All my blog posts and articles
The thing about a bubble is that while people worry about it, no one is actually sure whether they are in one, and especially when it will be over. The other thing about bubbles is that they keep happening because they are the result of human nature (greed and self-deception): > “Less than a decad...
Read more →I work at the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, where we are creating new, modern, open source, and publicly owned technology for operating all aspects of voting in the US. By the way, do not assume this means ‘internet voting’ — it does not. There is a lot of old techn...
Read more →With apologies for quoting a Foxnews story, and with thanks to Scott Adams for the link, here’s a fascinating behind the scenes story of Stuxnet: > “The mission: Infiltrate the highly advanced, securely guarded enemy headquarters where scientists...
Read more →I went to RubyConf and heard a detailed presentation on a new possible feature of possible Ruby 2.0 called ‘Refinements’. I have to admit that I didn’t fully grasp how the feature really would be used. Here’s a nice and quite techical article about it: Ruby 2.0 Refinements in Practice from Katz Got Your Tongue?: > "The first thing you need to understand is that the purpose of refinements in Ruby 2.0 is to make monkey-patching safer. Specifically, the goal is to make it possible to extend core classes, but to limit the effect of those extensions to a particular area of code."
I was experimenting with a lit...
Check out ‘Like a Full-Body Massage’: Thinking About the TSA(from James Fallows :: The Atlantic: > “3) The ‘zero-risk’ mentality vs ‘acceptable’ risk. Every society acc...
Read more →I happen to be reading iWoz, which is Steve Wozniak’s memoir/biography/whatever. It’s a very breezy easy read and fun if you follow this kind of thing. So naturally this caught my eye: > “Woz then moved on to the topic of Android saying that Android smartphones, not the iPhone, would become dominant...
Read more →And, maybe, better than any ad that Apple has ever done…. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAhJTxC1C8w&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]
RubyConf 2010 was excellent. It was my first and probably not my last. Some general thoughts and then a master list of links (the real meat.) - Unlike most all ‘business’ type conferences and talks I have gone to, the RubyConf style of presentation (and perhaps the Rails or Ruby community — I don’...
Read more →This is very close to where I live, and people are amazed to know that you can actually go by boat from Arlington to Boston Harbor. This video is beautiful proof of that. [vimeo 16535358 w=400 h=225] The Mystic (in Three Minutes) from Sarah Ginsburg on Vimeo.
I tend to agree with this writer that: > “With respect to airport security, it is remarkable how we have come to place Sept. 11, 2001, as the fulcrum upon which we balance almost all of our decisions. As if deadly terrorism didn’t exist prior to that day, when really we’ve been dealing with the same...
Read more →The problem with conferences is knowing what session to go to, right? Check out this talk called “ZOMG WHY IS MY CODE SO SLOW? Aaron Patterson. It’s really excellent. It has many specific pointers that I will be able to use as soon as I get back. (Yes, in case you wonder: ZOMG)
Odd thing happened in a talk at RubyConf. Speaker asks all attendees who are using Windows to raise their hands. Looked to me like about 3% of folks here are on Windows. Now its a very biased audience but still an interesting number!
Check out this cool site developed by some Brandeis students who participated in the bootcamp-like course that I taught this summer. It’s called Definitious and it’s kind of a collaborative, semi-serious, semi-silly dictionary where anyone can define any word they want and others can vote the definitions up and down. Definitious. By the way, we are in already planning an expanded version of the course for this coming summer. It’s going to be even better!
I feel that I am finally mastering CSS and in doing so I am seeing some interesting patterns. It seems to me that it’s very easy to get into a situation where you have too many CSS rules that overlap and override each other in ways that are more complex than necessary. It seems like there could and ...
Read more →Check out Apple Begins Accepting Submissions for Mac App Store(from GigaOM: ** "At the Oct. 20 “Back to the Mac” event, the Mac App Store was announced alongside the next iteration of OS X,...
Read more →If you are into fonts and typography, you might enjoy this Infographic that will help you choose.
This is a weird development. Java is a super well established language, why would Apple decide to stop developing it: “Apple’s announcement that they would be ceasing future development of their versi...
Read more →Two very contrasting ways of looking at our relationship with Pakistan. I don’t know where I stand, to be honest. If you are interested in the topic you owe it to yourself to read both articles, because I had a hard time finding an appropriate section to quote in each case. [Here is Johann ...
Read more →This article by David Brooks in the New York Times addresses a problem that I was wondering about too. New Jersey cancelled the building of a multi-billion tunnel into downtown New York City. Everyone without exception says that the tunnel i...
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