Unstructured Scribbles

The Waking Life

Excellent thought provocative movie.

The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything.

via IMDB

Make Terminal look good

The IR theme is one of the cleanest themes out there for terminal. Grab it from Todd’s detailed blog linked below. I also use some of the colors from the theme to pretty up the shell a bit and make it look like:

Put these settings in your .bashrc or .bash_profile

export COLOR_NC='\033[0m' # No Color
export COLOR_WHITE='\033[1;37m'
export COLOR_BLACK='\033[0;30m'
export COLOR_BLUE='\033[0;34m'
export COLOR_LIGHT_BLUE='\033[1;34m'
export COLOR_GREEN='\033[0;32m'
export COLOR_LIGHT_GREEN='\033[1;32m'
export COLOR_CYAN='\033[0;36m'
export COLOR_LIGHT_CYAN='\033[1;36m'
export COLOR_RED='\033[0;31m'
export COLOR_LIGHT_RED='\033[1;31m'
export COLOR_PURPLE='\033[0;35m'
export COLOR_LIGHT_PURPLE='\033[1;35m'
export COLOR_BROWN='\033[0;33m'
export COLOR_YELLOW='\033[1;33m'
export COLOR_GRAY='\033[1;30m'
export COLOR_LIGHT_GRAY='\033[0;37m'

Specify your shell to display time and current folder with home abbreviated as ~

export PS1="[\[${COLOR_LIGHT_RED}\]\T\[${COLOR_NC}\]][ \[${COLOR_LIGHT_BLUE}\]\w \[${COLOR_NC}\]] \[${COLOR_PURPLE}\]> \[${COLOR_NC}\]"

via Todd Werth

Chrome Release Cycle

Google has essentially mastered the release process for it’s Chrome Browser and made version numbers for their software essentially obsolete. The release often strategy is an excellent approach to client software. It’s good to see Mozilla following the same path.

Think of any major website, even the fancy Web 2.HTML5 ones… do they have version numbers? We took the same approach to our client software as an online web service. That is… we treat releases as a means of getting features out to users and not goals in and of themselves. It’s about flow

via Chrome Blog

One Man’s Ceiling

Excellent Article!

What’s true for low-interest disposable consumer goods is even more true for websites and web applications. As creators, it’s our job to fashion experiences that gently tug at the heart or lightly tickle the pleasure centers, lingering in the mind and quietly demanding reengagement. Good enough is not good enough, unless we want our web products to sit on the cyber-shelf, gathering digital dust.
Jeffrey Zeldman

via Cognition

Why Can’t Developers Estimate Time?

It’s not just developers that are bad with estimates either. Everyone at some point is just winging it because it’s something they’ve never done before and won’t be able to successfully make a judgement until they have.

Via PatchSpace

Working with the Chaos Monkey

When you work with the Chaos Monkey, you quickly learn that everything happens for a reason. Except for those things which happen completely randomly. And that’s why, even though it sounds crazy, even though it sounds crazy, the best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly.

via CodingHorror

On Groundbreaking Design

Groundbreaking design doesn’t come through statistical regression testing, metrics, and causality. It comes from the richness of a biased perspective on the world.
John Kolko

via Fast Code Design

The Facebook hype

Don’t get me wrong, I use social networks and media heavily. It’s painfully obvious that all internet fads die eventually. Staying relevant is hard, because the internet has a serious attention disorder. It’s a matter of time until the current concept of a social network will be replaced by the next myspace or facebook. Check out the article linked below for a well argued opinion.

So it’s not that MySpace lost and Facebook won. It’s that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They’ll go down in the same order.
Douglas Rushkoff

via CNN