Monthly Archives: November 2008

The black art of online ad placement

This YouTube clip of a CBS News story of the 8-year old boy accused of murdering his father and another man had a disturbing embedded advertisement:



Such a horrible, horrible news story. There is a lot of speculation about whether or not the boy actually killed his OOOH look, a cute bunny!!

At least it wasn’t this bunny.

(more examples of bad ad placements.)

links for 2008-11-14


Take Stanford’s iPhone Programming Class For Free
– I would love to take this class. The internet-connected iPhone’s multi-touch interface and powerful multimedia features provide an amazing playground for programmers, if you can stomach Apple’s strong-armed policies on application distribution in the App Store. (BTW here is a site that tracks activity of iPhone apps in the App Store, and posts information about apps that aren’t yet available in the App Store: apptism.com).

bitalizer – bending bits into structure – Upload a file, and this site will turn its binary contents into a simple set of rules governing an interesting image rendering process.



Bitalizer v1.1 – shell32.dll from Brian Reavis on Vimeo.

A visualization of the bits that make up the common “shell32.dll” library file found on Windows machines.

The Pomegranate Phone – A really well-done marketing campaign for a new touch-screen GPS-enabled smartphone that also makes coffee, projects video, instantly translates your voice into other languages, has a built-in shaver, and works as a harmonica. And doesn’t really exist. Instead, it is an elaborate ad campaign created by the Nova Scotia government to generate interest for the Canadian province. The little videos included in the ad are a good touch.

Child’s Play Charity – Donate games to sick children – For my birthday, Chris and Angel donated video games in my name to a Roanoke hospital using this site. Terrific idea!

As real as it gets – This is what Photoshop would look like if it were made out of the physical world.

Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering – A coworker sent me this great list. It was originally published in 2001 and its tenets remain true today.

In closing, a silicon haiku from our IRC robot:


like stars winking out
the woman has lost her screen
opening your toad

“I’m the founder of Capitalism, and I support this message.”

We are led to believe by McCain and Palin that “spreading the wealth” is the same thing as socialism. What Would Adam Smith Do?

The principle that Obama evinced, which most economists would regard as unexceptionable, can be traced to Adam Smith. In “The Wealth of Nations” (1776), his seminal treatise on capitalism, Smith wrote:

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. . . . The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. . . . It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

– Adam Smith, quoted in the New Yorker, October 27 2008

Do you pal around with Adam Smith the socialist?