What (Not) to Worry About
F. Scott Fitzgerald in a letter to his daughter Scottie. I’m not so sure about the horsemanship.
The Hidden Costs of Security
Back in July 2011 (i have some catching up to do), Rafe Colburn on the hidden costs of security:
I think that people are generally excessively afraid of crime but underestimate the day to day costs that crime imposes. In software engineering, we spend a lot of time and effort on security. If everyone were honest, we wouldn’t need passwords, encryption, or any of the other stuff that occupies a lot of time on every project. We’d still need to take precautions against damage caused by user error, but most of the hours we spend on security could be spent on other things.
The other cost of security, beyond implementation time, is the ongoing cost related to the inconvenience of security. Whether it’s the time we take to unlock our screen or set up SSH tunnels or deal with the fact that we have to decrypt data in the database in order to see it, it all counts. Security is almost always a form of technical debt.
Which again reminds me of Steve Yegge’s epic Amazon-Google rant:
[...] I’ll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
Chuck Close (via)
Breakpoints in Responsive Design
Responsive design works because of the combination of CSS layout and CSS media-queries. You can change the layout for different sizes.
When I first started, I created two breakpoints (where the layout changes): one for iPad-sized screens and one for phone-sized screens. It seemed logical.
Later on I figured out a better way: create breakpoints when the layout breaks.
I just shrank the width of my browser window until the design broke in some way, then I dealt with it, either by changing things or by creating a breakpoint and changing the layout at that point.
This made more sense because I was working with the design rather than thinking about specific devices.
Seems almost obvious in hindsight, but i had never read about this specific approach before.
Why Path added sleeping as one of its five moment types
Dave Morin, Path’s CEO, on Quora:
3 reasons:
First, we are now in the Post-PC, Mobile era. In the PC era we would often ask: are you online or offline? In the Mobile era this is no longer the case. You are simply sleeping or awake.
Second, because we now carry our mobile devices everywhere, they have become the best way to journal all of the important personal information from our lives. There is a trend around personal health applications which help you live healthier happier lives. Sleep data has been an interesting part of this trend, and something we thought would be nice to start with on Path.
Third, users tell us that they love getting our notifications during the day, but at night they would prefer if the notifications were not streaming in. Sleep also provides utility by turning off notifications while you are asleep.
We also considered adding an alarm clock, but thought it would be hard to compete with Apple’s alarm clock. However, many people are asking us for that feature so it’s something we might consider.
Very interesting. (via)
Warren Ellis recently posted a short piece on the purpose of comic scripts. I think there’s a lesson in there for interface designers as well if you replace “comic author” with “interface designer” and “artist” with “coder”.
Even if you and the artist have previously agreed on content and scenes and set-pieces, clear and specific notation of the mechanics of the comic is down to you. You are telling the artist what to do. The trick is to get the artist to like it.
Reading it that way, it also makes a compelling argument why designers would benefit from coding skills, just as comic authors can benefit from drawing skills:
When you’re starting out, you may well find yourself writing “blind”: not knowing who the artist will be. This is why people like Alan Moore evolved that hyper-descriptive style — so he could get the end result he was looking for regardless of who was drawing it. You may prefer to do that. I would prefer that you took some art classes, and talk to some illustrators (this may involve sign language and grunting sounds). Investigate art, even if your drawing hand, like mine, behaves more like a flipper. Understanding what is joyful about illustration is important. It’s important to create a thing that will delight an artist. (And even a letterer, although that’s going to be harder as many of them have the demeanour of a demented gravedigger.)
3D Long Portrait
Done in Processing with Kinect. Yes, i’m kinda obsessed with self-portraits at the moment.
Fotoshop by Adobé
Is it terrible to think the world would be a nicer place if this were real? There’s also a behind the scenes video. (via everyone)
Google Image Search Recursion
*Head explodes* (via)
Great Camera Buying Guide
If you’re thinking about buying a new camera, The Verge just recently posted a very comprehensive and detailed guide you might be interested in. They don’t seem to be very fond of the new Nikon 1 series, which i’ve considered buying. Maybe the Sony NEX really is a better choice…
