANHASCHEESEBURGER being hosted on WordPress.com VIP? I get a warm fuzzy seeing them as the Top Blog every day.
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Are Bloggers Being Gamed? – Fixing the Technorati Favorites Feature
Darren and Amit both recently wrote some criticisms about how bloggers have been doing Technorati Favorites exchange memes and how it is changing the landscape of the Top 100 Favorites list. (Darren comes in with further clarification as I type this.) Dosh Dosh wrote an insightful response that I feel covers all the issues, but I’ll throw in my $0.02, if only because I have a pocket full of loose change.
If you don’t blog, you probably want to skip this post as it is a hardcore geek out.
Technorati has two top 100 lists, the Top 100 Most Favorited list and the Top 100 Most Linked list. The Most Linked list where your Technorati rank comes from. It is reputable and hard to get on. The Most Favorited list is mostly a joke, and has been for a long time. You need around 3,000 blog links in a six month period to reach the Top 100 Most Linked list but only 200 favorites from all time to reach the Top 100 Most Favorited list.
What’s Your Web 2.0? (meme/survey)
Web2.0 is all about web-based communities and services that make it easy for people to share and collaborate. There’s an old post from around a year ago by Think Vitamin where he reasons that social web apps are great and all, but casual users don’t have the time to use them. He then goes on to interview the founders of several social software startups and finds out that most of them don’t use more than five either.
Does that still hold true? I’m going to bug a bunch of people and try to find out. At the very least this should give some ideas about which apps are popular and help me discover some new ones.
What is Web 2.0?
- Web-based software
- You can create and modify your own data
- Some social-networking aspects (friends list, etc)
Best of Feeds – 20 links – code, digg, programming, web2.0, software, google
Best of Feeds is a weekly series where I link to the stuff I found interesting from my feed reader. Links are sorted based on how many people have bookmarked them on del.icio.us. They are posted on Twitter as they happen and then collected together in a single post on Saturday. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.
This time I have 20 links from: guykawasaki, codecraft.info, codinghorror, commoncraft, digg, gilesbowkett, headrush, m.calacanis, members.shaw.ca, neothoughts, norvig, rodfrey, sandbox.sourcelabs, seomoz, techiqmag, valleywag, webomatica, wired, worsethanfailure
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Technorati Program – Automatically Favorite Anyone Who Favorites You
What Are Technorati Favorites?
Technorati is one of the two largest blog search engines. Technorati Favorites is a way to bookmark other blogs on the Technorati site. By favoriting a blog on Technorati it shows up on your favorites list and you can limit your blog searches to only search within your favorites. It’s a good way to track blogs you only casually follow.
What is Technorati Favorite Your Fans?
This is a program that connects to the Technorati.com service, finds everyone who has favorited your blog and automatically favorites them back.
14 Tips to Get More Done in Less Time
Productivity, efficiency and effectiveness are the buzzwords fueling the information age. Entire industries have been created around our obsession with efficiency and productiveness. We have more and more time for leisure activities but we use less and less of it for “leisure”; there are too many “work-like” things to do — maintaining social internet accounts, leveling up in online video games, sorting photos and mp3s…
We forget that time is the only true luxury in life. Being more productive doesn’t make you a better person, the essence of being productive is to put your attention where you get the biggest returns and get more done with less investment of your time. Use that extra time to get more enjoyment out of your life.
Greasemonkey Script – Stumbling Through WordPress.com Blogs
I’ve created a small Greasemonkey script that adds a “Random Post” button to the blue WordPress.com bar you see at the top of every blog when you are logged into WordPress.com. Pressing this button will take you to random posts on the blog you are currently visiting. This is a great way to explore a newly discovered blog beyond the most recent posts.
(This is using the /?random feature that Matt added)
UPDATE 2007/04/26: The random post feature now officially appears under Blog Info.
Stumbling through //engtech at random (or any wordpress.com blog)
Click here to view a random post from //engtech.
Thanks to Matt and the suggestion from TechCrunch it is now possible to surf through any wordpress.com blog at random.
