All my blog posts and articles
You should read this book: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Basically the book explains and teaches that when you hear, for example, that Egypt is getting a billion US$ in military aid, that’s not what it sounds like. We are not sending them a check for a million bucks. We are actually sending the million bucks to US millitary corporations.
Why? Because the funds that Egypt gets can only be spent with specific US companies on sp...
What Did Edward Snowden Get Wrong? Everything | RAND:
Incidents like the Snowden affair put my former colleagues in the intelligence community in an impossible position. Yes, the official explanations about the virtues of data-collection efforts can sound self-justifying and vague. But they’re still right. I know firsthand that Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, is telling the truth when he talks about plots that have been preempted and attacks that have been foiled because of intelligence his agency collected. I know because I was on the inside, I have long held security clearances, and I participated in many of the activities he describes.
I stumbled across this web site. I can’t say anything about their status or quality but I was suprised that someone developed what looks like a complete “university admin in a box” cloud based software. Maybe I can use it for Bootup Academy!
Get a Feature tour of Fedena – Management Information System:
Fedena provides user-friendly dashboards with login access to all the teachers, non-teaching staff, students, parents and management body of your institution. The various modules available in Fedena takes care of all the processes in your institution, right from admission of new students to generating transfer certificate, when the student completes the studies.
I haven’t read it, but, it’s free 🙂
A really useful link. For Ruby programmers only.
Jorge Coca | [HOW-TO] Build a Rails gem with Bundler – Gumby Framework:
Since I’m building a new Rails website, and I wanted to use Gumby as a part of my Gemfile, and I couldn’t find a gem with the newest version of the framework, I decided to write my first Rails gem and publish it to the community.
I am reading a really cool book right now: GARBO: The Spy Who Saved D-Day
Could it be a total spoof, and even as we speak, special forces are infiltrating Damascus and doing their thing? And “whoops” – did I just give it all away?
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I was rather pleased with myself!
I have been changing all my passwords to easier to remember but supposedly harder to crack passwords. I had read, on good authority, that making a password longer was a better protection that using lots of funky characters. So for example, I set my gmail password to “when-i-need-to-send-mail”. Nice and long. Also, sites that check a password for safety, tell me that’s a good password. http://www.passwordmeter.com gives it a 100% – “Very Strong”.
I admit that my inutition was confused. I was using common english words. Even though I have a lot of them and a long overall password length, it did feel like it was not as secure as the experts were telling me…
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If you are anything like me, this is something you’ve try to articulate. Here’s a great article on that arcane topic!
What is algebra? | profkeithdevlin:
Is mastery of algebra (i.e., algebraic thinking) worth the effort? You bet — though you’d be hard pressed to reach that conclusion based on what you will find in most school algebra textbooks. In today’s world, most of us really do need to master algebraic thinking. In particular, you need to use algebraic thinking if you want to write a macro to calculate the cells in a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel. This one example alone makes it clear why algebra, and not arithmetic, should ...
The way you try to get me to renew my subscription is just as bad as many of the merchants you call out in your reviews.
It is August. I have now received 3 mailings saying things like “It’s almost too late” and “ THIRD NOTICE” reminding me to renew my subscription.
My subscription doesn’t expire until December 2013, 4 months from now. We are barely half way through the subcription period.
LEAVE ME ALONE please.
You are setting a horrible example.
How to Use Siri – Full list of Siri Commands for iPhone, iPad, Video:
Below is a comprehensive Siri Commands List (updated for iOS6) for the new Siri Personal Assistant, optimized for mobile Safari browsers. These cool and useful Siri Commands can be used on your iPhone 5, iPhone 4s, iPad, iPad mini, and the iPod Touch. If you find this list helpful, or if you would like to add to our list of top Siri Commands, please use the comments section below.
Master’s Degree Is New Frontier of Study Online – NYTimes.com:
Next January, the Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a master’s degree in computer science through massive open online courses for a fraction of the on-campus cost, a first for an elite institution. If it even approaches its goal of drawing thousands of students, it could signal a change to the landscape of higher education.
