Wow
Chron.com: Answers come too late for Ike worker's daughter: Clear Lake woman uses Web to track down adult child of man killed while saving dogs from freeway
Wednesday, October 8, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Learn about psychiatry from Heavy Metal
Funny post over at Mind Hacks.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Effort Counts
Calvin Coolidge famously said: Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan press on has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
Seth Godin: Is effort a myth?
Overcoming Bias: Make an Extraordinary Effort
All we can do is play the cards we are dealt the best we can. And try to do so with every hand.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Understanding the economic crisis
Lots of material out there to read to understand what is going on. Here are some of the more interesting ones I've found:
The Money Meltdown - a set of links that attempts to summarize the situation and how we got here.
Slate.com: Subprime Suspects: Puts to rest the idea that poor homeowners are somehow to blame for this.
60 Minutes: A Look At Wall Street's Shadow Market
Megan McArdle: How did it all happen? - some cognitive science behind this.
Forbes: The Economics of Trust - Capitalism requires trust. Break the foundations of trust between people and institutions and something like this is inevitable.
And the best two explanations I have heard so far were on This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money and Another Frightening Show About the Economy
Wednesday, October 8, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Delete Email With Python
I have a problem on my host. This came in handy.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Know any interesting charities that interest geeks/technologists/developers?
Google's Matt Cutts asked this very same question a while back and followed up. Know any yourself? In particular, those that you can donate to via the United Way?
Tuesday, October 7, 2008 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
At one time I could speak Latin
Lawton Elementary was the exception to the norm of my Philadelphia educational experience. While I pretty much have forgotten everything of my 5th grade Latin studies, I bet it had a positive effect on my problem solving and communication skills. NYTimes: Latin Returns From Dead in School Language Curriculums
Tuesday, October 7, 2008 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
It's a Uke world, we just live in it
I have some links to share about ukulelies today. Scroll to the end of the post for why :)
Metafilter Thread: The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain performs the theme to "Shaft" (SYTL). Really, is any description needed?
YouTube: The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain - Shaft
YouTube: Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain - The Good the Bad the Ugly
YouTube: Ukulele weeps by Jake Shimabukuro
YouTube: Sci-Fi Ukulele: Doctor Who Theme
YouTube: Run to the Hills, Iron Maiden (on ukulele)
We bought Emma a Uke almost a year ago and she strums along while I play guitar or to just about any music playing in the house, but sometimes she just rocks out :)
Sunday, October 5, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Open Source Rich Internet Application Framework at CIM: OpenPyro
Check it out: OpenPyro: OpenPyro is a pure AS3 framework for creating RIA's. Open Pyro draws a lot of inspiration from Flex but aims to be more expressive as well as have a smaller filesize and memory footprint.
Arpit Mathur, one of the most brilliant developers I know and a straight up Flash guru is leading the Open Pyro project. He recently posted about OpenPyro on his personal blog and includes a screencast of him using the framework to develop an app.
Kevin Fitzpatrick another CIM Flash master, and lead developer of another open source project at CIM, LogBook, comments about OpenPyro.
Saturday, October 4, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Bad times at two blogging networks
Tech Crunch: Big Blogger Pay Cuts At b5Media
Valleywag: Valleywag cuts 60 percent of staff
Gawker: Friday Is Always Black
Hopes and prayers for all those affected.
Saturday, October 4, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Some ummm... presidential links for today
In software engineering we have a concept called 'Duck Typing'. Basically, some languages trust developers more so than others (lets say Python versus Java), and you can trust that if an object 'walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck'.
You end up writing far less code due to the trust you have that things are what they appear to be.
In this year's Presidential campaign, you have a candidate that looks like a normal Joe, walks like a normal Joe, and talks like a normal Joe, but whose income is anything but.
CNBC.com: Warren Buffet explains the credit crisis to Charlie Rose
FREE FOR ALL! the movie - watch it online. Roger Ebert's review.
Andrew Sullivan: Confronting Racism Against Obama (Powerful video)
NYTimes: Tom Davis Gives Up
YouTube: SNL VP Debate (via akkamsrazor)
YouTube.com: 5 Friends Uncensored - Don't Vote
YouTube.com: Bob Dylan: A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall
Saturday, October 4, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Upgrading SVN on Leopard
If you've been keeping your Subclipse Eclipse plugin up to date on Leopard, sooner or later you will be met with a situation where your svn cli client will report an incompatibility and lead you to upgrading it.
The problem starts when you download and install the universal binary at CollabNet.
Installation goes well, but it doesn't upgrade the original installation you have on your machine.
The simplest solution found in the comments in this post was to override path so that /usr/local/bin/ takes precedence over /usr/bin/ . In addition, I took the additional step of moving the original svn binaries from /usr/bin to a backup folder, to avoid any possible conflicts.
Saturday, October 4, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Google launches a Memeorandum competitor
Check out the new version of Google's Blog Search. I'm looking forward to seeing what this evolves into. About time there was some new competition in this space.
Other meme-trackers I visit all too often:
Thursday, October 2, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
TheServerSide.com: A RESTful Core 3 Part Series
There's a great series on applying RESTful concepts in application design at TheServerSide.com by Randy Kahle and Tom Hicks that's worth a read:
A RESTful Core for Web-like Application Flexibility - Part 1
A RESTful Core for Web-like Application Flexibility - Part 2
A RESTful Core for Web-like Application Flexibility - Part 3
Wednesday, October 1, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Social Software Links for October 1st, 2008: Of Google Hive Minds and Friending Obsolescence
Links on a theme in today's roundup.
