Blog Posts

July 2010

• 2010-07-20

  Invasion

  This didn’t really happen I am sitting on the lawn at the University, talking to a couple of friends. We hear a weird buzzing sound up in the air, and looking up we see an aircraft, flying very low. It looks kind of like an A-30 Warthog, but much much smaller. I guess it might be a radio controlled craft or maybe an UAV from the military. But strangely, it is able to fly very low, and very slow and even hover. It seems to be circling us, and actually watching us. It comes close to the ground but about 100 yards form us, and appears to study us. Soon another craft appears, equally small but this one is a helicopter. And it too, seems to be studying us.

  For some reason this doesn’t freak us...

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• 2010-07-15

  Why is iPod Shuffle’s ‘voice over’ feature not available on the iPhone?

  Just wonderin’ — the iPod Shuffle has a really cool feature where a synthesized voice will announce the name of a song over the earphones upon request. Super useful feature on any iPod, right? Then how come is it not available on the far more powerful and expensive iPhone? Is there a technical reason or a marketing reason or some other mysterious reason?

  #apple
• 2010-07-15

  From Mashable: The beat goes on

  Check out 10 Tools for Distributed Developer Teams(from Mashable!: ** "Every developer and every manager will have his or her preferred tools for working with a distributed team. We’ve rounded up 10 that came to us highly recommended, and we hope you’ll let us know what you think of them — good experiences and bad — in the comments. And be sure to enlighten us if we skipped your favorite resource, too." (from: **10 Tools for Distributed Developer Teams)

  A bunch of intersting products still trying to crack the collaboration/groupwa...

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June 2010

• 2010-06-26

  [POLITICS] McChrystal self-sabotage

  You can’t have missed the whole General Stanley McChrystal affair, where a decorated general who has spent his career in special operations and has been running the war in Afganistan in a moment of spectacular bad judgement let’s a young Rolling Stone magazine reporter witness McChrystal and his team bad-mouthing their civilian leadership, which ends up in the magazine under the headline “The Runaway General“

  Now from what I understand about special operations, these guys work behind enemy lines, operate in small super secretive groups, need to...

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  #politics
• 2010-06-24

  [GEEKY] Metaphors Rule! Actually, some thoughts about REST Security

  I don’t know yet whether I agree with or disagree with what is said in “REST Security (or lack thereof)” but you have to admit that this metaphor kills: “Until then, we’ll just continue (asGene Spafford said) using an armored car to deliver between someone living in a cardboard box and someone living on a park bench.” (from 1 Raindrop)

  (Also check out his follow up post: Part Deux

  #programming
• 2010-06-23

  [GEEKY] How to use Twitter in Rails

  This looks like a really nice and detailed tutorial on how to use Twitter in Rails. Check it out! p.s. if you don’t know what the previous sentence means, don’t worry about it. You must not really be geeky.

  #ruby #programming
• 2010-06-21

  [GEEKY] Nuances about REST

  While teaching at Brandeis University this summer (see Cosi JBS Web Site) I’ve come to think a lot more deeply about the often cliche’d ‘REST’ approach to developing Web Services APIs. As everyone always says, when you try and explain something, you discover the little gaps in your own understanding, and end up learning at least as much from your students as they are learning from you, which is cool, but for another day.

  The essence of the subtlety is captured in the introductory paragraphs of “Put or Post: The Rest of the Story” (an article t...

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  #programming
• 2010-06-21

  TIvo has an outrageous sale going on

  Right now, take a look at Tivo’s Site. They are ‘giving away’ refurbished Tivos for $30.00. I just bought one the other day for $50 (they lowered the price again.) They must have a warehouse full of these. I think the very comprehensive set of cables that come with the device alone are worth the $30

• 2010-06-18

  We go full circle: Google Command Line Tool

  Check out Introducing the Google Command Line Tool(from Google Open Source Blog: ** "GoogleCL is a command-line utility that provides access to various Google services. It streamlines tasks such as posting to a Blogger blog, adding events to Calendar, or editing documents on Google Docs." (from: **Introducing the Google Command Line Tool)

  .

  #technology
• 2010-06-18

  MySpace Loses a Co-President

  Check out MySpace Loses a Co-President(from Mashable!: ** "Space has announced that Co-President Jason Hirschorn has decided to leave the company, marking the exit of yet another top-level executive from the declining social network." (from: **MySpace Loses a Co-President)

  Don’t we know by now that co-presidents don’t work? We used to call it ‘two in a box’ and it was never a success. By the way, MySpace? They still around?

