All my blog posts and articles
I am assuming that you’ve followed the nonsense that has been going on in Washington D.C. about our so-called debt ceiling. If not this post will be meaninless and boring to you.
The famous triggers are designed to force this commision to come to a recommendation and the congress to accept them, because if they don’t the...
I’ve been an avid user and recommender of Pivotal Tracker, an excellent, simple to use, Scrum based project manager. I still love it a lot. 
But, today I came across a very clean and simple alternative called Trajectory.
You may want to check it out. I can’t say why we need Trajectory where we have Tracker. My guess is that Trajectory is much less than a scrum system, maybe it’s a structured way to communicate stories and design between client and developer.
If you are interested in graphics programming and gaming, let me strongly recommend you take a look at this 6 part tutorial on 3D graphics development on Android.
Open GL ES Programming on Android
‘Nuf said.
“Dear Congressman,
I implore you to PLEASE do all you can to break the deadlock and the impasse. I am not saying what proposal I would like you to back. What I want is that you compromise and get others to compromise so that this thing is solved TODAY.
It’s way passed midnight and the spectacle that we are seeing in DC is embarrassing and shameful.
There are no good guys anymore. All of you are acting badly. Compromise already. It takes two to tango, so it’s not ‘the other guys’ it’s just us chickens.
Please I beg you ALL to get along!
Pito Salas”
“Last summer, Sacha Goldberger decided he would take on a very interesting project. He assembled a team who helped him create an outside studio at Bois de Boulogne, a park located near Paris that’s 2.5 times the size of New York’s Central Park. He stopped joggers, asking them for a favor – would they sprint for him and then pose right after for his camera? Many obliged. Out of breath, these joggers showed an overwhelming amount of fatigue on their faces.” Check this out!
I still don’t love Microsoft. I used to, actually, use Windows day in and day out, for years. But I am known to frown a the thought of sitting down and usingn Windows 7 or whatever it’s called these days.
But isn’t Bill Gates awesome? After building Microsoft into a hugely successful business behemoth he takes his money and builds an awesome charitable behemoth:
“”We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they’ll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year,” he says. “Well, I’m enough of a scientist to want to say, ‘What is it about a great teacher? Is it their ability to calm down the classroom or to make the subject interesting? Do they give good problems and understand confusion? Are they good with kids who are behind? Are they good with kids who are ahead?’ (from The Wall Street Journal)
It’s unusual to see Thomas Friedman to throw his weight this thoroughly behind an outside organization:
“The goal of Americans Elect is to take a presidential nominating process now monopolized by the Republican and Democratic parties, which are beholden to their special interests, and blow it wide open — guaranteeing that a credible third choice, nominated independently, will not only be on the ballot in every state but be able to take part in every presidential debate and challenge both parties from the middle with the best ideas on how deal with the debt, education and jobs.” (from The New York TImes)
I am not sure this is for real, but it sure sounds interesting. I am signing up.
Check out The End of Free Will(from Dilbert.com Blog: ** "First we need to define free will. In the past, I’ve defined it as the brain’s magical ability to make decisions independent of the physical laws of the universe. And since I don’t believe in magic, or souls, I conclude that free will doesn’t exist, at least by that limited definition. In my view, we’re just moist robots bumping around and imagining we have control." (from: **The End of Free Will)
Dilbert Blog often has crazy excursions of fancy intellectual humor!
So I have now been using Spotify for about a week after sumarily deserting Rhapsody (no stickyness at all!) Here’s my summary:
Pro Spotify
Has a nice downloadable client on Mac which I can launch from the Dock
I seem to be discovering some new music from non-American Jazz artists. Not sure this is a credit to Spotify or just luck
Neutral
Exactly the same price
Apparently equally large catalogs
Against Spotify
Relies purely on an obscure search syntax (e.g. “genre:”Piano Jazz”) to search genres
Does not have ratings based on genres – i.e. top downloads or new this week in Classical.
Has a confusing relationship with iTunes. Why does it offer me to ‘download’ my iTunes and make it available ‘offline’? iTunes already does this on iPhone
No way to know what ‘genres’ it actually knows about beyond the obvious: “Classical” and so on. Is there “Singer Songwriter”? Is there “New Orleans Jazz”? No idea.