Union Square Ventures: Why The Flow Of Innovation Has Reversed:
. It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to the military, then to the enterprise, and finally to the consumer. Today, it is the reverse. All of the most interesting stuff is being built first for consumers and is tricking back to the enterprise. I suggested that one reason this is happening is that the success of a web service is more often determined by its social engineering than its electrical engineering.
Jeremiah Owyang (of Forrester Research): Why 'Friending' Will Be Obsolete:
Like a baby, we're teaching the 'system' our language, how to walk, how to coexist in our real flesh and blood world, the 'system' is just starting to show intelligence. One primary example of this is the use of hashtags in Twitter. We use the # sign to tag content so it's easily to organize and find. That one # character isn't native to our tongue (unless when you recite your grocery list and say "hashtag") it's another example of us speaking machine language in order to teach the system.For example, I started a social experiment on Sunday, where I encouraged folks to tweet related music artists using the tag "#relatedmusic" you can see the database form when you search for that term -If we had enough people do this in my -and your- network we'd be able to build a reference engine that other music reccomendations services could pull from.
Search Engine Land: Danny Sullivan: The Google Hive Mind:
As Google turns 10 years old, that important birthday sees the company more powerful than ever before. With its competitors in disarray, the Big G seems likely to grow even further. The secret to its success? For me, it's what I've been calling the "Google Hive Mind. " Rather than follow a rigid top-down master plan, the company's direction and success has been shaped by decisions often taken independently of how they'll benefit the company as a whole. But collectively, those decisions DO form a master plan, a hive mind that dictates what the company will do.
Phil Windley's Technometria: Alan Kay: Is Computer Science an Oxymoron?:
One of Alan's undergraduate degrees is in molecular biology. He can't understand it anymore despite having tried to review new developments every few years. That's not true in computer science. The basics are still mostly the same. If you go to most campuses, there is a single computer science department and the first course in computer science is almost indistinguishable from the first course in 1960. They're about data structures and algorithms despite the fact that almost nothing exciting about computing today has to do with data structures and algorithms.The Internet is like the human body. It's replaced all of its atoms and bits at least twice since it started even though the Internet has never stopped working. Attacks on the 'Net aren't really attacks on the 'Net, they're attacks on machines on the 'Net. Very few software systems, maybe none, are built in ways that sustain operation in spite of being continually rebuilt and continually growing.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Mentors can make a difference in your life
I am very thankful for mine.
The Simple Dollar has some advice on "How to Find and Utilize a Mentor, No Matter What You're Doing".
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Today's CD production - too loud for Metal fans?
Wall Street Journal: Even Heavy-Metal Fans Complain That Today's Music Is Too Loud!!!
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Epilepsy, Autism, Schizophrenia - A Connection Found?
Science Daily: Epilepsy, Autism, Schizophrenia: Master Switch That 'Balances The Brain' Found
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Some Eclipse and Maven Links
Maven: What is Maven?
Maven: Maven Getting Started Guide
Maven: Guide to using Eclipse with Maven 2.x
Eclipse: Top 10 Tips for New Eclipse Users
IBM developerWorks: Migrating to Eclipse: A developer's guide to evaluating Eclipse vs. Netbeans
eclipse-plugin: Weblogic Plugin for Eclipse
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
My thoughts and prayers Antonella
It's coming up on the one year anniversary of my Mom's passing. Antonella Pavese, who had an entirely different relationship with her Mom, then I had with mine, shares so much in a post that I feel I can relate to.
Antonella Pavese: Of things lost, of things found:
Slowly walking our karmic circles over and over again. I'm holding her hand, still cold but trusting, as I steer her away from furnitures and walls.I look at my mother and I realize that all the memories she didn't tell me about, all the memories I didn't listen to are gone forever. All is left is this moment, in which she and I walk in circles, hand in hand, in a medium size apartment in Rome, the capital of a country with a painful past. In a few days, I will be thousands of miles away from this moment and this place. Right now, I'm here.
Thank you for sharing that Antonella. My heart goes out to you.
Sunday, September 28, 2008 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Development links for today, Sunday, September 28th 2008
stackoverflow: What are the best resources to learn about capacity planning
Charles Miller: Spring is Sprung - his thoughts on SpringSource's new maintenance policy.
xkcd: Listen to Yourself
IBM developerWorks: Using Python to create UNIX command line tools
SEOBook: Google's Chinese Wall Between AdWords Ads & Organic Search Results Disappears*
Erann Gat: Lisping at JPL - the history of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab.
Sunday, September 28, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
"a Manual for our Kids to Save the Future"?
That's what John Baichtal at his Wired Blog "Geek Dad" called Cory Doctorow's book sci-fi novel "Little Brother", in his glowing review posted last week.
While you can download the book for free legally from the website, I'm going to want to buy a copy for the bookshelf - it's a great book so far.
One of the best purchases of mine these past few months was following his comic book series "Futuristic Tales" from IDW. As a sci-fi and comic book fan, I gotta tell ya, it was worth every penny.
Sunday, September 28, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Available: Blogger Libel Insurance
Media Bloggers Association is offering to its members a plan for libel insurance.
Bottom line: it's a big deal.
Read more at Dan Gillmor's and Seth Finkelstein's.
Sunday, September 28, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Give respect to Weird Al
There is a great Wired retrospective on "Weird Al" Yankovic's career.
Sunday, September 28, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Some RSS reader ideas
Check out Kevin's thoughts on making RSS easier.
Friday, September 26, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Weblog powered by Movable Type4.2-en | Syndicate this weblog (XML)
All Contents Copyright 1992-2005 Karl Martino
All Rights Reserved. Please read my disclaimers.
