I enjoyed this article from Ron Suskind about his family’s struggle connecting with an Autistic child:
Then, a thought: Be Iago. What would Iago say? I push the puppet up from the covers. “So, Owen, how ya doin’?” I say, doing my best Gilbert Gottfried. “I mean, how does it feel to be you?!” I can see him turn toward Iago. It’s as if he is bumping into an old friend.
I don’t think the take home from this list at Mental Floss is that even the greats were rejected at some point. The real lesson is that rejections should always be based on humanity and empathy.
I’m guessing Eliot R. Brown thought too much of himself and too little of everyone else.
The Beerviz site is an interesting visual recommendation system for beer. There are some good beers on the wheel but I don’t agree with their recommendation. Particularly funny is that if you like Pliny The Elder, there’s nothing else they can recommend.
From ExtremeTech:
In both cases, incorrect code short-circuited the functions that are supposed to verify whether or not a proper SSL certification has actually been presented. Red Hat found the error during a security audit and describes it thus: “It was discovered that GnuTLS did not correctly handle certain errors that could occur during the verification of an X.509 certificate, causing it to incorrectly report a successful verification. An attacker could use this flaw to create a specially crafted certificate that could be accepted by GnuTLS as valid for a site chosen by the attacker.
In the latest episode of Technical Difficulties Erik and I discuss mid-level to low-level headphones and microphones. I focused more on listening to music and recording lectures and dictation while Erik has more interest in Skype calls and portability.
We also do some interesting experiments so that you don’t just have to take our words for it. The show was a pain to record and even more of a pain to edit but I think it shows the huge variability in microphones.
Don’t forget to opt-out of Dropbox’s new arbitration default. Arbitration is almost never good for the customer. I’m not a fan of class action lawsuits, but sometimes the threat of big losses (even if most of the money goes to attorneys) keep companies in line. Not to mention, there’s usually limited discovery actions available in arbitration, which means proving bad faith would be pretty difficult.
Lindy West at Jezebel writes about an experiment with recipes from the 1950’s. Remember this when you’re feeling nostalgic for a decade you have no direct connection with. Most things probably sucked more than they do now, especially the food.
This is a cheesy pie crust filled with a layer of pimiento-olive-studded lemon-tomato Jell-O, topped with a chiffon of creamy, celery-heavy tuna salad. This dish somehow managed to out-cat-vomit cat-vomit.
Design patterns are easily the most important part of learning how to program well. I’ve always found it difficult to teach myself design patterns since practice may require writing a lot of code.
This tutorial from Tutsplus is a pretty good starting point. I’d also recommend the Head First Design Patterns book if you’re a beginner.
The future of advertising is probably bad for everyone except the ad network:
We spent over $600,000-plus to get these fans. And we haven’t run any campaigns for over two years, but still our pages are growing at 100,000-plus new likes every week. And I bet that most of them are fake likes with fake profiles," Brar says. “How many did we pay for that are fake?
I don’t think ignoring a bill from Facebook will result in a desirable outcome though.
A really nice post at OpenCulture:
“What has been my prettiest contribution to the culture?” asked Kurt Vonnegut in his autobiography Palm Sunday. His answer? His master’s thesis in anthropology for the University of Chicago, “which was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun.”
Don’t miss the embedded video and related links at the end if you’re a Kurt Vonnegut fan. I’ll never stop missing that guy.