• 2010-06-13

  Hubris, Technology and a Whale

  A couple of New York Times articles today that point out (what others have pointed out too) that the roots of the disaster in the Gulf have a lot in common with those of the Economic meltdown last year: “AS the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico follows on the heels of the financial crisis, we can discern a toxic recipe for catastrophe. The ingredients include risks that are erroneously thought to be vanishingly small, complex technology that isn’t fully grasped by either top management or regulators, and tricky relationships among companies that are not sure how much they can count on their partners.” (from: ...

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  #technology
• 2010-06-09

  Safari now has Scribefire

  Yay! One reason holding me to using FireFox on Mac was that I rely heavily on Scribefire which was not really working on Safari. I am using it now on Safari 5. It seems ok but, first blush it doesn’t seem quite as nice as on Firefox. But at least it gives me a chance to try starting to use Safari to see if it’s all it’s cracked up to be! Check out Scribefire, on Firefox or Safari (and I guess Chrome.)

  Chrome: I just can’t get used to it’s weird tab user interface. There goes Google again, reinventing the wheel. Gmail doesn’t have folders, it has tags. And now Chrome has funny tabs instead of ones that look ‘normal’

• 2010-06-06

  Live weather radar

  It was dark and thundering and lightening today at 4 in the afternoon. I found this really nice animated radar weather map of the last 2 hours. I am sure it’s just one of many but I hadn’t seen this one before. Enjoy! Live Weather Radar

  

• 2010-06-04

  Don Dodge on your creative genius

  I came across this good post from Don Dodge which I wanted to share. Don was at Microsoft and is now at Google. He cites a New York Times article about creativity, which I’ve also read. I recommend both. Here’s Don: “We are all creative but our human experience filters, and conscious mind, block out creative bursts. We are much more creative while sleeping when the subconscious mind is free to think outside the box and associate thought fragments in totally new ways. Think about your dreams. You create the characters, the story line, the scenes, the dialog, everything. All of us have a little Steven Spielberg inside us” (from Unlock Your Creative Genius)

May 2010

• 2010-05-28

  Interesting article about technology and risk

  David Brooks of the New York Times writes about technology and risk, in the context of the drilling disaster in the Gulf: **“Second, people have a tendency to get acclimated to risk. As the physicist Richard Feynman wrote in a report on the Challenger disaster, as years went by, NASA officials got used to living with small failures. If faulty O rings didn’t produce a catastrophe last time, they probably won’t this time, they figured.

  Feynman compared this to playing Russian roulette. Success in the last round is not a good predictor of success this time. Nonetheless, as things seemed to be going well, people unconsciously adjust their definition of acceptable risk.” (from**Drilling for Certainty, NYT)

  Good article, check it out.

  

  #technology
• 2010-05-28

  We need a debt rating service rating service

  Very meta. Who rates the rating services? I saw this in the Wall Street Journal, an article today called Stocks Wind Down a Brutal May:

  “Trading was especially volatile in the afternoon after Fitch Ratings lowered its rating on Spain’s debt to AA+ from AAA, but said the country’s outlook is stable. The downgrade came despite this week’s passage of austerity measures by the Spanish government—a move that bulls had hoped would help the country avoid struggles similar to those of Greece.” (from ...

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  #business
• 2010-05-27

  MSFT and APPL

  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?

  #apple
• 2010-05-26

  I guess it’s 2010 and this is Cambridge

  From a signup form at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

• 2010-05-23

  Wall Street Traders == Hackers

  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 hacker wants to jump in front of your shopping cart and grab your credit card and then sell it. A high frequency trader wants to jump in front of your trade and then sell that stock to you. A hacker will tell you that they are serving a purpose by identifying the weak links in your system. A trader will tell you they deserve the pennies they are making on the trade because they provide liquidity to the m...

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  #business
• 2010-05-07

  Poetry – “The Wasteland”

  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’s the genius of the lecturer, but even if you could care less about Poetry, this is a fascinating talk. By the way it also is a great introduction to my current absolute favorite Podcast series, “Big Ideas“, who present hour long lectures on all kinds of diverse topics, each by a great speaker who knows their topic, have prepared a well argued and compelling speech and then deliver it well. I recommend the series! (The Big Ideas web site, on the other hand, not so great…)