Tag: programming
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Open Source Software as Self Service
“Open source software development is the ultimate self-service industry”, says Jeff Atwood in an article looking at possible reasons for the OpenOffice.org project’s dwindling development community. However, it’s Atwood’s thoughts on self service supermarket checkouts that I found most interesting: What fascinates me about self-service checkout devices is that the store is making you do work they…
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Genetic Programming and the Evolution of Mona Lisa
Roger Alsing used a genetic algorithm to create a brilliant approximation of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa using only 50 semi-transparent polygons, evolving over approximately a million generations. You can see the end result, after 904,314 generations here, but even after roughly 100,000 generations the image is impressive. I loved scrolling through the pictures, slowly seeing…
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The Beauty of Programming
I don’t really know how to explain my fascination with programming, but I’ll try. To someone who does it, it’s the most interesting thing in the world. It’s a game much more involved than chess, a game where you can make up your own rules and where the end result is what you make of…
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More Interaction Design Patterns
A huge library of interaction design patterns; from accordion navigation to virtual product display. [This library is] a reference or basic ‘toolkit’ you can use when designing user experiences. It is no substitute for creative design, it simply seeks to describe what we know and have learned about solutions you will find abundantly on the…
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Interaction Design Patterns
The Yahoo! Design Patterns Library is what you could call a series of best practices for web interaction designers. Of particular note are the ‘Reputation’ Solution Patterns: A person participating in a social structure expects to develop a reputation and hopes for insight into the reputations of others, but each designed model of participation and…
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Geek Posters
At least a couple of these amazingly geeky posters are derived from projects at VisualComplexity, the site taking on the task of visualising complex relationships from all walks of life. My favourites, or at least the most interesting, are those showing the evolution of various programming languages; starting with COBOL back in the mid-1950s. There…
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Creating Indexed Users
When it was live, I used to look forward to the next instalment of Creating Passionate Users; a blog on doing business in the IT sector where the writers were “all passionate about the brain and meta-cognition”. The entries were comical and the accompanying graphs were simple, elegant, and really were worth a thousand words.…
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UML: Not Good and Not Funny
An hilarious diatribe on UML and it’s practices: The Teaching Assistant for your OO-101 class has instructed me to approach you directly about the D-minus grade I got on my term paper “An evaluation of the proposed Unified Modeling Language (UML)“. I hope you will consider changing it to something better — a plain D…