“The Aesthetic-Usability Effect: users perceive more aesthetically pleasing designs to be easier to use than less aesthetically pleasing designs.

“Nu is written in Objective-C, and is designed to allow deep interaction with Objective-C programs. As a result, Nu has deep access to its own implementation. That gives its users an unusual ability to explore and understand Nu.

“I publish various things on the web. I write in this blog, I publish photos to my photo blog and I save snippets of interesting articles using Magnolia. Unfortunately, Facebook only allows the importing of a single RSS feed. Enter Yahoo Pipes. Using Yahoo Pipes, I can combine all three into a single RSS feed.

What I love about this system is that it ties together the three power houses of the current internet: Google (Feedburner), Yahoo and Facebook, all working together.

“Avoiding error handling results in shorter and clearer code. In C etc. you have to write something if you detect an error, but in Erlang it’s easy - don’t even bother to write code that checks for errors. Just let it crash, the Erlang runtime will provide a perfectly acceptable error diagnostic.

Then write a new linked process that observes the crashes and tries to correct the error. If it can’t correct the error it should crash (same principle). Each monitor should try a simpler error recovery strategy, until finally the error is fixed.

“It doesn’t take special talents to reproduce—even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of. It helps more people, too.

“Partnerships have been crucial; the batsmen have clung on to each other dearly. Unlike in Australia, where they rattled off one masterpiece after another, none of these innings will be termed ‘great’. Yet they’ve made a collective statement. Like a swarm of bees, they’ve combined to make life hell for the opposition.

“Kumble has been the quintessential team man, the architect of far more Indian victories than the glory boys in the middle order.

“Scientists tend to ‘desist’ from scientific research upon marriage just like criminals desist from crime upon marriage.

“Give me a Linux desktop anywhere and I can tell you whether it has atime on or off, just by clicking around. That’s how I notice when I forget to turn off atime on a newly installed system: the system has weird desktop lags and unnecessary disk trashing.

“Consumer loyalty is directly linked to the amount the consumer invests out of pocket. Apple has a fiercely loyal base partly because they feel really stupid spending an extra $300 on a product that isn’t something special. With social networking sites the amount spent is zero - and the loyalty corresponds.