Roberto De Almeida

At 99designs we love great design, and a big part of good design is use of color. We were interested to see how designers make use of color in their designs, so we built an automatic color extractor to enable us to analyse color usage at a massive scale.

Would be interesting to make a website where you upload your company logo at it creates a colored CSS theme that goes with it.

Last Sunday, the BII's independent judges awarded BrewDog a prize for Bar Operator of the Year. When Diageo found out -- just ahead of the ceremony -- that a company affiliated with them hadn't won the prize, they threw a tantrum and said that they would cease all sponsorship of BII events unless the prize was given to them.

So BrewDog -- who'd been told in advance that they'd won -- sat at their table at the banquet with jaws on their chests as their competitor's name was read out by the announcer, and representatives from Diageo's chosen bar got up on stage to accept an award whose plaque clearly said "BREWDOG: BAR OPERATOR OF THE YEAR." The farce has turned into a scandal, and Diageo has issued a non-apology of the "mistakes were made" sort.

Maybe Kind of Blue has something very specific to teach us about the nature of true genius. It shows that there is a kind of magic to things that are made by exceptional people who are not in need of the false security that flaunting so often provides. And maybe this is the message that all jazz music tries to teach: make great things with your friends, and don’t be afraid to let them have the spotlight every once in a while. If it’s good, your recognition will come. Just ask Miles Davis.

Have you ever needed to parse a URL using regular expressions? It’s not easy to write regular expressions (for a lot of people, including myself) and it’s even tougher to test to see if that regular expression is reliable across every situation. You could, of course, just copy and paste a regular expression (or function or library) that someone else developed and use that, but I propose that there is a simpler and more concise way of parsing URLs that doesn’t require any regular expressions.

Really smart, I like it.

BEAM stands for "Biology Electronics Aesthetics Mechanics" and is an approach to simple, biologically-inspired robo-critters, invented by robot engineer Mark Tilden (designer of the WowWee Robosapien).

In a play on Isaac Asimov's famous "Laws of Robotics," Tilden came up with a set of his own laws for BEAM:

1. A robot must protect its existence at all costs.

2. A robot must obtain and maintain access to its own power source.

3. A robot must continually search for better power sources.

Or, stated in more pragmatic terms:

1. Protect thy ass.

2. Feed thy ass.

3. Get thy ass to better real estate.

As these "laws" imply, the BEAM approach emphasizes autonomy, simple, robust design (usually little more than analog components and a solar cell), and improved future designs based on observation of robots interacting with each other and their environment. Mark Tilden is fond of saying that a human is just a way that a robot makes a better robot.

My new favorite Tumblr.