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Aperture Laboratories faded iPhone wallpaper.

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Congratulations to iwdrm!

“Enough of symbolism and these escapist themes of purity and innocence.”

8½ (1963)

This post marks the one-year anniversary of this little tumblr. Thanks to all readers and followers.

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The quality jump from the iPhone 3S and onward is pretty impressive. I'd like to see a nighttime shot comparison.

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Gabriel Weinberg discusses how he manages inbound hiring at DuckDuckGo.

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"(Teachers in Finland) have a large degree of autonomy, because they are professionals."

Our (USA) system of education is designed around the idea that teachers aren't capable of teaching their students. That they are so incompetent their students must be regularly tested by an impartial level of standards.

There are perfectly valid reasons to have a standard test. For a properly functioning democracy the general public should be educated enough to understand and contextualize the issues they are voting for. A standardized test can give our system a baseline to target. The trouble is, that standard baseline becomes the goal when institutions use it to differentiate students.

Now, rather than serving as a snapshot to extrapolate a student's knowledge, the standardized test is all that the student knows.

Take math as an example. It becomes a disadvantage to try and teach an entire class actual mathematical concepts, that takes serious time and effort. It's far more reliable and efficient to teach students shortcuts and rote rules that let them to speed through the test questions. It's faster and easier to teach students how to recognize the right answer from a list of answers, than to teach them how to derive the answer or to comprehend why the answer is what it is.

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I've taken to wearing collared shirts and slacks to work. Why?

I have to admit that the biggest reason is to thumb my nose at social convention. People in "geek" jobs are simply expected to dress down. "Ha!" says I.

To my surprise, I found that dressing up is actualy much more comfortable than a t-shirt and jeans. The pants are the biggest difference, they just feel so relaxing and smooth compared to jeans.

It's been a month since I started this, and I've noticed a change in my work too. I'm more careful, deliberate, and precise in my work. Since I'm dressing and looking professional, I'm acting more professional. Getting more smiles and pleasantries from coworkers and strangers is pretty nice too.

Taking it a step further, a coworker and I have started "raise the bar Fridays" in which we dress even nicer and wear ties to work.

"What's with the ties?"

"We're just trying to raise the bar."

Why don't developers dress better?

“Suits shouldn’t be allowed to this type of meetup. I definitely saw at least 5 people in suits. so lame.”

That comment was left on the Hacker News comment thread about this week’s YCNYC. I went to the meetup on Monday and was one of those wearing a tie, jeans and a blazer, mistaken by many as a suit. The cliché is that many developers don’t know or care how to dress themselves. The result is ill-fitting screen-printed tees and hoodies. To some, it’s a secret handshake. It’s a “my talent supersedes my necessity to follow the guidelines of society.” But I still wonder, why aren’t developers better dressed?

I’m a developer and I’ve been attempting to dress better for the last few months. I’ve adopted a strict no T-shirt policy and I try to wear a tie a few times a week. Blogs and shows like Put This On help keep me informed.

The sentiment in the above comment is not uncommon though. For a group of people constantly trying for improving development ability, I’m surprised more aren’t trying to develop their dress. You see hints of honest self-improvement with successes like Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Body. There really is hardly an excuse. Developers have money. Many developers are holding increasingly public roles. You are building the future, so dress like it. You’ve got nothing to lose, save for some “geek cred.”

Maybe it’s the New York City in me speaking, but the days of T-shirts and hoodies are over. Even Zuck has been sporting a suit more and more. He’s the last person that needs to impress someone based on how he dresses.

Challenge yourself and try dressing better, maybe even only once per week.

If you’re interested in improving your wardrobe, here are a few tips coming from a fellow developer:

Fit is the most important. No matter what you wear, you should always buy for fit. This rules out T-shirts for most people. Unless you’re going to the gym twice per week, you probably won’t look good in a T-shirt. Find a good tailor.

Set silly goals for yourself. I set the goal of trying to wear a tie three times per week. Try to only wears shorts on the weekends or at the beach. When you start, you will look like an idiot. You will inevitably get better though.

(For guys) Girls like guys in ties. Show me a young woman who doesn’t like a well-dress guy and I will show you a liar. This doesn’t mean putting on a suit every time you step out of your apartment, but just putting on clothes that make you look good.

Watch every episode of Put This On. It will get you 80% of the way there.

Get a decent pair of shoes. Rather than rock your favorite pair of New Balance, go for something that’s still sneaker-like but a little nicer.

A heated discussion unfolds on Hacker News…

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What planes are overhead?

What’s that in the sky? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Yup, it’s a plane, and it is currently 31,100 feet high and traveling to St. Louis from Chicago. Simply enter “planes overhead”, and Wolfram|Alpha will provide a list of flights overhead based on your current geoIP location.  

You can also click on specific flights to learn more information, such as departure airport, estimated flight duration, and more:

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Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II

So I played it, I finished it, and it was pretty ok!

The story was pretty lackluster. I haven't played the first game so maybe I'm missing out on some key character development.

The force powers were awesome. I highly enjoyed tossing various bits of the environment around in the midst of combat.

