300.000 Norwegians move house every year. If the pattern made by their journeys could be compressed into one short animation, what would it look like? What would someone seeing it be able to learn, if anything?

Now that we got that out of the way... I have been seeing posts on sites with people having fun with embedded systems/devices and I was feeling left out. I didn't really want to go out and buy a device so I looked at what was laying around.

However, examining what "went wrong" is quite interesting, if one attempts, as much as possible, a dispassionate, analytical approach that aims to gain knowledge, rather than assign blame or paper over real defects with a rose-colored vision of things.

A self-avowed introvert herself, Susan Cain is the author of the recently published book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. Cain says this quality is vastly misunderstood and undervalued. Bill Gates, Craig Newmark, and Mark Zuckerberg would agree: They’re introverts, too.

There’s tons written about the world of startups and even freelancers, but almost nothing written about the world of software development services. The underbelly of the startup world, shops which get hired to do a lot of the dev work.

The strangest thing just happened. I'm sitting here in a hotel in New Zealand and my phone pops up an alert from a push-to-talk voice chat application I recently installed called Voxer. It's a voicemail from a tween (a child perhaps not quite 13 - in-between) teasing me about my name. "Scott Hanselman - Who would name their kid Scott HanselAndGretal man. *giggle*" Harmless stuff, of course, but weird and random. No idea who this is.

When I complain about putting maintainability above creativity and elegance, I do not mean writing a needlessly complex routine to solve a problem. I am talking about situations where companies refuse to let a programmer elegantly and efficiently solve a problem using metaprogramming templates because they're "too hard to maintain".

The Cloudcast discusses the issues and debunks the myths of virtual desktops. Particularly, they consider some of the security / risk-mitigations that surround virtual desktops, as well as the changing landscape of security in delivering an "end user computing" experience in businesses coping with non-Windows devices.

The problem with turning over rocks is that there’s usually ugly stuff hiding underneath. You retro every 2 weeks and you list out all the stuff that isn’t working. You diligently collect all the deltas and turn those into actions. You collect all the actions from your retro’s and your post-mortems and you track them in a tool where they sit… forever.

This blogger suggests that Amazon's Elastic Block Store was developed for Amazon's internal needs because it was released at the same time as EC2.

It seems like some NoSQL vendors have been moving back towards SQL-like interfaces, which is just what this writer has a problem with. He discusses the problems that arise when these worlds collide, and calls for "a real language for unstructured data," rather than resorting to those like XQuery. There is an interesting list of suggestions for what such a language should include.

Often management is late to figure out that a project is failing. Watching out for certain signs can help tell quickly when a project is heading for failure.

Getting Started with iOS Development using Sinatra on Heroku / Cedar

Tech companies can't find enough engineers. So why not train them yourself? For free. And then make $20K a pop on recruiting fees.

Most of us have a job, have a work to do. Some are studying . Sometimes we read or do some other stuff. The main problem of 21th century is our technology advantage. The thing, that was meant to simplify our life is making our life tougher. And that is the reality. Let me get to the point - we are getting distracted by lots of things - cellphones, IM ( Instant messaging ) and noise at the office. I am not the first one to admit it ( Find just same idea at "Rework" by 37 signals & GTD - Getting Things Done by David Allen ). There are lots of ways to fight the "distraction" but i'd love to speak about music .

Graphics researcher Jorge Jimenez has cracked the problem of rendering what he calls "ultra realistic skin" in real-time with consumer-level computer and graphics hardware. It's a breakthrough made possible by the process of separable subsurface scattering (SSS) which quickly renders the translucent properties of skin and its effect on light in two post-processing passes. The code is based wholly on original research using DirectX 10. Jimenez describes the achievement as the result of hours of "research, desperation, excitement, happiness, pride, sadness and extreme dedication."

There are apps, and there are apps. Every once in a while, an app appears that’s so beautiful, so technical, and so completely exploits the Apple iDevice that it takes one’s breath away. This is one of those.

Gumroad is an exciting new startup that lets anyone sell digital content with just a link. It was founded by the prolific Sahil Lavingia.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been interviewing with Google for a job doing primarily JavaScript development. I didn’t end up getting the job but I thought I would share the process of interviewing for Google as it was both very exciting and a humbling experience. I can’t reveal everything as I’m under a few NDAs. I’m not going to mention the products or teams that I was interviewing for but you may be able to guess.

I’ve been working on my startup Propelly for just over six months now, from the initial idea to the finished product and we’re set to launch today. Great isn’t it? Except one of our competetors got a 1.1 million dollar investment the night before and is now currently sitting on the front page of TechCrunch. Crap.

I ENVY the design community. I am JEALOUS of the programmer/developer community. Want to know why? It’s simple: They thrive on sharing, collaborating, and improving their field.

Imagine buying a car that locks you into one brand of fuel. A new BMW, for example, that only runs on BMW gas. There are plenty of BMW gas stations around, even a few in your neighborhood, so convenience isn't an issue. But if one of those other gas stations offers a discount, a membership program, or some other attractive marketing campaign, you can't participate. You're locked in with the BMW gas stations.

I’m a developer, have been for a long time. I’ve been wrting code for the web for the past decade in my life. I think I might be stuck in a bubble, I look to the web to solve problems that can be solved better in simpler ways. And looking around, I know I am not the only one.

I’ve noticed a rather interesting thing about best practices and trends in software development, they tend to oscillate from one extreme to another over time. So many of the things that are currently trendy or considered “good” are things that a few years back were considered “bad” and even further back were “good.”

Mistakes in software design aren’t always as easy to spot, but often it comes down to the same thing. To design something you must have at least a basic level of domain knowledge.  That doesn’t means you have to be a world famous chef in order to write a recipe webapp, but you need to make sure you at least know the basics.