All my blog posts and articles
[Note: don’t assume you know what a Charitable Mutual Fund is. It’s an evocative but really misleading name but I don’t have a better handle for it yet. This is not an investment vehicle, it does not return any money. It is way to allow a donor to donate to one or more causes that match certain ...
Read more →Qwiki seems to create multi-media presentations on any topic at all. I picked an odd topic, like “BlogBridge”, and it did a half decent job. I don’t know how automatic or human-driven it is, but it’s interesting. Another interesting find is Fotopedia, “The First Collaborative Photo Encyclopedia”. It’s interesting but it suffers from an unclear mission. I think it’s trying to be wikipedia meets flickr, but I am not sure. As you can see from this link, there’s some actual connection to Flickr. Are they using Flickr to prime their pump?
If I could fool you into believing that a fake rubber hand that you were looking at was really your own hand, how would you react if I took a knife to it? Weird questions that Neuro-science researchers busy themselves with, but really fairly amazing. [Here’s an article in Scientific American about t...
Read more →After attending the Lean Startup Machine weekend a few days ago, I pay more attention to these ‘I created this startup in 3 hours’ stories. So when I saw t[his in Inc. Magazine:](http://www.inc.com/articles/2011/03/how-19-year-old-daniel-gross-is-taking-on...
Read more →I had the interesting experience this weekend to attend the “Lean Startup Machine” weekend at the Microsoft NERD. It was kind of a hackathon for Lean Startups, which are startups that practice something refererred to as Customer Development, or [CustDev](h...
Read more →[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3]
Some choice quotes to introduce a good lecture about Engineering: > ‘…[snip], Napoleon dismissed Robert Fulton’s claim of a steam-powered ship: “What, sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? ...
Read more →I’ve seen several interviews with Scott Walker, the Governor of Wisconsin, about his efforts to ‘balance the budget’. I put that in scare quotes because there’s a good case to be made that his agenda is different or at least well beyond that....
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An interesting article about how to think about designing Artificial Intelligence for playing poker. It’s high level but gives you a good feel about how this writer went about the design. You also learn the basics of Poker at the sa...
Read more →Over the last several months I’ve been following a series of blog postings by Jamis Buckon the esoteric and quirky topic of writing programs to design mazes. For reasons that are not clear, Jamis developed an obsession with mazes and has collected a series of articl...
Read more →If you work with non-profit projects that collect or disseminate large amounts of public data, you would find this interesting. Amazon offers FREE storage for huge public datasets. So in otherwords, Amazon’s ‘cloud based’ storage service (known as S3) will offer, f...
Read more →This article is called “Fact and Folklore In Software Engineering” and while it is about that, the part that was more interesting to me was the first section talking about Scientific Discourse: > “This article is about why some “facts” refuse to die, a...
Read more →A seminal article about an advanced topic in software testing: Mocks aren’t Subs > “The term ‘Mock Objects’ has become a popular one to describe special case objects that mimic real objects for testing. Most language environments now have fra...
Read more →This is actually a keynote to a conference, but it had some very interesting ideas in it. The article is called “The New Science of Morality” and it’s by Jonathan Haidt. I don’t know if it makes full sense out of context, but read thi...
Read more →I recommend this article, “Fatboy in A Lean World”, (by Gordon Guthrie) if you are interested in ‘lean’ as in Lean Startups, Lean Production. About why lean production is becoming so hot...
Read more →Michael Arringtonis a famous Tech-pundit-commentator-blogger who recently left or got fired from AOL because he wanted to be a VC while being a journalist covering the companies he is investing in. One way or another that led him and AOL and the su...
Read more →I heard yesterday that there is “at least one farm” in Australia bigger than Texas. I guess this was a way to remind me that Australia is really really big. Which I think I knew already so I let it go. But then I got to thinking, Texas is pretty big too, and a single farm that size was still a little hard to believe. So I am looking for data. Can anyone prove or disprove the statement?
Read more →“That journey will provide reasons for resisting the claim that a deterministic view of the material universe is incompatible with free will. Much of the apparent power of deterministic arguments comes from their focusing on isolated actions, or even components of actions, that have been excised f...
When my computer turns on it can often take 30 to 120 seconds for my Samsung LCD display to wake up. Facts of the case: - Display is 213T and is something like 3-5 years old - Office can be cold - I am sure the computer is ready within seconds. It’s just waking up. It will play music for example right away. - In every other respect the display is fine - It has always done this Do you know?