Darth Vader was imposing and a little scary at the start of the game, very reminiscent of his role in the first Star Wars movie.

All in all, worth $20.

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Get Flow

I've tried almost a dozen TODO list trackers over the years. From text based solutions like TODO.txt or Xavier Shay's XTDO to fancy-pants GUI solutions like Appigo Todo or Pomodoro App for the iPad to web-based solutions like Toodledo. I've also tried enterprise solutions like Jira, or code-based solutions like github issues or redmine or trac.

None of them have ever lasted. I bump into a wall of "it doesn't quite do enough for me". I want a todo system that:

Tracks my TODO items from my laptop, iPad, iPod Touch, or any web browser

Can assign due dates for tasks; can easily create repeatable tasks.

Can group tasks into lists, and tag them with keywords and flagging

Can comment on tasks and use those comments as future reference/documentation (i.e. they have to be searchable and, ideally, support at least minimal formatting)

Can delegate tasks to other people

Tasks must be exportable into standard data formats

Most systems fall down at that first point. None of them have made it through all of them.

Until now.

Flow has changed my expectations of todo tracking. It's all of those points, all of them! And wrapped in an absolutely gorgeous interface. There are even niceties like a native OSX client that adds an Apple menu icon to easily and quickly drop in new tasks.

I've been using their free trial for two weeks now and have been nothing but pleased. I even got a response from their support email within an hour of asking how to do something. They even automatically renewed my first free trial for another two weeks after noticing that I hadn't really used it yet.

If you have a list of things to get done, and you want to sanely track them. You should definitely give Flow a try.

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If anyone needs me, I'll be in the angry dome!

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Broadband.com: third launch

Man, that was pretty much the roughest website launch I've ever had. You know it's just perfect when the CEO happens to be pulling up your website in the three minute span of time that the new site is coming up. It'll just be a few minutes we thought in our naïveté; who will notice? Ha ha!

CEO. Conference room. Pretty much all upper management. Our site. Broken rendering. Yeah.

But it's launched so woo! It's better than ever. You can now actually use our site to automatically price business Internet options for any address/phone line in the US. We hit the carrier APIs and pull back the best prices we can get automatically. No need for you to have an account, no personal information required, no sales people calling because you priced an address: just internet pricing data.

The new site: broadband.com

The updated map (now with prices on the map: green is better pricing)

A sample pricing page (yeah, you can just bookmark results now)

Horrible styling and color scheme? Gone!

Of course there's no resting here. I have a bunch of ideas for taking the site even further, but I'm once again happy to point folks to broadband.com and say "Yeah, I made that."

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I am going to bring daddy a light at work and he's gonna put it in the ceiling and it's gonna shine so bright that everyone at daddy's work is gonna dance!

Edward, three years old

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Bring on the Robot Cars Already

It's been almost a year since [Google announced that they were testing robot cars](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at.html) in California, and that those robot cars had already logged over 140,000 miles of real-world driving. The program quickly expanded into Nevada where Google convinced the state to issue [special licenses allowing the operation of the autonomous cars](http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/jun/26/self-driving-robot-cars-about-hit-nevada-highways/). A few days ago a [Google robot car rear-ended another car at low speed](http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/08/05/it-figures-a-human-driver-crashes-googles-robot-controlled-car/), but the **human** driver was in control at the time. Silly humans and our organic reflexes. I can only imagine that the robot car's logs were full of * APPLY 50% brake pressure. WARNING: Brakes unresponsive. * RIGHT TURN 80 degrees WARNING: Steering unresponsive. * APPLY 80% brake pressure WARNING: Brakes unresponsive. Based on the current rate of expansion, it'll be another thirty years before robot cars will drive me around. I want to speed that along. Even if robots don't "get" driving and aren't as efficient and capable as the best human driver, I am absolutely sure they are better than most drivers most of the time. And they'd be consistent. To quote Short Circuit:

It doesn't get pissed off. It doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it doesn't laugh at your jokes. It just runs programs.

How do we get the robot car adoption rate up? How do we quicken the creation of a commuter's utopia where we can sit back, relax, and enjoy the delicious combination of mass transit autonomy and personal car convenience? Simple. _Guarantee that no passenger in a robot car will ever get a ticket or be at fault in an accident._ And you're done. Ideally I'd go further down the avenue of potential and change car ownership to a subscription model. You wouldn't actually own a specific car, but subscribe to the availability of a car. At maintenance time, monthly, or whatever; the car hub would send a "new" car to drive to your house and swap out with your current car. Want to not have to worry about moving your things from the old car to the new? Pay more to be able to schedule a time for your car to drive back to the hub first. There the staff would move everything to the new car and send it on its way. You now have absolutely reliable personal transportation that drives you wherever you want to go. Put this all into an electric car and we'll cut back CO2 emissions like it's not even a thing. Need a big gas car for a road trip? Sure, just schedule it with the hub and it'll show up on time and ready to go. But don't limit this to just road trips. Grocery stores are experimenting with curbside service: you place your grocery order online, drive up to the curb, they load it in, you drive off. Combine that with a robot car and you just went to the grocery store without leaving the house.

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This deadmau5 remix is a little more techno.