rodcorp

links for 2006-02-24

• nthposition online magazine: deadkidsongs
  (tags: tobylitt deadkidsongs books)
• Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Boys will be boys
  (tags: tobylitt deadkidsongs review books)
• Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Observer review: deadkidsongs by Toby Litt
  (tags: tobylitt deadkidsongs review books)

links for 2006-02-23

• O'Reilly Radar > Web Development 2.0 practices
  (tags: web2.0 dev)
• Surname Profiler
  Geo surname distributions for UK, Ireland, US, Australia, NZ.
  (tags: genealogy maps surname)
• Atomic Bomb detonation by Harold Edgerton
  (tags: atomic atom history photo art)
• IT IN place
  painting and music
  (tags: art)
• Adliterate: Advertising engagement - lessons from the PVR revolution
  (tags: advertising pvr toread)
• DavidByrne.com - Tree Drawings
  (tags: art davidbyrne)
• How Much Is That? | EH.Net
  "comparative value covering purchasing power, exchange rates, and other variables between the past and today"
  (tags: economics History money)
• Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | Damien of the dead
  Damien Hirst's "new kind of art space which will take up 'half a street' in Vauxhall [...] will comprise nine separate gallery spaces, as well as a Hirst-designed restaurant and maybe a recording studio"
  (tags: art damienhirst)
• DevMaster.net - Writing Low-Pain Massively Scalable Multiplayer Servers
  (tags: dev openpoker gambling games)
• Tenerife Skunkworks
  (tags: dev openpoker gambling games)
• Guardian Unlimited | Arts critics | How Rothko's Seagram murals found their way to London
  Rothko wanted "to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room [...] feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up"
  (tags: art markrothko)
• In John They Trust
  (tags: toread cargocult)

links for 2006-02-22

• Who Are These People? - The Art World's JT LeRoys -- New York Magazine
  Art-world alter-egos, a tradition going back to Duchamp's Rrose Selavy, but surely much earlier too.
  (tags: art rroseselavy duchamp)
• Click opera - American Environics
  US, China, Japan, Europe mapped onto a chart with Authority/individuality Survival/fulfilment axes.
  (tags: culture maps)
• Confessions of an IT Hitman
  Technologist Manifesto..., or Things Everyone in IT Should Know
  (tags: dev)
• TECH BLOG: 10 Things a Web Developer should do for the Client
  (tags: dev)

links for 2006-02-21

• The Observer | Magazine | Saint Patrick's day
  For 13 years Fitzgerald lived in a Brooklyn apartment [but] never got around to connecting the gas to the oven. Once, when cops investigated a break-in next door, one officer saw the state of Fitzgerald's apartment and said: 'Looks like this guy's been ro
  (tags: patrickfitzgerald howwework)
• Reuse is vastly overrated (Loud Thinking)
  "Since the cost of producing new, original code is so much lower, the demands on reuse are that much greater. And usually that means it'll take more time to reuse something than it'll take to create it from scratch"
  (tags: ruby rails programming dev)
• Pragmatics: rest vs soap etc
  last point: "If you want to reach both audiences before your competition does, you'll avoid indulging in religious debates and ship something"
  (tags: dev)
• ArtScope.net: The Undressed Art: Steinhart: Why We Draw
  (tags: art drawing toread)
• Zigbee Alliance -- Home Page
  "an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard"
  (tags: Standards Wireless network)
• Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect: Removing, Supplementing Core Features
  That's a seemingly-sunburnt Jack Schulze holding a RakuRaku 3g handset. Big buttons, big colours, small screen, slide out recess for writing things down.
  (tags: japan mobile design jackschulze)

links for 2006-02-18

• Antimega: Voronoi Underground
  Chris Antimega has turned the London undergound map into a Voronoi diagram. Nice! Cf: http://rodcorp.typepad.com/rodcorp/2003/10/personal_space_.html
  (tags: london maps tube voronoi underground)
• Pat Hanrahan: Realistic or Abstract Imagery
  "Lines seem to convey more information than just intensity gradients. They seem to show the most important edges. Perceptual psychologists still do not have a good theory of line drawings."
  (tags: drawing art perception)
• John G. McDaid: Keyboard practice
  (tags: toread sf writing story)
• Thirteen Bullets: A Serial Horror Novel by David Wellington
  (tags: novel serial horror toread)
• The New York Review of Books: David Levine Gallery
  David Levine's caricatures for the NYRB 1963-present
  (tags: art caricature davidlevine)

