Damian Brady’s Blog

A few things I found thanks to Simon…

Coding Horror: Separating Programming Sheep from Programming Goats: Talks about an article about some research done into why some people just can’t write code. I remember when I was doing IT at uni, there were people who would not have been able to write a strip of code to save their lives. It seems that you either get it or you don’t. My subconscious is telling me, “I knew that”…

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments: This research basically gives legitimacy to the idea that stupid people think they’re smart, and smart people lack confidence. I love this article. My subconscious is now banging on the side of my head and asking why I never listen to it.

The Baby Name Wizard: NameVoyager: This is really interesting. Basically it just shows you the change in popularity of baby names. It’s a nice flash interface, and you can see some definite trends in names. Interesting ones to search for are Prince, Hillary, and Brandon. See if you can pick the reasons for the shape of those graphs…

Damo

Haha,

Stumbled across this Top 10 Coolest DIY Gadgets on TechEBlog. Some people have way too much time, but as long as it’s amusing me, how could I complain?!

My personal favourite is the PainStation 2. Closely followed by the lego robot that plays Connect 4.

Damo “Visa” Brady

I’ve read about 5 articles in the past couple of days about the “Mosquito” ringtone that has been going around in the US and UK.

Here’s a few links: BBC, Washington Post, CBS News.

Anyway, the story goes like this:

A short time ago, a Welsh security company decided that a good way to stop teenagers congregating in certain areas would be to broadcast a really annoying sound that could only be heard by youngsters and not adults. The idea relies on the general premise that your hearing degrades as you age. The other articles have better descriptions and I’m too lazy to put my own up… There’s an image on this post that gives you the idea anyway.

Anyway, some enterprising young teenager decided to turn the technology against the adults, and recorded the sound to use as a ringtone for his phone. That way, he could use it in class, and the teachers wouldn’t be able to hear it. One of the posts I read suggested that maybe he could have just put the phone on silent, but I’ve never been a fan of occam’s razor (boring), and this solution is much more crafty.

It’s worth looking at the blog post by a guy named Ochen Kaylan - he gives samples of a whole lot of frequencies so you can see when yours cuts out (the last one I can hear is 15,000Hz - I’m going deaf…)

Oh yeah, and this guy has a download of the mp3 if you want it for your ringtone.

Damo “Visa” Brady

This is a amusing little video of some kid getting ‘packed in a game of volleyball. I’m mainly putting it up to test a video plugin I just installed.

Cool

Damo “Visa” Brady