All my blog posts and articles
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. If you’ve not heard about it, here’s a 40 minute lecture about CustDevby one of the top gurus, Eric Ries. Another reference would be essentially the founding document:, “...
[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? I pray you excuse me. I have no time to listen to such nonsense.”
Or consider the pronouncement of Dr. Dionysus Lardner, professor at University College in London, on the prospects of a new form of transportation: “Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.”
Or hear the opinion of the commander of the army’s cavalry in 1938, just before ...
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.
He’s very articulate about his position, and quite convincing. None of the interviewers had anything to add to the debate other than, “gee aren’t you union busting?” and “gee, how come isn’t it good enough that the unions have agreed to the financial concessions?” And the Governor has very good answers to each of the ob...
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 same time:
“It is very important in this type of project, for any AI project really, to fully understand the rules of the game and the tactics typically used to win. So when I worked on poker I spent a fair amount of time reading the best books and playing the game, both against existing AI and real humans of various levels of experience.” (from Poker AI: A Starting Point)
And here’s a follow up article on the same topic: “Aces High: Numerical Techniques in Poker AI“
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 articles detailing many different algorithms, their tradeoffs and concepts and writing them up beautifully.
Today in his final installment he summarized the project:
Over the last six weeks I documented eleven different maze generation algorithms. It’s been a blast. I’ve had so much fun researching and implementing these! It’s bee...
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, for no charge, to store a dataset if it is open to the public and somehow for the public good.
From their site:
“Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications. Learn more about Public Data Sets on AWS and visit the Public Data Sets forum.” (from Amazon’s Public Data Sets)
Here’s the link: http://aws.amazon.com/datasets
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, and about how to avoid being fooled by opinion disguised as scientific “fact”. We start, therefore, with some observations on science and facts.” (from “Fact and Folklore In Software Engineering”)
Here he goes on to describe “The messy workings of scientific discourse”. It’s clarifying explanation of a process that we understand intuitively but actually ...
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 frameworks that make it easy to create mock objects. What’s often not realized, however, is that mock objects are but one form of special case test object, one that enables a different style of testing. In this article I’ll explain how mock objects work, how they encourage testing based on behavior verification, and how the community around them uses them to develop a different style of testing.” (from Mocks aren’t Subs by Martin Fowler)
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 this section. It makes an important point and it might draw you into reading the whole thing.
“[…snip]Morality is like The Matrix, from the movie “The Matrix.” Morality is a consensual hallucination, and when you read the WEIRD people article, it’s like taking the red pill. You see, oh my God, I am in one particular matrix. But there ...
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 among us software entrepreneurs:
The great transformation of the industry over the last 10 years has been the availability of already-written (and battle tested) software which has slashed the size of a team that can build a functioning product and the crash in price of hardware. (fromFatboy in a Lean World)
About Y-Combinator’s...
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 super-popular blog he started, TechCrunch, to part ways. All that is interesting back story.
Arrington recently wrote a very ...
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?
“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 from their context in the world of the self, so that they are more easily caught in the net of material causation.” (from How Can I Possibly Be Free?)
This is from a really difficult article called“How Can I Possibly Be Free?” in the New Atlantis. At ...
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?
As a naturalized citizen who’s lived here for most of his life, Football used to be foreign to me. I grew up knowing soccer and baseball but for the first years Football was a mystery.
Now I have a pretty good grasp of football and enjoy watching games on TV. But then I come across something like this, and I am stumped and can’t decode it. If only there was a good football tutorial (don’t worry I already have “Football for Dummies”.)
This is from “Oh, did this unit of the Patriots struggle against the Jets”, in the Boston Globe.
“On the first 12 plays of the game, ...
From Science Daily: Couch Potatoes Beware: Too Much Time Spent Watching TV Is Harmful to Heart Health.
“Data show that compared to people who spend less than two hours each day on screen-based entertainment like watching TV, using the computer or playing video games, those who devote more than four hours to these activities are more than twice as likely to have a major cardiac event that involves hospitalization, death or both.” (from Couch Potatoes Beware: Too Much Time Spent Watching TV Is Harmful to Heart Health
An insightful article about higher education in the USA: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education. Here are some interesting quotes. It’s a long article and all of it was quite interesting.
“Students at places like Cleveland State also don’t get A-’s just for doing the work. There’s been a lot of handwringing lately over grade inflation, and it is a scandal, but the most scandalous thing about it is how uneven it’s been.
Forty years ago, the average GPA at both public and private universities was about 2.6, still close to the traditional B-/C+ curve. Since then, it’s gone up everywhere, but not by anything l...
Scott Kirsner tweets:
“Invented at MIT, Sifteo cubes (tiny displays that talk to each other) are almost ready: http://bit.ly/eXsCQU / http://bit.ly/ehhZ1Q”
Sifteo cubes are similar (except much more expensive and presumably programmable) to Scrabble Flash, that have been around since last year. Interesting.