Berlin U6 drawing: circle

15 drawings of the journeys between 15 stations - Alt Tegel to Friedrichstrasse - on Berlin's U6 line in January 2006. They will eventually be composed very differently for a project on Casper David Friedrich, but for now here's a circle. In response to a raised eyebrow from a fellow passenger I exhausted my German and said "er... kunst...".

links for 2006-02-16

• Hamish Hamilton books: Toby Litt's Cult Choice Archive
  Toby "alphabetic book titles" Litt writes a monthly review of cult novels
  (tags: books writing tobylitt)
• Toby Litt: how I write
  " I know how I should work, but I always seem to let it slip. What I should do is hit the desk before I’ve had a chance to get scared of what I’ll find there. What I actually do is almost anything else at all. I know this is bad."
  (tags: tobylitt howwework books writing)
• Augusto Monterroso - Upon waking, the dinosaur was still there
  Shortest story, strangely remembered as "when he woke, the elephant was gone". Also: http://www.tobylitt.com/editorial12.html and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/2741417.stm
  (tags: augustomonterroso short writing story dinosaur)
• Does Anything Eat Wasps?: And 101 Other Questions (2005)
  Q and A from New Scientist's Last Word column
  (tags: booksreadin2006)
• Masochuticon: writing
  (tags: writing sf mattwebb)
• Yahoo! UI Library
  (tags: dev web2.0 ui javascript tools opensource)
• Yahoo! Design Pattern Library
  (tags: dev web2.0 ui javascript tools opensource design)

Excitementerror: Masochuticon

Matt Webb has launched his new fiction website Masochuticon, a name that confounds my spelling and pronounciation abilities. A story a week from one of seven people, writing in turn; Anne Galloway has bravely plunged in first with I ape the satisfied cadaver. I am nervous.

Dennis Nilsen fanboys Victoria Coren

Serial killer Dennis Nilsen told RussCoff that he's a fan of Victoria Coren's Balderdash and Piffle. The show's product isn't over the moon, says Media Monkey (you might need to register with The Guardian to read it):

(Feb 9) The folk behind BBC2 word show Balderdash & Piffle presented by journalist and poker fan Victoria Coren have just been made aware of recent "communications" from Dennis Nilsen to a blog. In the electronic missives, the one-time army cook, policeman and mass murderer expresses his fondness for the show, which explores the origin of well known phrases and words. Apparently Nilsen is "addicted" to it. But as Archie Baron, the series producer at the show's production company Takeaway Media, puts it, this is not something they are going to shout about. "In this world where ratings count and every viewer is appreciated, I am not sure that providing comfort to Dennis Nilsen ranks as one of our proudest achievements," Archie tells Monkey.

One of the other producers is happier though:

(Feb 13) Now it turns out the producer of the show is one Jamie Muir, son of the late Frank, and a family with a history of attracting the wrong sort of fan, apparently. "Fabulous! Ian Brady, Moors murderer was a big fan of my father's radio programme My Word," he writes. Such class.

See also: RussCoff wrote a great Sunday Times piece about Dennis Nilsen in 2003: Memoirs of a Serial Killer.

links for 2006-02-15

• Garrett Dimon / Templates & Stencils for Visio & Omnigraffle
  (tags: dev visio ria ajax wireframes design ui)
• Storyboarding Rich Internet Applications with Visio - Boxes and Arrows
  (tags: dev visio ria ajax wireframes design ui)
• How much is your software company worth? (pdf)
  (tags: business)
• i am genmon (28 January 2006, Interconnected)
  super-determinist game: "strategy and rationality can get me so far, but being in tune with the world and allowing my gut to arrange the furniture in my house is a valid and useful way too [...] it teaches that everything is interconnected"
  (tags: animalcrossing mattwebb)
• Wired 14.02: Geeks in Toyland
  (tags: lego)
• Reactome
  Reactome - a curated knowledgebase of biological pathways. Nice mapping.
  (tags: bioinformatics biology database science)
• O'Reilly -- What Is Web 2.0
  What Is Web 2.0 Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software
  (tags: web2.0)
• Special Feature: The Four "Quantum States" of Ajax
  (tags: Ajax web2.0)