Joakim Nygård Archive Linked About

Animated Movie GIFs

14 Nov 2010 -

The vast majority of animated GIFs are not worth the bytes they take up. These, however, are a different breed

(via Jason Kottke)

1.0 Is the Loneliest Number

10 Nov 2010 -

Matt Mullenweg on shipping and shipping early:

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It’s even worse because development doesn’t happen in a vacuum — if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven’t even imagined that disrupts the market you’re working in.

Saying “enough” can be very difficult

Banana Republic of America

8 Nov 2010 -

Nicholas Kristoff for New York Times:

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

Outrageous

Analog Compression

26 Oct 2010 -

Andy Denzler does remarkable paintings in oil on canvas that looks like badly compressed JPEGs or stills from an old video tape. A fascinating crossover from digital to real.

Into the Black Woods (© Andy Denzler)

Setting Up A Shared Git Repository

25 Oct 2010 -

There’s been much talk about the version control system git, in great part thanks to github. At the office, we put almost everything under version control (either explicit or implicit through Google docs). It just makes sense when more people are working on the same files.

To make git work for us, we need it to work a little bit more like svn than it usually does. Specifically we want a central, shared repository on a server to commit our individual changes to. It turns out this is very easy to do:

  1. Initialize a new repository on the server. This will create a bare repository (not a checkout) shared between users of the same group. We added ourselves to a new developers group.

    git init --bare --shared=group projectname.git

  2. Make sure the group is correct so all developers have access. Replace $group with your group name.

    chgrp -R $group projectname.git

  3. After cloning the repository and making a few changes, pushing the changes to the shared repository:

    git push origin master

This is only needed the first time. After that a git push is enough, as long as there is only one branch.

100 Million Sunflower Seeds

19 Oct 2010 -

Tate Modern just opened an exhibition called Sunflower Seeds by chinese artist Ai Weiwei and it’s just stunning.

Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands. Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape.

Porcelain is almost synonymous with China and, to make this work, Ai Weiwei has manipulated traditional methods of crafting what has historically been one of China’s most prized exports. Sunflower Seeds invites us to look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today.

Be sure to watch the video on the intricate proces.

Creative Internet

15 Oct 2010 -

The internet is a funny thing. The endless stream of pointless status updates and silly youtube videos makes us look rather stupid as a race. On the other hand, the enormity of it also reveals how the extraordinary happens all the time. It’s a matter of where you look.

It’s wonderful being reminded of the creativity we’re capable of. There are some truly remarkable things in this technology-focused collection.

Rouge Computer Traders

6 Oct 2010 -

The automated computer systems that trade stocks at high speed is a disaster waiting to happen. New York Times now has an article about how a 600 point drop of Dow Jones in minutes back in May was the result of these programs.

The mutual fund started a program at about 2:32 p.m. on May 6 to sell $4.1 billion of futures contracts, using a computer sell algorithm that over the next 20 minutes dumped 75,000 contracts onto the market, even automatically accelerating its selling as prices plunged.

I still don’t get how this is legal.

On Programming Languages

2 Oct 2010 -

Steve Yegge’s Whirlwind Language Tour from 2004 is one of the best posts on programming languages I’ve read in a while.

All of computing is based on abstractions. You build higher-level things on lower-level ones. You don’t try to build a city out of molecules. Trying to use too low-level an abstraction gets you into trouble.

We are in trouble.

There is a Horse in the Apple Store

7 Sep 2010 -

Lovely piece by Frank Chimero on not noticing the wonders around us

Can horses type? Probably not. But, you know, that clip-clop sound that their hooves make sounds an awful lot like the clip-clop sound my fingers make when I’m writing. I like that sound: it denotes progress. I wish we would still ride horses, because then we could have a sound we associate with progress and getting closer to somewhere we want to be. I didn’t know where I wanted to be, but I was glad I was here. Because there is a horse in the Apple Store.

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