In a further post of the intermitted kind, again, a collection of things I thought interesting and worth blogging about. Some of them are things I would previously have tweeted as interesting links, others are here because if like come back them some point.

Fun things, Cool Stuff

• Ever wondered how engineers feel in a meeting with non engineers. If I ever say to you seven perpendicular lines you'll now know what I mean.
• Cake is one thing. Layer cake is another. Layer cake in the shape of a sphere? Now that's planetary cake
• BBC News article on Denmark being entirely modelled in Minecraft...
• Interesting hack for solar charging using PWM and an Arduino
• It's always nice to have some variety in typography.
• Cool tech - 3D printer for Carbon Fibre
• Ever wondered what do modern websites look like on ancient browsers? No? Well, now you can and look at the answer in one step.

Useful tool

• Work with Mercurial repositories using git
• If you edit things using markdown, you'll probably find dillinger.io a useful site to visit - a combined markdown editor/viewer.

Programming

• Some notes on lesser known programming models. Most of these should already be known to most developers, but it's an interesting link nonetheless - esp given the links to languages you may/may not have already seen before.
• How to use Go on android devices.
• Every so often people look at systems and say "that must be easy!" and severely underestimate the complexity of a piece of code - be it a game or website. For those who don't code understanding why making code based systems can be hard is also hard - but hopefully this site helps. This also goes hand in hand with effective estimation. That's hard for all the same reasons.
• Rust and Go are both getting alot of airtime at the moment, and so it's useful to see a comparison of both rust and go.
• Interesting post on how to improve programming in the future, and for those not building coding tools how they could/should in future work.
• I'd never heard of Naur's ideas around programming as theory building, and it looks like it makes a significant contribution to theories around software development. Catenary's blog post regarding Naur stands as a useful introduction in a modern context. The original paper by Naur appears to be online as well.
• Ever wanted to write python with braces? Take a look at pythonb. Note, while it fixes the syntax, the standard library hasn't been flipped so you can't just compile and run. Fun thought though.
• Depressingly accurate youtube video of programming developments and how it could have been today. Talks about lots of things we should be doing now, but by going back to the roots of when these things actually started - often 30-40 years ago. This talk goes hand in hand really with the one on better programming. 30 minutes, but worth it, especially if you don't know an awful lot about the history of software development...
• Useful resource for [learning CSS layout][CSSLAYOUT].
• Since PHP won't go away, more and more people are looking at optimising for it. One project called HippyVM maybe worth your time if you do much with the language.
• The relatively new combined C++ FAQ - not just C++11, but also C++14 related...

Wider issues in tech

• An interesting business oriented take on innovation. Technically innovation has a different meaning, but interesting opinon
• Interesting read on how copyright laws for digital content conflict with sharing that people are used to - specifically preventing people sharing books
• Sleep deprivation is a bad idea at the best of times, it also has a severe effect on businesses, with sleep deprivation driving the failure rate of tech startups .
• Ever looked at a tech conference and thought "I can do better" or "there's no way I can do that?", the WAAA website is trying to encourage more people to talk. If you're not happy with diversity at conferences - propose a talk. We mimic those we percieve as being like us. By doing it yourself, you encourage others to do so too.
• ISO's recommendation on How to write standards
• Interesting read - the cost of telling lies
• Some people tweet without thinking about what their tweets tell others about their location. Worth a read - there are a lot of nutjobs out there who abuse twitter in that way.
• The Amiga will never die. Well, of course it did, but that doesn't stop people bringing life back into the old girl from time to time. This latest amiga hack of a Raspberry Pi and floppy drive is particularly entertaining. Much like the Amiga was itself. Nothing since has really quite had the same immediacy when it comes to digital art.
• Bit of a marketing post on Kanban (it mentions a particular product), but also quite a good post at illustrating the difference/benefit of Kanban over Scrum - even though on some superficial levels they're very similar.

Politics/Technology, etc

• You know that a technology has reached peak hype when the government starts talking about it. In this case, The Internet of Things.
• Is Nuclear energy about to have a comeback? Article discusses Thorium reactors - which reminds me of some writing by Isaac Asimov years ago...