Bloomberg interactive graphic on FIFA scandal

Oh, this is amazing: Following the FIFA Fiasco: Tracking the Charges Against FIFA's Executives and Partners

I love the way the tentacles spread out as you click on each link.

I could just click, and read, all day.

Tony Zhou on Chuck Jones

If you have any interest in cinema as an art form, you're probably already aware of Tony Zhou's superb series of video-essays, Every Frame a Painting.

Every single one of the essays in the series is wonderful, but I was completely taken by his recent work on Chuck Jones.

Chuck Jones, of course, was one of the creative visionaries behind the remarkable Looney Tunes cartoons produced during the 1940's, 1950's, and 1960's.

By the time I started watching Looney Tunes, Jones and the team were already at the peak of their form, and in my opinion they don't get anywhere near enough credit. Although these are animated short features, they are still remarkable, and enduring, works of art.

And so it's great to see them get the thorough, loving, and nuanced Tony Zhou treatment.

Spend some time with Every Frame a Painting, and with the Chuck Jones feature in particular; you won't regret it.

What I Learned: a very short review

In this modern age, with its technological marvels, it has become feasible, even straightforward, to write and publish your own book, using services such as SmashWords, LuLu, etc. And having done so, you can even make your book available to anyone who wants on a marketplace like Amazon.

My father took advantage of this capability to write a book: What I Learned.

When I think about the lives of my parents, they've always seemed divided into three segments:

1. Before Bryan was born
2. When I was a child, living with my parents
3. After I grew up

And of these three segments, the middle segment swells in my viewing to assume the largest size and greatest prominence.

But of course, upon reflection, that childhood time with my parents was barely 20% of their lives.

And thus events that assume an enormous size in my own memory (e.g., our Burmese cats), and which somehow seem like a story that was an entire chapter in my life, only have time for a short paragraph in a longer tale.

So while I've heard most of the stories in the book, on and off, over the years, it turned out to be quite interesting to hear them told in a different order, from a different perspective.

Although the book is subtitled "An Autobiograpy," and tends broadly toward a mostly matter-of-fact depiction of people, places, and events, it is certainly also a memoir, colored by my father's own perception of those parts of his life that he found most worthy of relating.

And yet it also wouldn't be wrong to call the book a testament, or a creed, for some of the most interesting parts are when he points a finger at a moment when something changed for him, or when he realized a point when he had made up his mind about something.

So I could wish there was a little less of the facts and figures, which although important and significant are a tad dry in the telling, and instead could wish there were a few more pictures (and that the pictures were larger and easier to see).

And I could also wish that he had let a bit more of his personality out, granted more prominence to more strongly-issued opinions and proclamations. He has always had interesting and unusual positions about Right and Wrong and Should and Shouldn't and Cause and Coincidence, but I suspect that a 50 year career in organized public education, organized armed services, and organized civil service has forced him, over the years, to organize his life and express himself civilly.

So although it's clear by the end of What I Learned that, in fact, some quite interesting things were learned, those positions, policies, and proposals are not expressed as boldly, baldly, and aggressively as they perhaps could and should have been.

Of course, he isn't running for president, and this isn't a platform, so to observe that this book misses a few chances to Shout About Things That Matter is unfair, because my father, whatever he has been through the years, is certainly not a shouter.

Overall, it's an interesting book, and certainly a well-written one, which flows along and leaves even me, who certainly should have known my father at least as well as most people, feeling that I now know him at least a little bit better.

And so I'm glad he wrote it, and I'm glad I read it.

Stuff I'm reading, mid-July edition

At last, summer is here; the weather is beautiful.

• Reddit's Future Is the Future of the Internet

  Reddit’s conundrum is worth following not just because the site is one of the major anchors of the social web or because it attracts massive amounts of traffic - a whopping 164 million visitors each month. It’s important because the site is founded on principles that mirror the founding principles of the web itself. Reddit was conceived as an open forum, a place where conversation is self-regulated and community-driven, freedom of expression is prized above all, and authorities don’t meddle with - much less censor - content. And sometimes, wonderful things happen. But there’s also a dark side.

• How does Shazam work

  This article is a summary of the search I did to understand Shazam.

  I’ll start with the basics of music theory, present some signal processing stuff and end with the mechanisms behind Shazam.

• Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon New York 2015

  InfoQ reported from the event, and there are also numerous QCon photos on our Flickr page. This article, however, presents a summary of QCon New York as blogged and tweeted by attendees.

• Java Annotated Monthly – July 2015

  You don’t always sign up for a free e-book about collecting garbage, but when you do, that book is by the unwavering Charles Humble at InfoQ. Within, you will find heaps of helpful pointers on monitoring and tuning, and a sweeping look at many practical topics in modern garbage collection. This book is an indispensable reference for new and old generations of Java developers alike.

