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Books read and lives lived

I read the book Islam ovellamme (Islam at our door) by Risto Soramies yesterday. It was a relatively honest summary of the basic ideas in Islam and about the kind of an attitude Christians could adopt about Islam entering Europe. Earlier this week I finished Valtakunnan salaisuus (The Secret of the Kingdom) by Mika Waltari, and loved it. Also this week, we watched the open source movie Elephants Dream. It was... interesting.

The summer has started, and I enjoy the light and the warmth. On Tuesday, we're going to visit Stockholm with a group of friends. Before that, I've got lots to do—though living mostly alone now, it takes extra effort to get things done.

Sat 2006-05-27 14:26 in diary No comments #link

Recent stumbles

The Development Abstraction Layer

From the page: "a system administrator who makes the Internet as available as oxygen, a tester to find the bugs they just can't see, a graphic designer to make their screens beautiful, a team of marketing people to make the masses want their products, a team of sales people to make sure the masses can get these products, some patient tech support saints who help customers get the product working and help the programmers understand what problems are generating the tech support calls, and about a dozen other support and administrative functions which, in a typical company, add up to about 80% of the payroll".
Did I miss something or has everybody forgotten about human-computer interaction design? Or is this guy just calling them programmers, the people doing the requirements engineering and the usability research?

CSS PLaY ~ SLIDE SHOW

A CSS-implemented "slide show". Beautiful photos, too :)

Learning the shell.

I seldom see such a clearly written basic shell tutorial.
From the page: "Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are helpful for many tasks, but they are not good for all tasks. I have long felt that most computers today do not use electricity. They instead seem to be powered by the "pumping" motion of the mouse! Computers were supposed to free us from manual labor, but how many times have you performed some task you felt sure the computer should be able to do? You ended up doing the work by tediously working the mouse. Pointing and clicking, pointing and clicking. I once heard an author remark that when you are a child you use a computer by looking at the pictures. When you grow up, you learn to read and write. Welcome to Computer Literacy 101. Now let's get to work."

CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions

Check out the design on this page! :) Also, the sample chapter, as well as probably also the rest of the book, is a must-read for any web designer taking themselves seriously. (photo from the iPod shuffle competition)

Rules That Aren’t.

From the page: "MYTH: Never use the passive voice. It's easy to find silly examples of passive voice. Mistakes were made comes to mind. But sometimes - often - the object of an action is much more important than the actor. The winning Powerball numbers will be announced tonight. (Who cares who's doing the announcing?) Three city officials were arrested Friday. (I can wait a couple of sentences to learn the oh-so-vital detail of which police force was doing the arresting.) I wasn't born yesterday. (And, sorry, but I don't remember the name of the doctor who brought me into this world. I was young at the time.)"

Originellisti arabiaa

From the page: "Lähi-idän ihmisten tavassa suhtautua omaan kirjalliseen ja kulttuuriperintöönsä olisi Hämeen-Anttilan mielestä oppimista vain nykyhetkessä eläville eurooppalaisille ihmisille, joille kymmenen vuotta vanha kirja on jo auttamattomasti vanhentunut.
- Keskustelin kerran erään arabialaisen taloustieteilijän ja sosiologin kanssa siitä, mikä oli paras keskiaikainen rakkausruno ja lausuimme ulkomuististamme säkeitä. Ei suomalaisten taloustieteilijöiden kanssa voi mennä keskustelemaan esimerkiksi renessanssiajan rakkausrunoista.
Hämeen-Anttilan mielestä menneen kunnioittamisessa kysymys on pitkälle kulttuuriin liittyvästä asennoitumisesta.
- Teollistumisen ja modernin maailman myötä Eurooppa on menettänyt kyvyn ymmärtää vanhempia kulttuureja; edes omaansa, saati sitten vierasta."

JBrout

The photo organizer I use, the only one I found with which you don't have to worry about losing your tags when you move from an app to another (tags and comments are embedded in the JPEG files in astandard way: IPTC/EXIF). The tagging system rocks. The UI is simple and clear.
Cons: the user community speak french in their mailing list, it's not possible to search images by filename, operations such as tagging are quite slow, and it's a bit buggy (version 0.2). Still, it rocks, and I hope the project will find a more active community.

Fri 2006-05-12 14:31 in links 1 comment #link