random($foo) is the occassionally still updated blog of Leonard Lin. My pics are on Flickr, code is on Github. @lhl on Twitter. More »
First Test for Freshmen: Picking Roommates – NYTimes article on picking roommates via online matchmaking methods, also some interesting anecdotes w/ traditional methods:
“We had a match that seemed perfect, until we discovered that one was a cattle rancher’s son and the other was a vegan,” said Leslie Marsicano, the director of residential life at Davidson. “They should definitely meet, on the same hall. But we didn’t want to put them in the same room.”
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (via Liudvikas Bukys)
Researchers (Hayes, Bloom)
have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a
wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition,
painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in
neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts:
even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years
before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the
Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene, appearing on the Ed Sullivan
show in 1964. But they had been playing since 1957, and while they
had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success,
Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Samuel Johnson thought it
took longer than ten years: “Excellence in any department can be
attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at
a lesser price.” And Chaucer complained “the lyf so short, the craft
so long to lerne.”
CSS Cursors – testcase for bug 163174 – quite nice, a list of CSS3 cursors, as well as Mozilla specific ones. The -moz-zoom-in and -moz-zoom-out cursors are useful for my little image shrinking JS:
Hmm, one problem that may force me to use a simple graphic overlay, the cursor doesn’t change after an onclick until you move it (and off course doesn’t work at all in non-gecko renderers)
Also, loading this script in the body seems to make my page title logo disappear for some reason.
Hey neat, Paul Ford was on NPR yesterday – also on ftrain.
The Netgear WGR614 (802.11g + router) I ordered just came in. Took about 10min to set up and throw online. For now, it’s just attached onto my Linux box (which is acting as firewall/NAT/file server); I’ve yet to figure out if I’d rather figure out how to set up RIP on that (or otherwise getting them to play nice), or just replace it w/ the Netgear.
During the initial assault on Baghdad, soldiers set up forward bases named Camp Shell and Camp Exxon. Those soldiers knew the score, even if the Pentagon’s talking points dismissed any ties between Iraqi oil and their blood.