Danny O'Brien gave a talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference called Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks. [Hey, good title :)! Yes, it's just a coincidence.] You can read Cory Doctorow's notes from the talk here.
Danny O'Brien interviewed several well-known geeks to find out how they manage to be so prolific and keep their lives in order. Some interesting ideas from the responses:
It's the 10-second rule: if you can't file something in 10 seconds, you won't do it. Todo.txt involves cut-and-paste, the simplest interface we can imagine.
Geeks write scripts to take apart dull, repetitive tasks. They'll spend 10h writing a script that will save 11h -- because writing scripts is interesting and doing dull stuff isn't.
By far, the idea I found most interesting was the importance of sharing ideas.
Edd Dumbill: Ideas rot if you don't do something with them. Don't hoard them. I blog them or otherwise tell people.
This is a way to look organized, "That guy has lots of ideas, what a genius."
You only have to be right once -- people google for some idea and find your ramble about it and are impressed.
Making stuff public is like having your parents come to stay -- you clean everything up.
The people whose ideas become known are the ones who make their ideas public!
Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten conducted a poll in his lunchtime chat today, attempting to rate the senses of humor of his readers in terms of which comic strip they find funniest. You can find the results here. (The poll was only intended to run during the chat but it appears that people are still voting.)
I chose D, the Frank & Ernest strip as the funniest. It was the only one which made me laugh out loud. Turns out that I was in the minority of voters, but that strip was among Gene's top picks. I think I'm proud of that :).
Google's latest feature is local searching which searches the yellow pages for all businesses matching your search term that are located near the address you entered. Yahoo has had a yellow pages feature like this for years, but I like Google's because it is clean and fast and includes links to web pages related to the search results.
I'm still working on the color scheme and stuff, so expect more changes over time. The main thing that I wanted to do was rearrange the side bar so it stays on the left side instead of wrapping around the bottom like it used to. I ended up combining the default Movable Type Clean style with a modified Georgia Blue. I also added an "about" class to the default template so the box in the upper left corner could have a different style. As always, if you like the new stylesheet you can grab it here.
My kids love play dough and clay; basically they love anything squishy that they can mash and pound and generally make a mess of. This morning I tried making homemade play dough with them. Most of the recipes I found called for cream of tartar, which I don't have on hand, so I used this recipe instead. I halved it and then adjusted the amounts of flour and water to make it more doughy. It came out pretty well.
Does anyone have a good play dough recipe? Are the cream of tartar versions better?
Slashdot linked to a neat story. What happens when you feed Shakespeare's plays into a program designed to map relationships in IRC chats? You get a visual map of the relationships in the play.
PieSpy is a tool designed to infer and visualize social networks on Internet Relay Chat (IRC). It works by applying simple heuristics to work out who is talking to whom. This information can be used to produce a visualization of the social network, essentially showing which users are connected and how strong those connections are.
As PieSpy matured, it became obvious that IRC was not the only suitable testing ground. By feeding PieSpy with the entire texts of Shakespeare plays, it became possible to produce drawings of the social networks present in his plays - it is now possible to visualize the relationships between the characters in his works.
I never thought that IRC ("a million monkeys typing on a million keyboards") could relate to the works of Shakespeare :). But there you go. A new way to analyze random chattering + a great work of literature = an new way to understand a great work of literature. That's a pretty cool hack!
