Crayon Physics kicks ass:

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

It’s in beta now.

At work, I have a brand new quad core Dell running Vista. The machine is super fast and rock solid…except for the video card and driver.

Dell sells this computer with a defective video driver. Icons sometimes vanish until you move your mouse over them, at which time they eventually paint. The screen shows frequent painting artifacts — sometimes the entire login screen is blank, but you can still type. Software updates from ATI crash and burn.

This is true for other people’s PCs as well, so I know it is not a fluke with my machine. I have first hand experience with Vista at home, and I know that some video cards work fine with Vista. This particular configuration — the one Dell chooses to sell — does not work properly.

Yes, Vista has a lot of problems. I get it.

In this case, however, Dell is the problem. They knowingly sell this particular video card with their own PCs. 20 minutes of basic usage reveals painting artifacts and bugs. If Dell cared about customers, they would reject shitty hardware like this. Dell is huge. They can very easily tell ATI: “Sorry, not good enough. We refuse to cheapen our PCs with your flaky hardware and drivers.”

I got myself a shiny new OpenID account from Yahoo, and so far it only worked on 1 out of 3 sites:

• Pragmatic Bookshelf – yep, worked
• DZone – nope, does not work
• Blogger – nope, does not work

Perhaps one day the whole world will come together and agree to implement the spec in a consistent way so OpenID accounts work everywhere. But so far, I’m not even marginally impressed.

Each month, the folks I work with have a Java Lunch. A volunteer gives a 1-hour tech talk on something Java-related, but we’ve also had talks on ANTLR, Ruby, Groovy, and many other technologies. These lunches are fun, informative, and a good way to get free pizza.

I signed myself up to present in November — I plan to show some advanced Swing concepts. There are many reasons to give a presentation:

• Giving a presentation to your peers is one of the best ways to learn something.
• A speaking engagement provides a hard deadline, forcing you to get something done.
• Presentations can be a good way to spread some knowledge.
• Public speaking is a great career move.

But I already know Swing really well…and I don’t really need a deadline for this. Here is my real motivation:

• I want to improve my presentation skills.

I want to push the envelope a bit and expand my repertoire beyond PowerPoint with bullet points. I want to learn how to give dynamic presentations that make people say “damn, that kicked ass!” (yep, I stole that from Kathy Sierra). I want them to feel this way because they learned something within the 1 hour time constraint.

Mistakes to Avoid

I think I am a good speaker, but I certainly can improve. Here are some mistakes I (have made and) plan to avoid:

• Do not include an introduction slide. This wastes precious time because people in this audience already know who I am and what the topic will be.
• Do not include an “outline” slide. With only 60 minutes, why waste 5 minutes describing what I am about to talk about? I’d rather use my time talking about Swing.
• Absolutely do not include a “History of Swing” slide. Technology history lessons put people to sleep.
• Don’t make everything “beginner level”. Far too many technical presentations cater to rookies and are boring. This is particularly true when the audience is a group of consultants who know Java inside and out.

Things That I Would Like to Do

• Show working code snippets throughout the presentation.
• Show real working Swing examples.
• Keep the pace up. We only have an hour.

The goal of a 1-hour presentation is not to teach people details. It is to spark people’s imagination, show them what is possible, and to give people a kick in the pants (or perhaps point them in the right direction) if they are interested in pursuing the technology further.

No Slides?

One idea is to skip the slide show completely. Instead of slides, I could show a series of small Swing examples: real, running programs. After showing each example, I can switch over to an IDE, pointing out the most important code snippets. Small fonts can be an issue, but IDEA makes it easy to zoom in.

Other OCI employees have given presentations in this style and it works very well.

Bullet Points

Most presentations fall into this category, and I refuse to do it this way any more. I will not have a series of slides with bullet points.

Lots of Slides

This is an option I never considered until seeing Archaeopteryx: A Ruby MIDI Generator, via Alex’s blog.

That presentation does show some working code along with a real demo. But the bulk of the presentation consists of hundreds of slides. Giles burns through the slides at a frenetic rate, and the results are phenomenal. I have never seen or given a presentation remotely like this.

What Should I Do?

