Panic Blog » The Panic Status Board
Panic is doing crazy awesome stuff right now. This internal status board (built in pure web standards goodness) is the latest example.
“The Cooper Residence” by architect Randy Weinstein is completely stunning. (via Contemporist)
When Books Could Change Your Life -
Absolutely fantastic article on why the books we read as adolescents hold such a dramatic power over our imaginations.
From the article:
“I think adults tend to forget about the fears of childhood,” author Jenny Boylan (She’s Not There and I’m Looking Through You) says via e-mail. “I was then and am now drawn to stories that paint a more complicated picture of childhood. Fern, in Charlotte’s Web, is poised between childhood and adolescence—she starts off rescuing Wilbur from death (yes, that’s right, DEATH WITH AN AX), and yet by story’s end she kind of forgets about Wilbur—she and Henry are `off at the fair.’ So to speak.
“At story’s end, Wilbur’s one friend—the wise, illuminating, literate spider—curls up and dies. Wilbur manages to save her egg sac, tends it all winter, and in the spring, the babies hatch out and—IMMEDIATELY LEAVE HIM. Except for a couple of them, who know nothing of Charlotte, and how she saved Wilbur’s life. Charlotte’s Web was the first book that made me weep, and I wept because I knew that it contained truth.”
As I think back on my reading of books with fairly “depressing” endings - or rather, books that faced the uncomfortable realities of life dead on - I am reminded that I would avoid the endings entirely. Once I saw the “writing on the wall” of the ending, I just closed the book and tried to ignore it - in the same way that an optimist might ignore the reality of the “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” finale.
Now that I’m older, I recognize that life doesn’t allow us to stem unfortunate endings at the pass. But as the author notes:
When we’re children, all the books we read are handed down to us, like the Ten Commandments, by grownups, who seem like, and sort of are, a different order of being from ourselves. They’re the gods of childhood, bigger and older and more experienced; they know more than we do, imparting what wisdom to us they think we can bear, empowered to tell us what to do. I’m over 40 now, no longer by even the most charitable definition a young adult, and I’m starting to realize, in something like panic, that I don’t understand anything, and that nobody else seems to know any more about it than I do. There aren’t any grownups. And maybe there aren’t any secrets left to tell.
Once upon a time I had a first-world problem, luckily I had a first-world product that increases my dependancy on technology, removes my need to consult other humans and deepens my handicap of extreme-laziness. My friends were thoroughly impressed.
“I look at the cheapest [iPad] as the best value because it comes out before the 3G model, and given it’s a new platform I wouldn’t be eager to spend extra on a first generation/Revision A model. If spending monthly for the 3G service is no problem to you, I’d wait and get the cheapest 3G model when they come out.” —
From kevin.tumblr.com, in response to a question of which iPad is the best value.
Also, if you live in NYC, 3g is going to barely work anyway - so why spend the extra money on that model?
“If Apple becomes a company that uses its might to quash competition instead of using its brains, it’s going to find the brainiest people will slowly stop working there. You know this, you watched it happen at Microsoft. Enforcing patents isn’t a good long-term play: it’s the beginning of the end of the creative Apple we both love.” —
Open Letter to Apple | Will Shipley
It’s great working in an industry in which many of the top performers have a consistent ethos which actually informs their day-to-day decisions. It’s rare that you hear of the best technologists selling-out (other than early exits from startups, I guess). But you frequently read strongly stated opinions on everything from technical architectures to corporate ethics.
I’m not sure what sets the field apart from others. It’s a shame banking doesn’t seem to have the same culture.
From Jason Santa Maria | “Final Moments”
This view of Manhattan (similar to the view from our neck of Brooklyn) will hopefully never get old.
fingernails in oatmeal: Metaprogramming: Ruby vs. Javascript -
I’ve recently been working more with Javascript outside of the browser, thanks mostly to node.js. To jump in and learn the language, I tried to emulate some of the metaprogramming I’d learned from working with ruby. I’m going to show examples in ruby and the equivalent code in Javascript. Let’s…
Flash and Web Standards, again -
As someone who spent years as a Flash developer and who still manages a team of bright and capable developers with a lot of Flash expertise, I have to say that the only platform I’m really excited about these days is “the web” specifically the future that HTML 5, CSS 3 and javascript libraries like jQuery portend. Flash was interesting for so long because it let us do things we couldn’t do otherwise — vector animation, audio and video playback, motion graphics. Over the past few years, though, the number of problems that Flash uniquely solves versus the number of problems that Flash creates has all but leveled out.
This is about how I feel lately. Flex/AS3 is still my dayjob and the technology with which I’m likely to perform the majority of my work for the short-term future, but I’m really excited to see the “open” web stack actually allow for the creation of incredible app experiences.