candescence.org

Stumbled across this depiction of the 20 Largest Bankruptcies in the history of the world. I love how cheerful the graphic is in comparison to the depressing truth it is displaying. All in all a great little bit of info viz.

It took me forever to figure out who all these Coho people were; at first i thought it was just some annoying bot and mostly ignored it. It wasn’t until i finally responded to one calling it a bot (to which i was accused of being a bot back) that i got curious enough to investigate. According to Wikipedia the bots are directed at public twitterers, the goal of the social experiment being to connect random people. They usually lead with some simple comment sent to both users ranging from the simple “Hi!” through other greetings and apparently, as i found out tonight, including demands of “internet sex”.

To the random internet stranger who, through coho, i apparently demanded the “internet sex” from, hats off to you my friend.

Jasen discovered recently that this coming Friday, Feburary 13^th, at 18:31:30 EST it will be exactly 1234567890 in Unix time. As an added bonus it’ll be Friday the 13th! So of course we’ve decided to celebrate. Now how exactly do i go about creating a zombie Ken Thompson costume?

I’ve fallen in love with Java’s instanceof; it makes me feel a bit more at home when i’m away from my beloved Ruby. I recently ran into a situation where i needed to determine if an object implemented a specific interface and it turns out that instanceof is just the tool to do it.

    Vector foo = new Vector();
    boolean comparable = foo instanceof Comparable; // false, Vector doesn't implement Comparable
    boolean serializable = foo instanceof Serializable;   // true, Vector does implement Serializable

Like designers, if you give a programmer a problem with parameters, they’ll apply every bit of genius they have to solve it in the best possible way. If you tell them how to do it, you’ll suffer the wrath of an angry God.