If you look at my sidebar there is a new link called “Random Post“. Keep clicking it to go to any other post I’ve written at random. You might be surprised at what you find!
All wordpress.com bloggers can do the same thing for their blog by adding “?random” to the URL of their main site.
Best of Feeds – 36 links – humor, programming, code, tips, gmail, seo
Best of Feeds is a weekly series where I link to the stuff I found interesting from my feed reader. Links are sorted based on how many people have bookmarked them on del.icio.us. They are posted on Twitter as they happen and then collected together in a single post on Saturday. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.
This time I have 36 links from: 37signals, bertc, labnotes, .feedburner, compsci.ca, dailyblogtips, dilbertblog, doshdosh, douglaskarr, haacked, labnol, leggnet, lifehacker, lorelle, m3solutions.co.uk, neomeme, netbusinessblog, pcweenies, pcworld, plagiarismtoday, problogger, pronetadvertising, publishing2, secretgeek, stumbleupon, thecodist, valleywag, vgcats, webworkerdaily, winextra
How I Learned to Shoot the Engineers and Ship the Product (by guest blogger Andy Lawrence)
This post is by a guest blogger.
Andy Lawrence aka andyxl is the Head of the School of Physics and a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, located at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh (ROE) on Blackford Hill. He work on quasars, observational cosmology, big, big sky surveys, and the Virtual Observatory.
I am a scientist. I come across a lot of engineers. They are alien life forms, but I have had a symbiotic relationship with them. I found myself getting confused trying to understand the differences between us, until I realised that behaviour depends on environment. You can see how we are different in three ways:
- general differences in behaviour,
- working on hardware projects,
- and working on software projects
The latter is where it gets weird.
Joost Invite Giveaway to RSS Subscribers
I’ve given away my first three Joost invites to three of my RSS/email subscribers:
Cheers
Technorati Favoritism – Trading Favours
Technorati has long had a “favorite blog” feature where users can mark their favorite blogs and be able to browse recent entries from their favorites (like a poor man’s RSS). They also have a Technorati Top 100 Most Favorited Blogs which gets a lot less attention then the Technorati Rank. Six months ago it took only 60 favorites to become a Top 100 blog, now it is still a lowly 125 favorites. There are only seven blogs with over 700 favorites on all of Technorati. This is a feature that never became popular.
Blowing Twitters out of proportion
StumbleUpon and Tumblr are both interesting forms of micro-blogging, but I’ve been getting more into Twitter. Twitter lets me surf other people’s streams of thought (like a super micro-blog-lite with 140 characters or less per entry). You view all of the your friends/contacts “tweets” as a stream. What’s funny is when completely unrelated tweets can appear connected because of the random positioning of technology.
How to find out if you are passionate about your career or if you are just wilfing
I was reading an interesting post about a new weblogism [1] called ‘wilfing‘. “What was I looking for?” describes getting trapped in an Internet rats nest – you had good intentions of doing a work related search but the siren call of the Internet was too much and you went off on a tangent (*cough* It’s all Google Reader’s fault *cough*).
In The Art of Happiness At Work [2] they state that “A third of people see their work as a job, a third as a career, a third as a calling.” The go on to say that it is more a reflection of the attitudes of the worker than inherent qualities of the job. Books like What Color is Your Parachute are devoted to helping people find a calling instead of a job. To paraphrase my friend AJ [3]: I’d rather spend my life failing at something I love instead of being successful at something I hate (or worse, something that filled me with apathy).
Best of Feeds – 15 links – google, lifehacker, twitter, usability, design, greasemonkey
Best of Feeds is a weekly series where I link to the stuff I found interesting from my feed reader. Links are sorted based on how many people have bookmarked them on del.icio.us. They are posted on Twitter as they happen and then collected together in a single post on Saturday. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.
This time I have 15 links from: codinghorror, destraynor, hamelife, lifehacker, mattcutts, modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk, randsinrepose, rev2, robotproject, softwarebyrob, themicrobusinessexperiment, torrentfreak, vaspersthegrate
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