Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity

Currently I’m not overloaded with work therefore I have much time. I use this circumstance to read some books.

Presentation Zen book cover by Gábor Hojtsy

This time I’ve read, you may already guessed, Presentation Zen. Firstly, I was surprised that this book really contains a scientific presentation. Most of the times you read great tips for this and that but they only work for shallow content.
The main statements are simple yet powerful.

  • Use your slides as support to your speech
  • Don’t overload your slides
  • Use pictures
  • Simplify your slides
  • Be authentic

Garr Reynolds explains these points in detail with many images and stories. In conclusion, this book is written with its own guidelines in mind and that’s enjoyable. Though a bit disturbing is his apple-fanboyism.

Flickr Search for Firefox

Yesterday I wrote a search plugin for Flickr. It’s searching for all content types (photos, illustrations, screenshots) which licensed under the CC and allowed to modify, adapt, or build upon.

Download flickr_photos_cc.xml and move it to:
Windows: C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxsearchplugins
Mac Os X: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/searchplugins/
Linux: ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/searchplugins/

Windows vs. Linux

LET'S ALL FIGHT - BUY WAR BONDS by HeadOvMetal

What? Did you really think I would begin an OS war? It’s about OS wars, Editor wars, Browser wars etc., that’s right. Just to say it directly: $Foo wars are annoying.
Yep, you love your editor and you think that everyone should use it because it’s the world’s most awesome editor ever. It’s OK, write a blog post about it, show its fancy features but please, be factual.

It isn’t cool to say Windoze.
Furthermore, such wars are kind of useless because there’s no real outcome. And does it really matter if somebody is using emacs or vim? (This question is 100% rhetorical!)

A similar phenomenon is $foo killer.
What the, oh no here’s the IPod Killer! Run, run, run, here’s the Google Killer!
I would have inserted a quote by Guy Kawasaki if I had found it while browsing in The Art Of Start. Nonetheless, I found a book called Why Killer Products Don’t Sell. I think the title speaks for itself.

Maths in the Bedroom

Clocks. Wealth. Lava lamps. Mattresses. What, no correlation? You should read Group Theory in the Bedroom by Brian Hayes. This books covers eleven essays published in American Scientist and one published in The Sciences.
Very neat is that Brian Hayes appended a section called Afterthoughts on the end of every essay where he reconsiders the statements and adds information from letters to the editor.
I don’t want to reveal you too much information. If you are interested in mathematics and computation, go and buy the book (or if you are miserly you can read the essays online).