Jury is still out for me…
It always happens and I really try not to have buyers remorse, but: “Apple Updates MacBook Air”…
Actually it’s about Twitter Support in BlogBridge. If you are a BlogBridge user, please try it out. Just click on BlogBridge Weekly Release and it will just work.
If you aren’t still or yet, please help me spread the word!
“I have exciting news. We have released a new beta build of BlogBridge with IMO awesome new twitter support. This is bringing us another step to being the ultimate personal social media dashboard.” (from me!)
Spread the word!
This site looks really good, but I am not signing up yet.
I am famously promiscuous signing up with new services just so I can ‘know what’s going on’, but when the first thing I have to do is to give this site my account and password for a credit card that I use, I stop and take a breath.
Who are these guys? Fred Wilson, a highly reputable VC blogger is the one who recommended it in his blog. Maybe he’s an investor? I don’t know. But for now, I am holding off.
Ok a few hours into it, I’ve located what looks like a major weakness in Spotify. One of the fun things about Rhapsody is discovering new music. What are the top albums in “Piano Jazz”. Had to look and look for a similar feature in Spotify. The closest I can find is to type this into the search box:
genre:”piano jazz”
Oy! And by the way, how am I supposed to know that “piano jazz” is a legitimate genre? Oh just look on this list.
Whoops. Piano Jazz is not a real genre, so it doesn’t work.
Any one know any tips?
As I said in the previous post, I am a bit of a promiscuous signer upper. From a cursory look, Rhapsody and Spotify are fairly similar. They both charge $10 per month for unlimited listening to all kinds of music. I saw a few blog posts that took one side or the other.
With all the geek news about spotify, one would like to know more. So, I capriciously cancelled my Rhapsody and am now trying the new thing.
That’s a problem they both have. No stickiness whatsoever. I know that for example the Sonos product supports Rhapsody. If I had spent $1000’s of dollars on a Sonos set up (like friends of mine have) AND Sonos didn’t support Spotify, then I might think twice. But here, it’s just another bit of software to set up and play with.
I will report back!
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what kind of preparation college students need as they graduate to pursue their futures. Thomas Friedman writes an excellent column in the New York Times where he says:
“Look at the news these days from the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy — Silicon Valley. Facebook is now valued near $100 billion, Twitter at $8 billion, Groupon at $30 billion, Zynga at $20 billion and LinkedIn at $8 billion. These are the fastest-growing Internet/social networking companies in the world, and here’s what’s scary: You could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma. ...
We just got back from the monthly meeting of “Boston Postmortem“.
Huh, what is that? Well as a result of my teaching at Brandeis this summer – Mobile and Game Software Development – I have developed a greater appreciation for the gaming world. When we had Ed Baraf of Blue Fang games speak to our class, among the many things he taught us was that there’s this great meetup in Waltham called the Boston Postmortem.
It was very well attended and the crowd sounded and felt like a community that knew each other and was pretty tight which ma...
From ABC News, but I’ve seen a similar story elsewhere:
“There are 300 million third-party charges totaling $2 billion on U.S. phone bills each year, according to the Senate Commerce Committee.
What’s more, according to the Federal Communications Commission, about 15 million to 20 million households are overcharged for their telephone landlines by third-party companies but only 5 percent realize they are victims.”
Here’s the article: “Phone Bill Fees: How to Identify 3rd-Party Charges and Protect Yourself“.
The article seems to focus on landlines. Does that mean that this problem does not occur with cell phones? That would be good to know?
Another on the mark article by David Brooks: the mother of all no brainers.
I can’t help it but I am riveted by this debt ceiling debacle. Like many I want them to stop bickering and reach and agreement. I know there will be parts of it that I hate, but I know that overall I will be thrilled that this particular soap opera/drama/crisis is over, and that our leaders have stopped acting like children:
The struggles of the next few weeks are about what sort of party the G.O.P. is — a normal conservative party or an odd protest movement that has separated itself from normal governance, the normal rules of evi...