• The Java Garbage Collection Mini-Book

  The Java Garbage Collection Mini-book provides a concise, accessible guide for Java architects and senior developers who want to understand what garbage collection is, how it works, and how it impacts the execution of their programs.

  This book dives right into the details. Starting with an examination of the Java heap and pointers, safe-points, and generational collection, the book then explores each collector in turn, describing its memory structure, the basics of the algorithm, and its performance characteristics.

• Interview: Larry Wall

  At FOSDEM 2015 in Brussels, we caught up with Larry to ask him why Perl 6 has taken so long (Perl 5 was released in 1994), how difficult it is to manage a project when everyone has strong opinions and pulling in different directions, and how his background in linguistics influenced the design of Perl from the start.

• Getting into Linux Kernel Development

  The first thing that'll happen when you send the first version of your patchset to the mailing list is that it will be outright rejected. It's very uncommon that a patchset is merged immediately. Maybe you could've done something better, maybe you didn't grab some locks in the right order, maybe you missed a race condition, etc. It's important not to be dissuaded when your patch gets rejected. It happens to everyone, just take the feedback you got and move on.

• IBM Cloud: it’s the infrastructure, stupid

  When everyone else in IT turned around one day and realised Amazon was going to eat their lunch just as surely as software was eating the world they had to do something about standardising and commoditising the infrastructure layers of the stack - storage, network and compute - in a topology that resembled Amazon’s own services, without directly aping them (Eucalyptus, acquired by HP, tried that route).

• Speed Up Your Rails App by 66% - The Complete Guide to Rails Caching

  As a tip to newcomers to caching, my advice is to ignore action caching and page caching. The situations where these two techniques can be used is so narrow that these features were removed from Rails as of 4.0. I recommend instead getting very comfortable with fragment caching - which I'll cover in detail now.

• The Web’s Cruft Problem

  Why does CNN show ads? To make money. Why does CNN include tracking services? To learn more about the reader, to show more targeted ads, to make more money. Why does CNN use social media buttons? To get people to share the article, to get more page views, to get more ad views, to make more money. Why does CNN include a weather widget? Ok I don’t get that one; they should really get rid of that.

  Again, I don’t mean to call out CNN as the "bad example," but rather use them to show a specific example of a model that has become pervasive for content on the web.

  My friend Brian Rinaldi recently wrote that the content model of the web is broken, in which he argues that we as web users thoroughly devalue content and writers. He argues that because we refuse to pay for content, content producers must resort to increasingly drastic tactics to make money off the content they produce - or have some ulterior motives to make the content production possible.

  Paywalls have failed (mostly), so we’re left with a bunch of sites that use an eclectic set of ads, tracking scripts, modals, and such, all in an attempt to scrape together enough revenue to fund the content that lives behind the cruft.

• If You've Got Nothing to Hide...

  Because the attack on the civil registry in Amsterdam is widely appreciated as an example of the work the resistance did during the war it is still very much present in the Dutch collective consciousness (though, unfortunately, less so with the passing of time). Apparently innocent database fields suddenly came back to bite a very large group of citizens.

• The Man With No Name, my role model for life

  The Ennio Morricone Anthology - A Fistful Of Film Music is my stranded on a desert island album of choice. It hits every emotion that I could ever want and I dare you - no - I double dare you to listen to Man With A Harmonica or Navajo Joe and tell me you feel nothing. If I listen to this collection from beginning to end, I still get goosebumps.

It's not just a game, ...

... it's a journey through 1000 years of Eastern European history:

CD Projekt Red On The Making Of The Witcher 1: "We thought we could accomplish anything."

"[This topic] could potentially spawn a minor dissertation," he admitted. "I haven’t even intimated at the more literary and cultural references [in the Witcher series], like the friction between the Romantic and Positivist worldviews, the coexistence of superstition and science, the Frozen or Ice Plains at the tail end of the game as reflecting a strong trope in Polish culture: namely, the revisiting of past triumphs and tragedies."

"El Chapo Otra Fuga Más"

Wow. Amazing video: Watch "El Chapo" Guzmán's escape and his amazing 4,591-foot tunnel.

NOTE: Turn on subtitles to see the translation of the "narcocorrido" about the escape. Witness the moment of the escape and the amazing tunnel (4921 feet long, with a ventilation system, electric illumination, and motorized carts) that El Chapo Guzmán took to get out of the prison of El Altiplano, in Mexico.

It's not just a game, ...

... it's a reason to embark on a whole new movie franchise.