Alexander Williams

can you spot tetris?

“The lesson is that it is less important that you pick exactly the optimal order in which to do projects. It is critically important that you build teams that focus on delivering one project at a time. Your teams must more...

“Apocalyptism: Hey, man, have you heard? There’s this bunch of, like, crazy nerds out there, who think that some kind of unspecified huge nerd thing is going to happen. What a bunch of wackos! It’s geek religion, man.”

“Once you've trained to fight a real war, you can forget about winning at paintball.”

Unfeasible: it means impossible. Since no engineer is going to admit something is impossible, they use this word instead. When an engineer says something is "non-trivial," it's the equivalent of an airline pilot calmly telling you that you might encounter more...

the reversibility and decentralization of the Internet are the breeding ground of brazen user-empowerment, serving solely as an end in itself and providing no sort of edification whatsoever – a kind of user-generated discourse delirium.

Another explanation on how a Pakistani ISP was able to block the world's access to videos of exploding jelly.

Eliot Spitzer’s prostitute scandal is all the big news here in New York, but the lesser known tale is how an information system–the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network–played a role in his downfall.

Researchers at the University of Washington managed to embed an electronic circuit and LEDs directly into contact lenses, which seemed to look good on rabbit eyes. Though the circuit is not functional and the lights don't light up, the development more...

Describing Web 2.0 as the "latest fashion", Mr Nielsen said many sites paying attention to it were neglecting some of the principles of good design and usability established over the last decade. Good practices include making a site easy to more...

First time I've seen professional starcraft matches with English Commentary. Watch tournament games live, or after the fact.

This service allows you convert a Flash Video / FLV file (YouTube's videos,etc) to MPEG4 (AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3/3GP) file online. It is using a compressed domain transcoder technology (outline in Japanese). It converts FLV to MPEG4 faster and less lossy than a more...