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Monday Links from the Bench: Vol. III

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    Monday Links from the Bench: Vol. III

    Once again it's Monday, and as the previous instalment and the one before that were so amazingly popular, here are some more places to forget about work:
    • The Do's and Don'ts of Online Publicity, For Some Reason: "...if you incorporate these concepts into your work, I promise, you will have far greater success. And also we will stop laughing at you and forwarding your emails around to each other in awe of your complete ineptitude..."

    • how to make a starship enterprise out of an old floppy disk - handy if your client has lots of old 3½" floppies lying about

    • Colonel Sanders - Story of Perseverance & Entrepreneurship - Plan B FTW! "The Colonel is 60 years old and has to shut down his restaurant business because a new highway was being built where his restaurant was located. Colonel Sanders decided to retire and lived off of $105 in the form of social security checks. Not wanting to accept this as his fate, he decided to franchise his chicken at the age of 65." The tenses of the verbs may be badly mangled, but it's an interesting story.

    • node.js - JavaScript for the server, using Google's open-source V8 engine. "In other systems there is always a blocking call to start the event-loop... In Node there is no such start-the-event-loop call. Node simply enters the event loop after executing the input script. Node exits the event loop when there are no more callbacks to perform. This behavior is like browser javascript—the event loop is hidden from the user." Whatever your views on JavaScript (which are almost certainly views on browser DOMs and have nothing to do with the language) this is seriously cool - those who don't grasp lambda functions, closures, and currying need not apply

    • Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken - It's only when you work with arrays containing over a billion elements that certain bugs manifest themselves, even if they have been in Sun's java.util.Arrays for nine years

    • Jeni Tennison's Sparkline Visualisations of Crimes in the UK Over the Last 100 Years - one of the first and neatest examples of utilising the data (in this case from the Home Office) recently made available to all under the government's OpenData project. Select your crime from the drop-down menu to see the figures and a handy sparkline. (Note that not all crimes have been crimes for the last 100 years, and the way some have been recorded has changed.)

    • 10 Stupid Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed - "I've had signed contracts with supposedly reputable corporations, and they weren’t worth squat when the CEO decided he wanted out of the deal, even for completely dishonorable reasons." Far be it from me to suggest that we start comparing scores

    • Periodic Table of Typefaces (JPEG image file, 3150*2100px, 1.6MB) - Clarendon, which many people confuse with Rockwell, is number 29; Rockwell itself is 43. Personally, I've always had a soft spot for Rockwell, perhaps because I used the 12pt bold version for my bookplate back in the Seventies, when individual letters were still made from pieces of metal ("sorts") and I had to set and justify them by hand

    • Tesco Value Cards for all occasions - the site seems to be riddled with PHP errors at the moment, but the content is there: downloadable PDFs of greetings cards in the style of Tesco Value range packaging, complete with "Fold along dotted line" and "BEST BEFORE: SHORTLY AFTER POSTMARK" printed discreetly on the front. "Sincerity Guaranteed"

    • Hmm, I wonder why I saved this CUK link. I suppose I might find out if I read the start of the thread


    Happy Invoicing Everybody

    #2
    Excellent - I especially like the Tesco Value 'Deepest Sympathy' card!

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