Even though we use Helipad for our notes and to-do lists, I still think you can’t beat a good paper notebook. It’s hard to hunt down something unique, but we recently found Unfinished and Unpublished—a limited-edition collection of very special notebooks created by a collaboration between StudioMatador and several international artists and designers. The Isis&Pluto cover is particularly inspired.

Continue reading → | design, inspiration | 1 comments

PingMag MAKE features interviews with entrepreneurs and craftsman in Japan. Some of them are people who have taken over an ancient family business and are dealing with business challenges presented by modern culture and economics. Others are people who have resurrected an old craft, to find a niche space in the market today.

These interviews are literally a gold mine of ideas for designers, entrepreneurs or even programmers like me! In the most recent interview, Kiri Woodcraft with a Modern Vision, Katsunari Matsuda reveals how he gets inspiration for his products:

In my case, I get hit when I first open my eyes in the morning. When I wake up, and I’m just sitting there staring into space and thinking, an image will come to me and take shape.

And a great story for dealing with unhappy customers:

One time, we received a complaint from a customer who had bought one of our rice storage bins. It was af…

Continue reading → | inspiration, japan, design, craft

Rowland Watkins, an old university friend of mine (and a friend of all the staff at Helicoid), recently wrote up a comparison of the Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services. He’s specialised in grid and more general distributed computing for about 8 years now, so his comments on the topic have some pedigree.

Since we specialise in Rails, leveraging the power of Amazon Web Services has always seemed more natural than Google’s approach which currently relies on Python. Here’s what Rowland has to say on the matter:

The clear separation of duty in AWS is what gives it the edge over Google App Engine. EC2 allows businesses to deploy complete OS images from S3 to produce novel environments such as Morph. It gives business more control on how to put together business processes which currently isn’t possible with the Google App Engine.

It was announced today that Google are now “allowi…

Continue reading → | cloud, development, programming

From the BBC’s article, Code centre ‘in financial crisis’:

Simon Greenish, director of Bletchley Park Trust, said: “The site is unique and one of the most important remaining from World War II.
“We have exciting plans to develop the park and save it for future generations. The more visitors we have helps us to realise these plans.”

As a British software developer I find this saddening, since stories of the efforts at Bletchley Park (partly due to Neal Stephenson’s depiction in Cryptonomicon) are partly what inspired me to get into programming.

Perhaps I’ll organise a big Helicoid visit to help!

Continue reading → | culture, programming, history, england