Seth Godin is said to have said that anonymous commenting is not a good thing:
“…Mathew, the forces for anonymous are running out of time. For almost two decades, the internet has been anonymous friendly, and what has come of it?…” (from GigaOm, via @davewiner)
Here’s what Rosie O’Donnel said about Twitter, which gets to a similar point:
“…Correct, and that’s what it is. It’s like standing on a stage in a darkened comedy club and people throwing shit at you and you still trying to do your act…” (from transcript of Here’s the Thing interview)
I came across this article a few days ago. The Ticktock of the Death Clock – NYTimes.com. Yes a depressing topic. The author muses on the wonderful internet resource DeathClock.com which purports to tell you, to the second, when you will die. Hah Hah funny.
Oddly though the article turns this topic into a positive and constructive messasge. Once the author sees that according to DeathClock.com he only has 18 years to go, he ups and quits his job:
Yes, just like that. Call me crazy. I worked as an editor and, ironically, my soon-to-be-former boss had once gi...
A couple of entrepreneurs asked me whether I’d be interested in investing in their project at a very early stage. The question arose, what kind of information would I need (and by extension would any other potential angel need) to see before even considering this?
Most obviously, what would the investor get for their funds. What are the legal/financial terms. Exactly what would the ‘paperwork’ look like. What is the total amount they want to raise this time around? What they plan to do with the money and what do they think they will need to accomplish before needing to go back to angels for more. Any references, recommendations, early validation from experts in the field, or potential or ac...
We were on vacation in Greece and Turkey a few weeks ago and I noticed many TripAdvisor Certificate of this or that, hanging in windows of random shops on remote islands (and big cities) and I got to thinking, are these for real? Is there a simple way to get a counterfiet certificate? It’s just a piece of paper and I somehow doubt that TripAdvisor in Massachusetts USA is aware that “The Citadel” shop on Santanelli is sporting a fake certificate.
[p.s: Searching for “get me tripadvisor certificate of excellence” produced these high res images ready for editing and printingat your neighborhood color print shop. ]
Cory Doctorow: Lies I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently Trees talk…:
“Lies I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently Trees talk to each other at night. All fish are named either Lorna or Jack. Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose. Tiny bears live in drain pipes. If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky. The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago. Everyone knows at least one secret language. When nobody is looking, I can fly. We are all held together by invisible threads. Books get lonely too. Sadness can be eaten. I will always be there.” — Raul Gutierrez, “Lives I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently” (via words-in-lines)
(via thatbooksmell)
About a year ago I started reading Rolling Stone magazine. It’s true what Taibbi says, it’s definitely not People or EW magazine. Yes it does have good ‘cultural’ coverage about music and art and so on, but the writing is good and interesting and very often has nothing to do with music. All the uproar about the Tsarnaev cover (I haven’t received the issue yet but I almost feel like I have) is so over the top.
I mean get over it people, it’s just a magazine cover. Anyway, Mike Taibbi below has a far more reasoned reaction to the outrage than mine, and it’s a good article.
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I’ve been using Gmail like forever now and have converted many friends and family members to using it. It’s great and it’s ridiculously cheap. Coupled with a good ad-suppressor plug-in for Safari (Mac) it works well for me. I do access it, almost always, via the desktop Mail app on Mac OSX, so I don’t experience it’s UI all the time.
But the Gmail UI is quite bizarre, with multiple different ways to do similar things, weird drop down menus and weird functionality in places. So it’s a little annoying, but, it does scale, it is cheap, and it is up almost all the time.
I only briefly considered the idea of moving from Gmail to something else when reading this article, but within seconds knew ...
Very clever!
An Automated GPS-Free Location System For Cars | IdeaFeed | Big Think:
It works through the use of two simple cameras, which collect video data that is then compared to an OpenStreetMap area map. Through a process of elimination that takes place within an average of 20 seconds of driving, the system is able to figure out exactly where the car is. During tests conducted in Germany, it located cars to within 3 meters of their actual positions.
You probably don’t know what a social login button is so forgive this bit of geekyness. I am sure you’ve seen them: “login with facebook or twitter?” If an app or a site wants to “save you the trouble” of registering a username and password, they may “make your life easier” by allowing you to register using your facebook or twitter password. Conventional wisdom in the world of apps has been that this is a user requirement, and plus beneficial to the business as well. Here’s an interesting article that refutes that belief, at least in certain significant scenarios.
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