The Case for Creativity in a Vacuum
Mankind’s greatest challenges demand the combined effort of many, but collaboration thrives on trust. As such, teams often falsely bolster positivity through the acceptance of unfit ideas, dismissing critical people as pessimistic or pedantic. Valuable insights are therefore tempered, with group harmony taking precedence over excellence.
Becoming a Mac User
In early 2009, the hard drive of my laptop failed. Replacing a hard drive is trivial, but I had been saving for a while and decided it was time to buy a new machine. In the beginning, I had no intention of switching to a Mac — I hated Apple, and I had always hated Apple.
Using Apple Routers with ADSL
I’ve been using a faithful DG834GT router for as long as I’ve had an ADSL connection, but it is now showing its age. I recently bought a Time Capsule with an inbuilt 802.11n router. Unfortunately, it caused my internet to drop out sporadically, especially under heavy loads. I suspected a protocol mismatch between the ADSL modem and the Time Capsule. After hours on Google, I discovered the problem was inherent to all Apple routers.
Push Mail
Most OS X hints are cumbersome and inelegant, but this one rocked my world: Push email in Mail.app
Streamlining Static Websites
I witnessed a dramatic boost in the performance of my website after switching to a Sydney-based server. In hindsight this is hardly surprising, but it illustrates how the performance of a website is dictated by more than pure bandwidth. My website is made with static HTML, which mitigates server-side lag under load. The main bottlenecks should therefore be the size of the content, and the number and latency of any requests for that content. In this post I describe how I addressed these performance bottlenecks.
Amazon S3 TurboBoost
Amazon doesn’t have much of a presence here in Australia, but the limited set of services they do offer are excellent and affordable. I use Amazon Web Services to host this site, which is both extremely cheap (~1c per month) and extremely reliable. Unfortunately, until recently their closest server was in Singapore, so the latency was really bad. Sometime in November however, they quietly launched a Sydney based data centre.
Professor of War
Mark Bowden’s article The Professor of War describes the life of David Patraeus, the General recently shamed for having an affair with his biographer. It was written back in 2010 before this scandal got the better of him.
Pee-Powered Generator
Alex Wilhelm, writing for the next web, African girls have created a pee-powered generator
Sketching Designs
The learning process gives us some appreciation for the unfathomable plasticity of our brains. Many of the skills we acquire throughout life are learned, rather than instinctual. For example, although I can’t draw, over the years I have learned how to make a convincing sketch. I understand that even this — admittedly unimpressive — ability is rare. As I age I am increasingly convinced that artistic talent is not instinctive, but a skill honed through practice. For those unfamiliar or uninterested in sketching, bear with me; I am not speaking about sketching per se, but the way we create.
Richard Rogers's House
From Deborah Copaken Kogan’s Lessons from a Surprise Visit to Richard Rogers’s House, recently published in the New Yorker