Things we liked this week:
Adam popped me over this rather nice interview with Peter Norvig giving a run down of AI techniques employed by Google. It’s a long piece but well worth a read as it explains how some of the magic actually works..
For once, Paul didn’t focus on the fail – this time his link (via @elliottkember) is all about testing in Ruby. It’s a tool called Heckle which will systematically break your code in every conceivable way, while running your tests. If a test doesn’t fail * then you need to get writing more. He tells me it’s a great tool for ensuring the quality of your tests, and therefore your code. [ * wait up, a fail! ]
Nicola sent me this interesting post about continual improvement and development – some really interesting stuff in there both for designers and anyone else wanting to up their game..
Liam sent over a couple: Firstly is a rather nice jQuery timeline plugin, called Timelinr (of course!). Second is the new homepage at http://desertbus.org/. Liam tells me that DesertBus is a charity event in which a bunch of Canadians play a mini-game from Penn and Teller’s never-released video game on Sega CD in which you drive a bus in real time, back and forth, until you get bored. They do it for charity every year – he helps them out with a bunch of graphing code of donations over time and other such analytics. Good work!
For me, it has to be the totally non-tech-related story about Fauja Singh finishing the Toronto Marathon in 8 hours 25 minutes. Pretty slow, you might think, until you realise the guy is 100 years old. Singh apparently ran his first marathon at age 89 and has since run seven more. He attributes his success to “ginger curry, cups of tea and ‘being happy'”. An amazing, inspiring story..
Finally, Andrew pointed me to this story over on TechDirt. I’ll let you read it and get cross all on your own, but in short – don’t ever point out a blindingly obvious security flaw on a bank website – it might get you into a lot of trouble. Shocking.
