links for 2011-08-02

Loving how "You’re going to just hate Eclipse. You’re going to hate it with the heat of a thousand suns. It’s going to feel slow and bloated and it won’t taste like real food" morphs into "The upside is, after acclimating to Eclipse, you’ll enjoy some seriously amazing, productivity-boosting code completion, refactoring, and automatic fixing. It’ll basically write your code for you."

"The fashion writer represents the worst excesses of the west's dieting obsession. Why send her to cover a devastating famine?"

"How having access to more and more data about who is reading your stories when and where could help make journalism better". Great article by Alexis, but I still feel it is a shame that in 2011 even someone as forward thinking as him feels the need to temper the message by saying more data "could" make journalism better. Every other digital vertical knows that more data "would" make things better...

"I hear that programmer-journalists are needed, having this combo of skills is valuable.  But it’s harder than you think to find an organization that a) has a persistent opening and b) understands what a programmer journalist can do.  Add to this that the positions that do exist want oodles and oodles of experience, and the pool is small."

"Culled here are some remarkable archival images of ethnic diversity in Russia during that period, which at the time included not only all the countries that would eventually become the Soviet Union, but also present-day Finland and Poland."

Fascinating essay by Tyler Tate

Includes the quote: "While my friends were rolling in cash from native apps, I couldn't pay my rent building web apps"

Oh, I missed this from a few days ago, Tammy Gur looking at the UX of BBC World Service news content. I had the opportunity of working with on the internationalisation project back in 2005 at the BBC and she is very talented.

"But the reaction that really matters came from real users. Actively asking people what they think about a new product is always chastening yet ultimately rewarding, akin to a visit to the stern dentist."

"Every big organisation has one and every department at the BBC is required to keep it updated. It lists any and all hypothetical risks to the business, but that doesn't mean that they will happen. By virtue of what departments are asked to consider, the risks can and do range in terms of scale and potential severity but they help ensure that the BBC is able to effectively manage and deliver its projects successfully. Indeed, it would be negligent not to have a Risk Register that covered every potential scenario."