All my blog posts and articles
I saw this bit today: “Apple: Will Steve Balmer Show Up At The WWDC Keynote?”. Interesting… It leads me to speculate in a different direction. What if Google is distancing itself from Apple over competition between Android and iPhone? And so, what if in anticipation of this, Apple, knowing that it couldn’t ALSO be in the business of creating a world class mapping service, decides to move native support of the iPhone mapping app from Google Maps to Microsoft Maps? Good theory?
From a signup form at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.
Mark Cuban comes up with a very plausible analogy: “The best analogy for traders ? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, traders do the same thing. A hacke...
Read more →I’m ok with poetry – like it from time to time, but certainly not one of my main interests. Who knew that an hour lecture about a single poem, “The Wasteland” by T.S. Eliot could be absolutely gripping and fascinating. Maybe it...
Read more →Lately because of one of my projects I am having to work my way through a bunch of long, semi structured documents containing things such as requests for proposals, government program reports, threat models and all kinds of things like that. They are in techno-legalese as I would call them: highly s...
Read more →Here’s a great article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker about espionage. Most of the content comes from a couple of books that he essentially is summarizing, but in his inimical style make more fun and fasci...
Read more →So a friend of mine told me of his iPhone app, called Etude. He sung the praises, it sounds really cool to me. So I whipped out my iPhone and went to download the app. Wouldn’t you know it costs $4.99. I turned to him and I said, hey, “it’s not free!”. Yeah silly reaction, given how I’ve ranted myself about free and not-free. And here’s the funnier part still. He said, Oh, yes, it’s $3.00. I said, “No it’s more like $5.00”. He said, “Oh yes, we just raised the price.” I gave him a blank look. Here’s the kicker. He said, “What if I give you $5.00 right now?”. I still didn’t want to buy it… How does that make any sense?
I am not sure exactly what this article about Trust means exactly, but it’s thought provoking, don’t you think? “Trust is present or it is absent. Grab a nerd and he’ll tell you that even the absence of trust is a measure of trust and that particular measure is zero. When trust is non-zero (which is better, believe me) it is based on one of two methodologies — empiricism or transparency (the other T-word).” (from I, Cringely)
Scott Kirsner summarizes a new book “Mastering the VC game” and re-tells a funny VC scenario: “He also talks about an exercise called the “rock fetch,” when VCs ask an entrepreneur to spend time finding other investors willing to join them on the investment (bringing them “rocks”), but then decline to collaborate on a deal with those investors (“bring us a different rock.”)” (from Scott Kirsner) Ok, not really funny. More sad depressing poignant familiar…
Ok, probably to a mathematician these are not arcane, but to normal people (oops, sorry, I love mathematicians) I think they might be. Anyway, read and enjoy without any further commentary: - Needle-in-a-haystack Problems: “[snip...
Read more →Check this post Sequoia Voting System Witch Hunt, err… Study Project from Coder’s Revolution: > [Matt Woodward](http://mpwoodward.posterous....
Read more →CAPTCHA is the nickname of the venerable (ok only a few years of veneration) technique of verifying if the person on the other side of the screen is actually a person not a computer. We’ve all seen them a million times: a very hard to read bit of text in a small box, with a request that you decipher...
Read more →If you’ve been in computing for any time you may have been hit over the head by the slogan “Security by Obscurity is No Security”. As I have understood the argument it has a few components: - If your security relies on secret tricks, trap doors, and a hope that no one will be able to find out or gu...
Read more →The earphone/microphone that came with my iPhone is acting odd. First I thought it was a problem with my ear, then with my iPhone, but it seems to be a problem with the earphones, which I never thought of as something that could actually fail, except if I broke it physically. The sound quality is ju...
Read more →The article “Reflections on Trusting Trust” is often mentioned in conversation and cited. I finally tracked down and read this classic, and it is indeed a classic of computer science. And typically for classics, it’s short, clear, readable and impactful:...
Read more →I am not going to spend bits talking about the iFad (other than deploying my snarky nickname for it) but if you are interested here’s a (very positive in fact) review it by uber-technology taste maker Walt Mossberg: Apple iPad Review: Laptop Killer? Pretty Close.
They may not like me to say this, but as a longtime subscriber, I’ve been very disappointed for the last several seasons at the Huntington Theater in Boston. A very hit or miss program with only a few memorable plays. Well I did stick with the [Huntington](http:/...
Read more →David Mamet (supposedly) wrote this compelling note to tv writers for the now-defunct tv show “The Unit” (which I thought was a really good tv show.) If you like TV you will enjoy reading this. Gems such as:...
Read more →Steve Jobs says: “I almost died” in interesting article: Apple CEO Steve Jobs joins Schwarzenegger to push organ donor registry 
I stopped posting thoughts about the mess that all of congress has made of health care reform. There are daily articles in the news to confirm the dysfunction in government today. Here are key quotes two from today which again hit home. I recommend that you read both articles in full:[Health Care Le...
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