Worthy stuff to watch and read - issue 3

3-minute read

Read

  • Article by one of the Russian expats currently living in San Francisco. In light of the recent events he is having personal identity crisis and leans towards calling himself “euro-slavic”.

The population at large is, statistically speaking, not very bright. Many are deranged from overuse of alcohol or drugs. A big number are simply aging elderly rooted in USSR-centric mindset who never adjusted to the modern world. Most of them do not “work” in the sense we understand full-time employment here: they occupy placeholder positions sponsored by the government. Being dependent their whole life on government help, they are psychologically unable even to think government can do something wrong.

  • Tales From The Lunar Module Guidance Computer - breakdown of the mistakes made in the software and hardware of the computer used to land first humans on the Moon. Will illustrations and commentaries of the authors of this computer.

Garman said, “go”. Larson gave a thumbs-up. (He later said he was too scared to form words.) So Bales answered, “go”, Flight Director Gene Krantz said “go”, and capsule communicator Charlie Duke passed it up to the crew. At MIT, where we realized that something mysterious was draining time from the computer, we were barely breathing.

  • If you are making Ruby on Rails apps, chances are that you are slightly disappointed with the built-in assets pipeline system called Sprockets. Luckily, here is a guide how to switch to Gulp.
  • Timeline of the far future - captivating read if you are interested in things like “what will happen in 1 billion years according to the current knowledge of things”.

More…

Watch

  • In Turkey - amazingly shot travel video by @vincenturban, with after taste of Ron Fricke.
  • TheVerge and their research on the best calendar app for iOS
  • How to draw seven red lines, all perpendicular, some with green ink, some with transparent ink, and one in the form of a kitten
  • This week in pictures by BBC
  • Fresh teaser of the new Doctor Who season. Daleks, dinosaur walking past Big Ben, Peter Capaldi. Season opening will be screened at cinemas on August 23rd.
  • And, if you missed it - beautiful fan-made teaser for the new Doctor landing.
  • Entertaining bloopers reel for the past season of the Game of Thrones, revealed this week on Comic Con 2014
  • 20 min long documentary on the story of Adobe Illustrator. First alpha, PostScript and vector graphics as opposed to the analog way of designing things.
  • The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway - documentary by BBC on the construction of CrossRail - available on iPlayer for another week

Weekly notes

  • Russia - if you have a blog, or a personal site of some sorts (or a LiveJournal account), and your daily traffic is over 3k (unique?) visitors a day, you must register with a state registry. Brand new law (in russian) brings plenty of responsibilities, but doesn’t provide much of rights for the “bloggers”. You also must specify your real life name and contact info for “judicial inquiries”.
  • Fairly common in London exclamation Ta! according to the Urban Dictionary is actually dutch.

Most people do not realize that the English language roots are really Danish or Jutland. Equiped with this knowledge this word is easy to decipher.

  • Did a presentation on the latest London ReactJS meetup. It was nice, about half an hour. Got a bit lost while demonstrating the source code of the app not written by me. Note for the future - make more comments in the code which you intend to demonstrate during the talk.
  • Got one great advice from @charypar before the talk - “Always think that audience badly wants you to succeed.” The very same advice works in life too.
  • Have a great start of the week!