The art of presentations

Giving presentations that are both funny and informative is extremely hard. Graphics can help as long as you avoid "death by powerpoint" - slide after slide with bullet points and boring graphs.

This is an amazing presentation about the world economy and the third world that should be an inspiration to anyone giving presentations.

Numbers

Cool pictures illustrating big numbers like 426.000 cellphones retired per day in the US.

The answer to the interview question...

is of course |

The Birds

That most birds don't have penises but copulate by a brief "cloacal kiss" is well known. What I had no idea about until a few days ago is that some birds in fact have penises (and what majestic, weird, and wonderful devices!). How can they fly with these things?

Language of Machines

FLA live in London 8th of July!

The best interview question ...

... that can be answered with one character: Describe the philosophy of Unix.

In Theory

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is...

Tactical Neural Implant

The Blade (Any means necessary for survival)
Mindphaser (The language of machines)
Headhunter (I'm looking for this man to sell him to other men)

Birthday and blog of the day

Yesterday was my birthday. It started with Angela giving me a a trip to Sicily this weekend (leaving Saturday, back Monday) - it's going to be so cool to see home of the Mafia, the blue sea, and try all the tasty food. I also received the unicycle I bought from 'I want one of those' using the voucher my nice Tideway friends got me for leaving present. In the evening Ang with a little bit of help from me made amazing home-made pizzas. Then Assif and Aris came over and we (including Alex) feasted on the pizza, wine, champagne, sake, beer, absinth and watched Dude where's my car. Sweet!


Check out Not so boring life, and excellent blog filled with various useful posts about things like shark-fishing, increasing your hand-strength, an pipe-smoking.

Do less

What I meant to say yesterday regarding reversing a string was of course that the real fun start starts when you want to have a new reversed string that only contains every other word:

>>> s="I am a cat with a tail"
>>> " ".join(s.split()[::-2])
'tail with a I'

37signals is a really cool company that builds clean, efficient, and good looking apps. Their company philosophy can be summarised as "do less". Instead of building 30 features all more complicated than your competitors, build 5 really good features and let your competitors wrestle with the complicated problems. As they write in their book "Getting Real":

Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors you need to one-up them. If they have four features, you need five (or 15, or 25). If they're spending x, you need to spend xx. If they have 20, you need 30.

This sort of one-upping Cold War mentality is a dead-end. It's an expensive, defensive, and paranoid way of building products. Defensive, paranoid companies can't think ahead, they can only think behind. They don't lead, they follow.

If you want to build a company that follows, you might as well put down this book now.

So what to do then? The answer is less. Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to everyone else. Instead of oneupping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing.

We'll cover the concept of less throughout this book, but for starters, less means:

Less features

Less options/preferences

Less people and corporate structure

Less meetings and abstractions

Less promises

Bubble Gum

While spending the weekend hiking around the beautiful mountains (hills?) of Wales with Angela and Alex I re-discovered the lovely world of bubble gum. Now my jaws hurt but I have a dream - to beat the current bubble world record of 22 and half inches!

Completely unrelated: what's the easiest way to reverse a string? In Python there is a nice trick:

>>> "bubble gum"[::-1]
'mug elbbub'

What if we want to reverse a sentence but not reverse the words?

>>> " ".join("I am a cat".split()[::-1])
'cat a am I'