I saw Vantage Point last night and it blew me away. As a taste reference point, other movies I enjoyed greatly are The Usual Suspects, Thank You for Smoking and Lucky Number Slevin.

Also, I watched the movie with a slightly negative expectations, having read on IMDB that the movie retells more or less the same story from a number of different perspectives. I dislike that technique but in this case was used to expose more and more of the story instead of focusing on how characters perceive various situations.

Richard Feynman’s analysis of the space shuttle Challenger explosion is a great read for everybody interested in engineering. I particularly enjoyed his critique of the top-down approach to design.

(Of course, nobody designs software in a purely top-down or bottom-up manner. No matter from which side you start you always keep the whole roadmap in mind. But for any large product the roadmap is going to be somewhat fuzzy which is the biggest reason why we do design in the first place.)

Most of the talk about upcoming version of FireFox and IE focus on standards compatibility. Not being a web developer/designer I don’t give a damn, but I do care about another thing: bookmarks.

Bookmark management in both browsers has been locked in 1995 when the whole Internet was something like 10 websites . Its purpose was to save typing because address bars then didn’t have intellisense.

But it’s 2008 now, the Internet is pretty large, and the address bar is pretty darn smart. Classic bookmarks are pretty much meaningless.

There are two types of web pages: The ones you visit every day and the ones you may want to read again at some point in the future. The address bar is good enough for the first but the Bookmarks menu is woefully inadequate for the second.

Which is why the latest beta of FireFox 3 is so cool. It keeps the old Bookmarks menu but also introduces a bookmark "bag" where you simply store your bookmarks without worrying about hierarchy. For each bookmark you can specify a list of tags, and that’s it.

Then when you want something all you have to do is go to the address bar and type a tag or two, and the drop-down will show all the matches:

Meanwhile, the IE team is still busy playing catch-up.

If you enjoyed Rico’s writings on improving program performance then you should definitely read What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory by Ulrich Drepper. It’s a long, long PDF that’s great at curing insomnia, but the contents definitely match the title.

The first few chapters cover the hardware part which I pretended to read while playing video games, but then it moves onto the programming and gets really interesting. Highly recommended.

[Photo credits: Eugene Zelenko, click on the image for license.]

From a SlashDot comment:

You two should be careful about critcizing Bruce Schneier. His fists are tatooed with “Bob” and “Alice” and if you get on his bad side, he’ll exchange keys all over your face.