Blog Posts

January 2012

• 2012-01-08

  On the importance of learning to work in teams

  David Colletta shared this link in comments to my recent post about team work. David’s link was good enough that I thought I should excerpt it to increase the chances that my colleagues and students at Brandeis see it.

  Here’s an excerpt from it:

  “However, the most rewarding experiences I had were when I was actively collaborating with others on the H-Store and Relational Cloud projects. We achieved more than I could have by myself, I learned more than I would have by myself, and most importantly: it is more fun to work with others. You have people to commiserate with when pape...

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  #education #brandeis
• 2012-01-06

  Serve-the-check instead of Starve-the-beast

  Here’s an interesting article “Modernizing Conservatism”, yes, not my typical subject matter. Written from a Conservative’s viewpoint it critiques some of the pillars of American Conservatism that might not be effective or useful anymore.

  The part I found the most interesting is the argument against the popular Starve The Beast concept in our current political discourse. As I understand it (a big caveat) the Starve The Beast idea is that the only way to shrink the size of government is by cutting budgets severely. Because, while everyone agrees that government is too big (!) congress does not hav...

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  #politics
• 2012-01-04

  Teaching: Group Projects

  I’ve had occasion as you know to teach a few times at Brandeis University. The courses were in Web Development, Mobile Development and Game Development. A major component was a Product Incubator where students worked in teams to develop a product. The organizational and logistical questions as well as the dynamics around team work were significant and challenging.

  In my mind the overall benefit of team student projects are:

  students must show mastery of the material to do well it is more fun and rewarding for the students team work is a fundamental aspect of whatever they will do in the future the teachers are around to help ste...

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  #education #brandeis
• 2012-01-03

  Texting: Left and Right Hand of Government

  Do you agree that prohibiting texting while driving is contradictory to texting as a way to deliver of major emergency messages?

  “This week I noted a couple of different items that are a good example of the right hand of the Government not knowing what the left hand of the Government is doing, in the headlines this week. The first being that the Government is establishing a system to push Emergency Broadcast Alerts to our Cell Phones and other electronic widgets. The second is the banning of using Cell Phones while in a vehicle, so we could not get them while moving.” (from Software Safety Net)

  I am...

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  #politics
• 2012-01-02

  I wish I knew more JavaScript

  I know basic Javascript. I think I will be learning more soon. I think JavaScript is the language of the (near) future. Predicting what the language of the (further) future is would be impossible, as programming languages come and go. Hopefully they get better as they evolve.

  Why do I say that it is the language of the (near) future? Compared, for example to Java, or Ruby or Python, or even Erlang? Here’s an article I wrote about that: how JavaScript may be the most important language for the web for the near future. Do you agree?

  With that context, I was very interested to see Jon Ressig’s article...

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  #programming
• 2012-01-01

  TSA: Smokescreening

  An interesting and fun to read article in Vanity Fair about the security check procedures established by the TSA:

  “Taking off your shoes is next to useless. “It’s like saying, Last time the terrorists wore red shirts, so now we’re going to ban red shirts,” Schneier says. “If the T.S.A. focuses on shoes, terrorists will put their explosives elsewhere. €œFocusing on specific threats like shoe bombs or snow-globe bombs simply induces the bad guys to do something else. You end up spending a lot on the screening and you haven’€™t reduced the total threat.” (from: Vanity Fair)

  Schneier of course is Bruce Schneier who is always interesting to read. He writes about security and computers. I have quoted him many times before on this blog.

• 2012-01-01

  Happy New Year from Curaçao!

  It felt like a war zone without the danger! [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofUdhro7G2o&w=420&h=315]

  #curacao #personal

December 2011

• 2011-12-31

  Sharing Web Site Designs

  Recently I wanted to get feedback on one of several ideas for the design of the new BlogBridge web site. I had selected 6 product web sites that had a nice look and wanted to somehow visually compare them. Here are two free tools I used:

  Papparazzi! is a free Mac utility that does one thing and does it well. It makes a screen shot from a URL of a web site, importantly, including the whole page not just the part that is visible without scrolling. Pintrest is a free web site that facilitates sharing of images of things. Kind of like a delicious for images … or something. It’s kind of hard to describe whic...

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  #design
• 2011-12-29

  MacBook Performance comparison

  Due to an unusual set of coincidences I have 3 different Macintosh computers in my office today so I could run performance comparisons. After a brief bit of research I came across XBench, a free, open source benchmarking suite. I am not positive that it is the state of the art, but it’s quite popular. Here’s what I found:

  Mac Pro, Early 2009, with 6 Gig of memory and a Solid State Disk (SDD) (MacPro4,1)

  Overall: 234.09, CPU: 198.42 Memory: 474.51 Graphics: 379.61

  MacBook Air, Late 2010, with 4 Gig of memory and a SDD (MacBookAir3,2)

  Overall: 126.07 CPU: 149.17 Memory: 198.90 Graphics: 159.94

  Macbook Air, Late 2011, with 4 Gig of memory and a SDD (MacBookAir4,2)

  Overall: 199.85 CPU: 205.25 Memory: 508.89 Graphics: 316.38

  I know, you want to know the units, and I don’t know them. But still you can see remarkably that the brand new MacBook Air is almost as performant as the huge towering Mac Pro, Pretty amazing and telling.

