Archives for 2009

The Solar Outhouse

8 April, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Solar cells on an outhouse? Yup. In the coastal headlands of Marin County.

We see these in the Sierras (the mountains) as well, in some high-traffic publicly-accessible areas of the wilderness. Usually the solar cells in the mountains are powering fans that circulate air into a composting toilet (one that composts the deposits rather than requiring removal to another location). And they’re generally so far from civilization that running a power line would be ludicrous.

But it always seems funny to me.

Null pointer at Starbucks

6 April, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Approaching the cash register at Starbucks I noticed this perhaps puzzling message on the little LCD display. It has nothing to do with the economic meltdown, or the amount of cash in the cash drawer, but instead reflects a programming error!

Generally a register displays a short greeting on its display when it is “off” like Come back soon (or at Squaw Valley Winter’s here). In this case the string of characters that usually contains the greeting was probably missing, and the software, encountering the situation, displays the message “null” meaning null pointer error. Made me laugh out loud, and I’d guess that nobody else who saw the message that day had the slightest idea that this little word represented one of the oldest programming mistakes in the book.

Earthquake Measurement Online

30 March, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

This is more fun than any sporting event. The US Geological Survey long ago automated their earthquake reporting instruments and it has become somewhat of a sport to see how fast we can report the shaking intensity and other details following even the smallest seismic event. There was a small quake near AlumRock/San Jose/Morgan Hill about an hour ago and a couple thousand people went to a USGS web site to report the intensity – as they felt it – with many reports coming in within 10 minutes of the actual event (and 14,000 reports in an hour for this particular one).

Read more about what the USGS has available online for earthquake reporting. [Read more…]

It’s the User, Stupid (It’s the Stupid User?)

29 March, 2009 by sky 2 Comments

In The Curious Case of the Invulnerable Browser, Roger Grimes of Infoworld writes about the recent CanSecWest 2009 PWN2OWN contest where hackers pitted their skills against web browsers to see how quickly they could break into a computer. The prize was the computer itself. Roger says that the state of browser security is actually pretty good, but even if browsers were inpenetrable, the major source of computer breakins is users browsing to a web site that then infects their computer. [Read more…]

Google ruled by engineers, Apple ruled by designers

27 March, 2009 by sky 2 Comments

Fundamentally different approaches to problem-solving, nope design, nope creating products, nope life!

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. — Doug Bowman, Goodbye Google

I love this farewell post by Google’s visual design lead because it confirms a theory I’ve long held: that Google is a company where engineers are the ruling class, while at Apple it’s designers. – Buzz Andersen, Sci-fi Hi-fi

This just blew me away because of my experiences with people from both Apple and Google.

[Read more…]