Sophia Dembling has a different style of travelling, and she’s tired of hiding it:

Introversion and extroversion are inborn traits, and the difference between them is not that one is gregarious and at ease in the world and the other shy and awkward. Rather, extroverts are outwardly motivated and gain energy from interaction with the outside world while introverts are more inwardly directed and drained by interaction with others. Introverts’ thinking tends to be deep and slow, we require copious time alone, we prefer probing conversation to shallow chitchat, and our social lives are geared more towards intimate one-on-one interactions than “more the merrier” free-for-alls.

Netbooks are the endpoint of four decades of computing — the final, ubiquitous manifestation of “A PC on every desk and in every home”. But netbooks are more than just PCs. If the Internet is the ultimate force of democratization in the world, then netbooks are the instrument by which that democracy will be achieved.

Kris Sowersby describes the process of designing and developing a typeface and taking it from concept to a commercial product — a process that took around two years to complete.

One thing is certain, typeface design is a long, involved process with many hours of seemingly endless tedium.

A great essay from Aaron Swartz:

The traditional programmer hiring process consists of: a) reading a resume, b) asking some hard questions on the phone, and c) giving them a programming problem in person. I think this is a terrible system for hiring people. You learn very little from a resume and people get real nervous when you ask them tough questions in an interview. Programming isn’t typically a job done under pressure, so seeing how people perform when nervous is pretty useless. And the interview questions usually asked seem chosen just to be cruel. I think I’m a pretty good programmer, but I’ve never passed one of these interviews and I doubt I ever could.

When I said users don’t read anything you put on the screen, I was lying. Users do read. But users will only read the absolute minimum amount of text on the screen necessary to complete their task. I can’t quite explain it, but this kind of user myopia is epidemic. It’s the same problem, everywhere I turn.

How do we treat user myopia? How do we reach these users?

More and more, I’m thinking we need to put the [important information] — for new users only — directly in their line of sight. Nothing complicated. But at least then it’d be in the one — and apparently the only one — place myopic users are willing to look. Right in front of their freakin’ faces.

The next time you’re designing a UI, consider user myopia. You might be surprised just how myopic your users can be. Think long and hard about placing things directly in front of them, where they are not just visible, but unavoidable. Otherwise they might not be seen at all.

Anyone who has visited YouTube.com in the past four years knows that you can embed video in a web page. But prior to HTML5, there was no standards-based way to do this. Virtually all the video you’ve ever watched “on the web” has been funneled through a third-party plugin — maybe QuickTime, maybe RealPlayer, maybe Flash. (YouTube uses Flash.) These plugins integrate with your browser well enough that you may not even be aware that you’re using them. That is, until you try to watch a video on a platform that doesn’t support that plugin.

HTML5 defines a standard way to embed video in a web page, using a <video> element. Support for the <video> element is still evolving, which is a polite way of saying it doesn’t work yet. At least, it doesn’t work everywhere. But don’t despair! There are alternatives and fallbacks and options galore.

And Mark Pilgrim goes on to explore this fascinating and long-overdue addition to web-developer’s armoury. As we have come to expect from Pilgrim, all the technicalities are covered and the essay is written in an easy-to-understand manner with exquisite presentation. The “bible” for video-over-web people everywhere.

Spacewar! was one of the first video games and in 1972, Rolling Stone magazine sent Stewart Brand — 33 years old at the time — to document the early days of computing as entertainment. The photographs were taken by a young Annie Leibovitz (23). Play the original 1962 game code running on a PDP-1 emulator in your Java-enabled browser. [via]

There is no argument more evergreen among programmers than the timeless debate between tabs and spaces. The only programming project with no disagreement whatsoever on code formatting is the one you work on alone. Wherever there are two programmers working on the same project, there are invariably disagreements about how the code should be formatted. Sometimes serious disagreements. The more programmers you add, the more divisive those disagreements get.

Manton Reece explains what you need to do to get ahead. “I honestly don’t care if I have to go for a week without sleeping more than 5 hours a night to be able to ship on time.”

Photo Credit: “Ormai” by pierofix

Back when I rebooted the Urban Mainframe and made my big switch to WordPress, I registered with wordpress.com and started recording traffic data for this site — looking for an ego boost, like you do. I also installed the WordPress.com Popular Posts plug-in and it is this which drives the “What’s Popular Here?” widget in the sidebar.

I had hoped that the Popular Posts widget would drive some traffic to some of my older posts and indeed it did, but with an unexpected consequence.

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