I feel like I should take one of two avenues. Either go all demo+code, or go the “super fast paced slide show” approach. I must admit, the super fast slide show approach appeals to me for these reasons:

• It is completely different than what people are used to
• If done well, it can be extremely entertaining
• It’s a big challenge
• It may avoid awkward context switching as I constantly switch back and forth between code examples and demos

That last bullet is important to me. A lot of speakers spend too much of their hour stumbling back and forth between demos, the command prompt, and their IDE. Perhaps if I put everything into a fast-paced, well scripted Keynote presentation, I can avoid these context switches.

What do you think? I just placed an order for slide:ology, perhaps that will inspire me.

A human would never make this mistake:

I initially suspected this happened because the MP3s from Amazon have “(Album Version)” in their titles while the titles in the iTunes store do not.

Simple Test

To confirm my suspicion, I renamed the tracks to match the titles in the iTunes store. Unfortunately, Genius still provides the same “Top Songs You’re Missing”, so I think this flaw goes beyond simple title matching.

I find this odd because iTunes is able to automatically locate the album art. Perhaps some of the intelligence behind the album art locator needs to work its way into the Genius sidebar.

I wrote about The Dumbest Generation back in May; now Wired has an excellent essay on the subject, much more eloquent than anything you’ll read here.

Wow, 8 reasons why this is the dumbest generation is way off target. Let’s review the list, put together by author Mark Bauerlein.

1. They make excellent “Jaywalking” targets.

The article starts with a weak argument that today’s young people “…are encased in more immediate realities that shut out conditions beyond — friends, work, clothes, cars, pop music, sitcoms, Facebook.”

Apparently “pop music” and “Facebook” are bad. But where is the evidence? Let’s continue.

2. They don’t read books — and don’t want to, either

Again, he presents no evidence. My gut tells me he is right: people read less today, particularly “young” people. But I’m also sure that has something to do with the availability of more information online. Why dig through books when I can look up something in a few seconds on Wikipedia? Does that make me “dumber”? Prove it. You may be right, but I think some evidence is in order.

3. They can’t spell

From TFA:

Lack of capitalization and IM codes dominate online writing. Without spellcheck, folks are toast.

Actually, my quote is the entire explanation put forth in the article.. Maybe people adopt shorthand writing styles because it is a PITA to text on most phones? I am detecting a distinct trend in these wacky reasons we are so “dumb”. This guy does not like technology.

4. They get ridiculed for original thought, good writing

He uses MySpace as the first example, where (apparently) buddies make fun of you if you write clearly. Huh? OK, I’m sure you can find lots of examples of this. But again, are these cherry-picked examples evidence of widespread dumbness?

He then goes on to criticize Wikipedia:

Wikipedia writing is clean and factual, but colorless and judgment-free.

That is because it is an encyclopedia. It is supposed to be judgment-free. They call it NPOV, which is actually quite smart.

5. Grand Theft Auto IV, etc.

Holy shit. Go read the article. I don’t even know where to start. He somehow connects video games to “Thousands of Massachusetts public school graduates are ending up in remedial reading and writing classes in college…”

What absolute rubbish. Maybe we ought to look at poverty, single parent households, and other such factors before pointing fingers at video games.

6. They don’t store the information

The fact that we can easily look up information on the Internet makes us dumber. I don’t get it.

7. Because their teachers don’t tell them so

Here we go again. Another “blame the teachers first” article. Sigh.

8. Because they’re young

No, no, no!. I think I first read this in a book called “The Invisible Future“, but I might be remembering that wrong. (thanks to reason 6?) The general idea is that EVERY generation since the dawn of time has always thought the young “next” generation is dumber, that society is decaying, etc. This must be wrong, of course, or by now we’d be in complete disarray.

Here’s what the IBM 5100 Portable Computer looked like:

From the look on that guy’s face, I bet that thing was damn heavy. I scanned this from the November, 1975 issue of Scientific American. Here are the specs:

I just received a whole box full of Scientific Americans from the 1970s. I’ll scan and post some of the Apple and Radio Shack ads in coming days.

The March, 1979 issue looks really cool — it features detailed descriptions of ancient catapults with lots of diagrams showing their construction. The whole magazine had a distinctive hands-on feel back then.

Lifehacker just ran their Top 10 Email Productivity Boosters. My inbox — and every other folder — is a disaster. Thus, my list is far shorter: