07/13
Useful robots may be here sooner than we think —
“The Most Advanced Quadruped Robot on Earth — BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog’s legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next.” Check it out and watch the BostonDynamics video. Pretty cool and surprising. Your tax dollars at work! p.s. But a gasoline engine?
07/13
Fun little web goodies — Check out “Forget Photoshop: 15 Online Graphics Generators“: > “Shiny edges, reflections, neat 3D effects – you love them and can’t get enough of them. Well, there’s no reason to spend any time in Photoshop creating them since there are so many tools out...
07/10
Photoshopping missles — I recently saw a Nova episode about Hany Farid about so called “Digital Forensics”, that is how to detect and discover photos manipulated digitally. Here are some useful links if you are interested: www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/ [www.digitaljour...
07/08
Whats the point of setting a goal for 2050? — How lame and do-nothing can you get when the best you can do is to set a goal to be met in 2050, when probably most of the signatories will be dead and gone? Do you think it has any effect on anything real? > “RUSUTSU, Japan – The Group of Eight leading industrial nations on Tuesday endorsed halving world emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050, edging forward in the battle against global warming but stopping short of tough, nearer-term targets.” (from Associated Press) Lame-o?
07/07
What it takes to emmigrate to Australia… — Aleksey (my colleague on BlogBridge) is planning to move from the Ukraine to Australia. Here’s a fairly fascinating account of the experience of proving that he knows enough English to be permitted to Australia. Check out this post from [noizZz...
07/06
Making my blog look very busy — 
Have you noticed? How frequently I’ve been posting? I am using WordPress’s ‘post in the future’ feature so in one sitting I can rattle off 6 or 7 posts and schedule them for publication in the coming days. Very efficient 🙂
07/04
Quote of the day — “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood” — the great city builder Daniel H. Burnham
07/01
WebInno is back in town — If you live in the Boston area and are in the tech business you should check out the more or less monthly Web Innovators gathering sometimes referred to in shorthand as WebInno. Here is the WebInnot blog and here is the [WebInno registration page](...
06/29
Devil in the White City is now an archeaological dig! — I am just finished reading Devil In The White City by Erik Larson. Loved it! This news item about the first archaeological dig at the site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition caught my eye because that is what the book is about (also about a serial murderer, but that’s something else again.) I am only part way through the book but it’s quite good so far.
06/27
Dave (not that one) writes about Fear of Failure — I just came across Dave Dupre’s blog. Some good reading there, for example: > “[…snip] If the single test does not show a huge improvement, the project is considered a failure and scrapped. This happens all the time, and it always stifles innovation. Why propose something new...
06/24
Good article about TechCrunch and Michael Arrington in Wired — I haven’t seen anyone pointing to this article about TechCrunch and Professor Arrington, but it’s very interesting. I remember when it was first starting and how he would write an unbelievable number of interesting and useful reviews...
06/18
Does your computer ever make a weird sound for no apparent reason? — I am on a Mac and I have lots of odd little things running, doing backups, syncs, who knows what. Every so often my computer goes “boink!” with no error message or display and I wonder, hmm, I wonder what just happened? I have a suspicion it’s my hourly backup which is boinking because one file couldn’t be backed up. But it might be finder saying that it was done copying all those files (oh wait, maybe that’s a “bing” not a “boing”) Or might it be something else totally?
06/18
FireFox 3.0? — I got the big new release of FireFox 3.0. Looks fine. Actually looks mostly the same. I am not sure what the big changes are but I am trying it out to see how it goes. I know one regular headache with FireFox for me has been that it would pin the CPU for no apparent reason. The closest I came to see...
06/17
LifeLock and Identity Theft – again — I am a LifeLock customer and so I follow developments in this arena pretty closely. Check this post LifeLock and Identity Theft from Schneier on Security: > LifeLock does a **bunch of othe...
06/17
Virtual credit card number — My Citibank MasterCard allows me to generate a virtual credit card number, pretty simply, using a fairly ugly web interface. But a few clicks and you get a picture of a credit card, including numbers, dates and CVC. The magic is that this credit card can be used only once so if it’s stolen you don’t run a risk. Pretty cool. I just used it to pay for some software online and it worked like a charm. Simple and useful!
06/09
What’s the difference between a web site and a blog? — This is a question I hear all the time. I thought I’d write a bit of an introduction to the topic. Check out “The difference between a web site and a blog”on Squidoo.
06/09
June in Paradise — 
I just returned from RailsConf, a conference all about Ruby on Rails. Many bloggers have [written about it...
06/06
“This is the Discover card Fraud department. Call 1-800-555-1212 – IMMEDIATELY — Sounds ominous, right? So I call them up, and I hear a serious voice telling me to please hold on, then I hear the official sounding “you are being recorded” beep beep beep. Then the voice comes on the phone and says, “Thanks for calling Discover Card. Please give me your Discover Card number.” What would you do? I am worried about fraud on my card, right? But do I know who I am actually talking to?
