Links from 2015

RICHARD SMYTH Does too much modern nature writing bear ‘the smudges of the writers’ desperate groping for the mot juste ’? A Northern goshawk (Accipiter…

Published November 8, 2014 in Programming Dec 15, 2014 by vjeux Jul 28, 2014 by vjeux May 29, 2014 by vjeux

I recently stumbled across an excellent talk by Nicolas Gallagher at dotCSS 2014 titled “Thinking beyond Scalable CSS” where he shed some light on how Twitter…

We know that we have built something which is genuinely useful: almost any team which adopts Slack as their central application for communication would be…

This is a unique open collaboration between the Department of Twin Research at King's College London and The American Gut Project (AGP) to try to understand…

Since starting the new job and spending a lot more time on trains between here and London, I've had to start thinking about how I fill those commuting hours. As…

Orson Welles would have been 100 this month. When he died in 1985, aged 70, the wonder was that he had lasted so long. His bulk was so immense, his…

Last week we were working on making our website indexable for search engines. This is the story of rewriting it and the summary of what we have learnt.…

TL;DR: Today me and Tobias released our new web performance dashboard: three Docker containers that makes it super easy to setup something like this:…

In his article  Obvious Always Wins , Luke Wroblewski warns of the dangers of sweeping links and actions under the rug. It’s challenging to find the room to…

BEM was a transformative methodology in the world of CSS, but — when limited to the style sheet — it can only take us so far. The act of defining “blocks”…

The…

four simple timing rules discovered by researchers at the Sleep Medicine Institute at the University of Pittsburgh

<blockquote>The word mobile has come to mean many things. But when designing mobile software, we need some clarity. What kind of devices are we talking about?</blockquote>

"Education should indeed be responsive to the needs of society. But this is not the same as regarding yourself as a service station for neocapitalism. In fact, you would tackle society’s needs a great deal more effectively were you to challenge this whole alienated model of learning. Medieval universities served the wider society superbly well, but they did so by producing pastors, lawyers, theologians, and administrative officials who helped to sustain church and state, not by frowning upon any form of intellectual activity that might fail to turn a quick buck." Terry Eagleton on good form.

<blockquote>Some suspect both an increase in our close-up work time (think computer use) and a decrease in time spent outdoors.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Finally, our analysis might provide a reality check on some of the gigantic brand values now published by leading brand valuation companies as it reveals that often the lion’s share of value lies in customer relationships. Although closely intertwined, brand equity and customer equity are different concepts that need to be measured and reported separately. The real art of brand management will be to integrate the two concepts without being stymied by friction between the camps that typically manage brands and customer relationships. As Peter Drucker said, well before the advent of the information age, the sole purpose of a business is to create a customer. It’s clear that brand building will only go so far.</blockquote>

<blockquote>gu:who is an audit bot for the membership of your GitHub Organisation. It checks all users in your organisation, and raises a GitHub issue for anyone who doesn't meet the basic security requirements.</blockquote>

The Economist has taken the view that advertising is nice, and we’ll certainly take money where we can get it, but we’re pretty much expecting it to go away.

Pixel measuring and colour picking.