Another great set of images of the 2010 Winter Paralympics at The Big Picture. Pro tip (thanks MacBreak Weekly) you can use the j and k keys to move up and down the pictures.
This chat roulette video from Casey is good and goes in and defines what this new phenomenon is all about.
Snuzzy has a video of an Alpaca on a surfboard.
Sometimes the world really just doesn't make sense.
GetHuman.com is a directory of numbers and tips to get a real person on the phone when calling those big companies.
John Gruber points to the "No Dashes Or Spaces" Hall of Shame, showing off stupid sites that can't figure out how to parse CC numbers with spaces or dashes in them.
Boingboing has a horrifying story about a Happy Meal that shows no decay in a year on a shelf. Either it's terrifying that that stuff is eaten (cause it's so damn good) or good to know it'll survive the apocalypse and sustain the survivors....
Ruby Best Practices - Full Book Now Available For Free!
That about says it all! Kudos to the author for doing this, and please donate and support him!
Another great find from Aryk - Top 10 Things That Annoy Programmers over at Kevin Pang's site. I agree with all of these.
From MIX '10 comes some Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview Info. Short story: HTML5, hardware acceleration, and a public download that's appears to be available (Vista SP2 + only).
Personally I don't care about the IE9 rendering engine that much, even if it's faster than chrome/webkit/mozilla by a factor or 10x. What has put me off IE again and again is the user interface that sits around the rendering engine. The feel of it is sluggish and feels just.... "bleah". The big long list of icons to the right of the tabs, the menu bar sitting in the middle, the weird button/dropdowns for things like suggested sites, the little icon that pops up every time I select something and the huge long context menus.... Yech! I'm sure some of these things can be turned off, but honestly I don't get far enough to even bother, cause I just use IE to download firefox/chrome.
However for you fine readers, I'll take a bullet and am installing it on my home machine and will give it a run and report back. Who knows, maybe MS has taken the Windows 7 and Zune approach and hit one out of the park this time?
Update: OK, so the download is a tech preview, of no use to "normal" users as it is basically a rendering window with no UI. Only 55/100 on the ACID3 test, and the one quick test of the HTML5 site I tried (this canvas experiment) failed. The YouTube HTML5 site also doesn't work, but that could be a browser detection issue. Still, I have hopes that the speed/html5/css3 demos that they are showing off turn out being real in the end. Bringing these new technologies (blah blah not an official standard yet blah blah) to the browser that still (somehow) has 70%+ of the market (or whatever it is these days) is a Good Thing.
Kudos to James Strocel for pointing me to the Death Star vs Force comparison chart.
College Humor has a great Chat Roulette Piano video. The guy doing the piano has got some good skillz too!
The Color Fields Colr Pickr allows you to select a color, and it will show you images from Flickr with that color. Pretty simple, but really cool.
Kevin Rose has video of Leo Laporte crowd surfing during the Diggnation filming. I anticipate more of this when the Diggnation episode comes out on Tuesday.
Nice video showing some great Rock Climbing Photography. Well, the videos are ads for Nikon, but the video and stills are awesome, and the scenics out at Yosemite are gorgeous.
Aryk sent over a comic on The Difference Between Firefox, Opera, Explorer & Safari via The Next Web.com
I have to give Vimcasts some advertising and props. I've been using Vi/Vim since I was introduced to Unix in 1994 or so and learned new things in the first podcast. That's either a great compliment to Drew Neil or saying something about my ability to learn new things over almost 15 years :) Either way, if you use vim at all, this is a must-subscribe.
Apple has put up their iBooks page with some extra details on the (available for pre-order today!) iPad iBooks software. Nice that they have a built in dictionary/wikipedia access, and it also has text to speech. Wonder if Apple has the same (stupid) restrictions on some books allowing text to speech and some not? The Apple Blog has more details on the iPad features.
Found the Top 20 5 Second Films where you get 2 seconds for title, 1 for end titles, and 5 for content. Some stinkers in there, and some NSFW language/content, but more gems than stinkers.
My favorite is the guy waking up late... FUUUUUUUUU.....
Yahoo has the Robin Hood (2010) trailer. Looks like another must-see.... Ridley Scott FTW it looks like.