A system I need to do anything today has gone down over the weekend. Luckily, it's somebody else's responsibility to fix it. Mondays are much better when you're doing nothing and don't have to feel guilty about it 
Happy invoicing!
- Know When To Run: The Story Behind The Xmas Kings Cross Problems - Excellent explanation of the problems, technical and managerial, that led to the post-Christmas rail travel fiasco: ”On paper everything seemed in order, but when work began on Christmas Day, things began to go wrong from the beginning… By 11:00 on Boxing Day they were officially 15 hours behind and it was clear that there was no chance of completing work on time. They were well beyond the point of no return.”
- Poetweet - Strange little tool that, when given a Twitter username, will pull in that account’s tweets and construct a poem from bits of them in one of several forms. Here’s a few lines from a sonnet based on the CUK account @itcontracting: ”Salary – how do they compare? / Or shelved? Don't hold your breath / Backs leaving PSCs as they are / Jailed for stabbing wife to death” Mouseover each line to see the full source tweet to the right. It can take a couple of minutes for it to do all the work needed; go and make a cup of tea or something
- Unselfishly Unpopular - ”Free riding is not the most popular of behaviors, and notorious free riders are generally not welcome in most group contexts… they are surprisingly joined in infamy by those at the very opposite end of the selfishness-unselfishness spectrum; namely those who do not consume the public good, but unselfishly contribute towards its provision anyway!”
- Accidentally Turing-Complete - "Some things were not supposed to be Turing-complete. This is a collection of such accidents." Even Wikipedia’s templates are, it turns out, Turing-complete
- The Emularity - "Last week, on the heels of the DOS emulation announcement, one of the JSMESS developers, James Baicoianu, got Windows 3.11 running in a window with Javascript… That’s Netscape 1.0n, released in December of 1994, running inside Windows 3.11, released in August of 1993, running inside of Google Chrome 39.0.2171.99 m, released about a week ago, on a Windows 7 PC, released in 2009.” If you fancy running Netscape 1.0 in your browser, bear in mind that it only supports HTTP 1.0 and so won’t work with most modern web servers; luckily, jwz, who was one of the original Netscape employees, has your back with his http10proxy
- How PAPER Magazine’s web engineers scaled their back-end for Kim Kardashian (SFW) - "On November 11th 2014, the art-and-nightlife magazine PAPER “broke the Internet” when it put a Jean-Paul Goude photograph of a well-oiled, mostly-nude Kim Kardashian on its cover and posted the same nude photos of Kim Kardashian to its website… What PAPER was asking was: Can you take a website that we use to reach hundreds of thousands of people in a given month and turn it into a website that can reach tens of millions of people or more? Or rather, “can you turn our tour bus into an airplane for a week or two?”” An explanation of how to scale a website to handle potentially a year’s worth of traffic all arriving in the space of a couple of days
- Reinventing the Potato - Potatoes are more interesting than you might think: ”I traveled to an annual food festival in Lima known as Mistura, where I encountered tables heaping with all manner of bizarre and beautiful potatoes: spuds that were shaped like croissants and cucumbers; that were knobbed, ruffled, and bowed; whose skin and flesh were as yellow as egg yolk, as black as ink, or splotched and striped with shades of red, blue and violet.”
- The Untold Story Of The Invention Of The Game Cartridge - The story of the most influential games console you’ve never heard of: ”If consumers were going to use their console, they needed a way to change out those ROMs in a user-friendly fashion. So Alpex's engineers decided to mount the fragile ROM chip to a circuit board and, in turn, connect the chip's pins to a more durable connector that could withstand repeated insertion and removal. That's how the first prototype video game cartridge was born.”
- The Public Domain Project Makes 10,000 Film Clips, 64,000 Images & 100s of Audio Files Free to Use - ”The internet gets the most interesting, I would submit, when it makes freely available cultural artifacts with the express purpose of letting creators use them in their own work — which we then all get to experience through the internet. The new Public Domain Project will soon become an important resource for many such creators, offering as it does “thousands of historic media files for your creative projects, completely free and made available by Pond5,” an entity that brands itself as “the world’s most vibrant marketplace for creativity.”"
- Laika and Her Comrades: The Soviet Space Dogs Who Took Giant Leaps for Mankind - Long interview with Damon Murray, creator and editor of a new book, Soviet Space Dogs, with loads of illustrations: ”Dezik and Tsygan were the first dogs to be flown in a rocket on July 22, 1951. The scientists were overjoyed at their safe return, running towards the safely landed capsule (even though this was strictly forbidden), shouting “They’re alive! Alive! They’re barking!” Even the head of the space program Sergey Korolev, known as the Chief Designer, allowed himself a moment of celebration—grabbing one of the dogs into his arms and running around in joy. Only a week later Dezik would die alongside another dog, Lisa, when their capsule’s parachute failed to deploy.”
Happy invoicing!
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