March 18, 2008 at 2:29 am
I ran into Network World a while ago linked from some article I was reading and was taken by the site’s favicon. It’s almost a direct copy of del.icio.us’s:
The colors and layout are all but identical. The only difference is the orientation of the black and blue portions. I can’t decide whether or not it’s possible that it’s a coincidence.
A part of me wonders if it’s even post-worthy. Favicons serve a distinct purpose in making sites more recognizable and it seems someone designing a tech-oriented site (with a digg widget on the front page) would know about del.icio.us.
Is it reasonable to speculate on favicon plagiarism?
Tags: Design Trends
February 19, 2008 at 12:13 pm
The “I switched to -insert operating system here-” article has become a common theme on blogs and social media websites. For a while there a few months ago, it seemed like a different “hey, look at me, I switched to Ubuntu” article landed on the frontpage of digg every other day.
After reading the latest one on digg, I’m struck by a great revelation: these articles don’t prove a damn thing. It’s like professing to the world that you prefer Coke to Pepsi, except masquerading the article as a legitimate technology piece. That being said, the article in question is an outlier in that it goes a bit into the logistics of the case in question, as opposed to being some guy talking about how his new OS choice has increased his fertility and helped him lose weight.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Ubuntu and respect anyone willing to take the time and effort to try new things. The world needs more people who are up to trying software alternatives. My beef is that the situation and opinion of other people shouldn’t influence your own. Yes, Ubuntu works for many people who like to talk about it a lot. But you may be different. Inversely, many more people are happy with Windows or OS X. More power to them.
My advice to anyone reading this is to try software alternatives and find the perfect setup for you. My view is that all of the world’s software is a giant, metaphysical toolbox in the sky. I can pick and choose between many different applications and frontends in order to finely tune my computer to my personal workflow and computing style.
Tags: Gripes, Operating Systems, Software
January 25, 2008 at 1:48 am
The phrase “object-oriented” is thrown around a lot. It’s a very interesting concept and paradigm, but it can be a hard one for non-programmers to understand.
Imagine that you want to write a recipe for making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Imagine that the person you’re writing the recipe for has no idea what a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is, so you have to write explicitly what to do, step by step.
The resulting recipe would be very long and contain a lot of seemingly-trivial tasks that any idiot should take for granted like “find a jar in cupboard labeled ‘Crunchy Peanut Butter’” and “transfer a glob of peanut butter from the jar onto bread using a butter knife.”
To relate this example to programming, the person you’re writing the recipe for is a computer (compiler), the sandwich is a program, and the recipe itself is an algorithm. All a program is is a set of directions telling a computer what to do, step by step.
So, back to object-oriented programming… imagine now that you’re writing the same recipe for a person who knows a bit about the culinary arts. You won’t have to explicitly tell them every step. You’re recipe will be much shorter:
- Get 2 pieces of bread, 1 jar of peanut butter, and 1 jar of raspberry jam
- Spread peanut butter and jelly onto corresponding slices of bread.
- Put two slices together.
- Eat! (optional)
This is object-oriented recipe-making. You assume that the person knows what they’re doing and thus you can give higher-level instructions. In object-oriented programming, the program that you write takes advantage of already-written packages of code (called object classes), and allows you to tell the computer what to do without having to go into the nitty gritty details of every complex task.
In the sandwich example, the more complex steps of the second recipe can be abstracted as objects to be used in the sandwich-making algorithm.
Who said algorithms can’t be tasty?
Tags: Programming
January 15, 2008 at 3:15 pm
The internet’s ablaze with talk of the the freshly-announced MacBook Air, so naturally I’ll speak my mind.
The MacBook Air is definitely a step in the right direction. Like almost everything else Apple touches, its industrial design resembles perfection. Smooth, curvey, and paper-thin; the thing looks slick as hell.
Also akin to everything Apple touches, it’s obscenely priced. Starting at $1800, it’s definitely the bank-breaker of the sub-laptop class. Asus’ EeePC is like $400, for comparison’s sake.
What’s amazing is that if you want to swap out the stock 80gb 4200rpm hard drive for a 64-gb solid state drive (ZOMG NO MOVING PARTZZ!!1one), it’ll cost you $1300 more. (see Apple store) I know solid state drives are new and shiny, but seriously, Apple? $3100? Sigh.
Another minor gripe, at least for some people, is that <a mce_thref=” />it lacks a user-replaceable battery. Not necessarily a deal-breaker, but something to keep in mind, knowing how wonderfully stable Apple’s history with batteries has been.
So, in a nutshell, The MacBook Air is, like the iPhone before it, a definition of “overpriced,” but exactly what the industry needs.
Hear that, Dell, HP, Sony, et al?
Tags: Apple, Hardware, Tech
January 11, 2008 at 12:35 pm
I just set up a new feed with FeedBurner, so any subscribers should switch to the new feed.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/evanmeagher
Thanks and have a great day!
Tags: Site-related
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