Pixar has put their short films up on their site. These are great little films, made while Pixar was gaining experience with their tools. They are terrific just as shorts to watch, because John Lasseter's storytelling comes through clearly in each one. But they are also interesting as a progression of technology.

Yesterday's post about Stephen Wolfram's ego reminded me of the band Jim's Big Ego.

Jim Infantino is the main guy, and he writes funny catchy hip songs. I particularly like "Stress", with its flash video. My wife used to work with him back when he sold cassettes of his songs. He's a nice guy.

I've started reading Stephen Wolfram's landmark book, A New Kind Of Science. Much has already been said about Wolfram's high opinion of himself, and his presentation style. Even knowing these things beforehand, my breath was taken away by the sheer size of Wolfram's ego.

For those who don't know, Wolfram's book is about a new approach to science that is the biggest new direction since Newton, and, according to Wolfram, will be wildly more successful than previous techniques. Whether this is true or not, I cannot say. Presumably reading the whole book will give me some idea, but I don't pretend to ever be able to make that sort of judgement. I'll leave that to others. Perhaps only a century's time will ever tell.

» read more of: Stephen Wolfram's unfortunate ego... (9 paragraphs)

A few weeks ago, Charles Miller wrote about some theories of behavior and how they apply to coding. Basically, he says that it's important to make sure little badnesses don't creep in, because they add up, and discourage fellow coders from fighting future badnesses, and eventually, there's badness everywhere.

I totally agree. As a developer, I find my main enemies to be noise and inertia. Noise is anything that detracts from the good qualities of the code (clear intent, good performance, flexible structure, and so on). Noise adds friction to the development process by making it difficult to move forward. Inertia is anything that makes change difficult, which includes all the noise.

» read more of: Fighting noise... (4 paragraphs)

My coffee grinder is flaky again (no, it doesn't grind coffee beans into flakes: it behaves erratically). Last time this happened, I remembered a story my brother-in-law told me. My brother-in-law is a physicist, and not one to let mechanical failures be. When his coffee grinder stopped working, he took it apart, found the problem, and wrote to the manufacturer to explain what he found (I don't remember what the problem was, but he couldn't fix it, so writing to complain was the best he couild do).

When my coffee grinder first failed, inspired by John's can-do attitude, I took my coffee grinder apart too. It had been slowly getting less and less eager to begin grinding when I pressed the button, so I assumed the switch was broken in some way. I figured I couldn't fix it, but I should at least see the problem.

» read more of: Flaky coffee grinder... (4 paragraphs)

Mark Fiore does political cartoon animations in Flash.

letterscapes is a nifty interactive doodad (I'm reluctant to call it "art" because that doesn't imply fun to me). It is composed of 26 dynamic "scenes", each starring a different letter of the alphabet. I especially liked 'K'. Mike sent it to me, and said it was "bizomb".

As a developer, I was interested to see that the whole thing was done in Java, rather than the typical tool for this sort of thing, Flash. It's almost more impressive to me that it was all done via typing code, rather than dragging curves.

Peter Cho is the creator of letterscapes, and has a bunch of other nifty interactive doodads on his site.