  #apple #technology
• 2011-12-27

  Altered States

  I saw this movie, Altered States, again last night. It’s even better than I remembered and it’s my third or fourth time seeing it! It’s weird and scary (still) but really compelling. An antropo-horror movie!

  [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbYT3UclhNY]

• 2011-12-26

  Pause, you…

  I saw this quote from Dickens’ Great Expectations. I had to read it several times to get the meaning. It’s appropriate for this season.

  “Pause you,”€ Pip says, “€œand think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.” (from Dickens, as quoted by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times)

• 2011-12-25

  Common Non-sense

  I just finished reading a great book, “Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer ” by Duncan Watts. First of all it confirms the eternal sceptic that I am.

  My summary of that book is that it warns us to be careful when we think we understand why something happened (why did that startup succeed? why did that product fail? why does that medicine work? why does that treatment not appear to work? why did he get sick? why did he get well?)

  The danger is ...

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  #books
• 2011-12-25

  Experts are clueless

  One of the lessons that Guy Kawasaki learned from Steve Jobs, which really rings true to me:

  “Experts are clueless. Experts — €”journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus can’t €œdo€ so they advise.€

  They can tell you what is wrong with your product, but they cannot make a great one.

  They can tell you how to sell something, but they cannot sell it themselves. They can tell you how to create great teams, but they only manage a secretary.

  For example, the experts told us that the two biggest shortcomings of Macintosh in the mid 1980s was the lack of a daisy-wheel printer driver and Lotus 1-2-3; another advice gem from the experts was to buy Compaq. Hear what experts say, but don’t always listen to them.” (from How To Change The World)

  #business
• 2011-12-21

  Ideas that work! Not for me, but some great gift ideas

  I know my own Christmas/Channukah gifts have already been purchased by Santa. So this is not for me, but I saw a bunch of cool ideas on this list, so I thought I would share it! Check this post 10 Great Gifts For Photographers Under $20 from Digital Photography School:

  “It’s that time of year again – the time when most of us photographers find friends, family, and co-workers asking us what photo related gifts we’d like to receive. As much as we’d love to say, “Oh I wouldn’t mind a EOS-1D X or a Nikon D700,” the cold, hard...

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• 2011-12-21

  Packages at side door

  For no apparent reason, my Holiday packages are being delivered to our side door. We’ve had that side door for 10 years and no one has ever used it, especially not for package delivery. I wonder if this is a new anti-scrooge-thief policy from the UPS, Fedex and USPS’s of the world? See Holiday Deliveries Attract Thieves

• 2011-12-21

  Wall Street Journal has some sensational data visualization

  I don’t know if you need an account to see the amazingly useful, elegant and well implemented bit of data visualization in the Wall Street Journal. Typical of a nerd like me, I focus more on the design and technical elements than the data that it is trying to show. The data, by the way is polling data sliced in all kinds of ways that are useful and easy to use. Well done WSJ!

  

  #design
• 2011-12-20

  Channukah is like the World Series, Christmas like the superbowl

  Ned Batchelder, my pal, points out that:

  “Like the Super Bowl, Christmas is one concentrated day. For celebrants, it is the only thing happening that day, and it’s preceded by weeks of anticipation and preparation. Another similarity is the zeal with which businesses try to piggy-back on the excitement.” (from Ned Batchelder’s Blog)

  He ends sweetly:

  “While the daylight passes as it normally would, the evenings are spent specially, and the entire week is tinged with a special feeling because of it. If you have to miss one night for another reason, that’s OK, you’ve got others you can celebrate.” (from Ned Batchelder’s Blog)

  (yeah, you heard me, I called Ned sweet 🙂

  #jewish
• 2011-12-19

  Happy Hanukkah

  [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzh-TKzXN2k&w=560&h=315]

  #jewish
• 2011-12-14

  Squarespace: What’s a comment spam filter to you?

  You may have noticed that this Blog is now hosted on SquareSpace. I’ve been pretty happy with it so far. While it is kind of a closed system, there are extensive customization features that allow me to get pretty much what I want.

  And their support is 24×7 and very responsive. Although not necessarily always helpful. Note that I am not the first to observe this. Joannes Vermorel’s Blog says:

  “The feedback from the Squarespace support has always two properties:

  Extremely fast, my tickets are addressed within minutes. Extremely useless, canned answers co...

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  #technology
• 2011-12-13

  Summer’s almost here

  I noticed yesterday that sunset is now occurring at 4:12pm. The day before it was 4:11pm. So sunset is getting later! Summer is almost here, right?

  p.s. Before some smart-alec points it out, yes I know that sunrise is still getting later so the **number of daylight hours are still shrinking. **

  ****It is left as an exercise to the reader to explain why the two events do not occur on the same day – in other words, sunset starts getting later several weeks before sunrise starts getting earlier. Note: the explanation is very complicated.