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Bye bye linkblog experiment

18-Jun-2007

So much for having del.icio.us links auto-posted. What was I thinking?

Munch - The Scream

If I was able to take link posting frequency down to once per week I might leave it on, but once per day is ruining the look of the blog and spreading the signal amongst the noise more thinly than we’re all used to.

I’ll relegate del.icio.us links to the ever-expanding sidebar at some point.

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links for 2007-06-16

16-Jun-2007
  • Eating Bees » Things We Never Want To Hear Again
    “The developers are out to destroy X class. Oh. Right. People working fourteen hour days for less money than your mother would make streetwalking are spending huge amounts of that time plotting against a particular class.”
    (tags: mmog games development)
  • StorageMojo » Flash chance
    Loads of Flash info “Flash drives can only write zeros. Every write must be preceded by an erase because the only way to write a one is to erase first, which writes all ones.”
    (tags: programming computing fash memory)
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links for 2007-06-15

15-Jun-2007
  • HTML5 differences from HTML4
    HTML4 vs HTML5 (h/t http://glazkov.com/blog/)
    (tags: web programming code reference standards html)
  • Smoother toner could lead to smaller, cheaper color laser printers
    lmao: “New toner developments may herald a new era of cheap color laser printers, striking another blow against the paperless office.”
    (tags: toner printer innovation)
  • BP Global – Reports and publications – Statistical Review of World Energy 2007
    Loads of information. Loads.

    (h/t http://paul.kedrosky.com/)

    (tags: energy oil gas resources economics)
  • Lover Don’t Leave – Matt Tonks
    Go Matt!
    (tags: music friends)
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links for 2007-06-14

14-Jun-2007
  • F-Secure : News from the Lab : Vista Recovery Command Prompt
    “Did you know that the Command Prompt tool found in Vista’s System Recovery Options doesn’t require a User Name or Password? And that the Command Prompt provides Administrator level access to the hard drive?”
    (tags: vista recovery security windows)
  • StorageMojo » Apple’s touchless file system conversion patent
    Potentially painless HFS to ZFS conversion patent
    (tags: pantent apple zfs storage computing)
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links for 2007-06-11

11-Jun-2007
  • Using Mandated Speed Limits to Measure the Value of a Statistical Life
    Value of human life = US $1.54 million in 1997 dollars.
    (tags: economics research fatality value)
  • The Scala Programming Language
    I’m not usually a language fanboi, but this, at least, looks interesting.
    Concise! Plays nice with .NET! Java!
    (tags: programming language scala development)
  • Prance with the Horses, Skittr with the Mice – CircleShare Blog
    Scala being used to demonstrate insane scalability (alleged) with (brief) source code for a twitter-like app.
    (tags: code source scala twitter performance)
  • liftweb – Google Code
    Lift borrows from the best of existing frameworks including Seaside’s highly granular session and security, Rails fast flash-to-bang, Django’s ‘more than just CRUD is included’, and Erlyweb’s scalability for Comet-style applications.
    (tags: scala code development source framework web)
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Grady Booch at Yahoo!

I have a soft spot for Grady Booch. We knew back in 1993 that he was a hippy, what with all those dotty clouds. Today (you ca see below) he’s still a hippy! A greying, post-heart-surgery, eminent software development guru hippy with a penchant for Halo. It’s a good thing Jacobsen and Rumbaugh set him on the straight and rectangular when they U-ed their respective MLs.

Below is a video embed (courtesy of the YUI Theater) of Grady giving a version of his Turing Lecture “The Promise, the Limits, the Beauty of Software” to an audience at Yahoo!

It’s a heavy sprinkling of software history and a boat-load of personal anecdotes. The anecdotes are especially valuable, as they’re from the perspective of someone who has incredible access to many of the major software development projects and organizations around the world.

It’s jam-packed with golden nuggets of wisdom and fore-warning. Around 8 minutes in he warns about perpetuating organizational silos with (what I’d call) interior-decorator SOA. At 36 minutes he talks about assessing an organization’s maturity through their release frequencies, the presence of a “culture of patterns” and a system or organization. He moves on to Boehm and COCOMO, and the observation that complexity is the dominant determinant of project cost — bad process is something that amplifies the effect of complexity and good process dampens it.

In all, it’s a nice introduction to the how and why of software development and how we got to where we are today.

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Home tinkering checklist

10-Jun-2007

I’m a bit of a tinkerer in my leisure time. I like messing around with different software, hardware and writing little programs to try stuff out and keep current with a variety of fun-looking technologies. I also do a little bit of development for friends and family, but mostly this is fun-driven as well. This makes me someone who knows jack about most trades and a master of not so many.

My modus operandi is to prepare list of things to do, and then work through them in an order prioritized by fun and tempered by expense.

It’s like I’ve been running my home leisure time as a consultancy practice with myself as my biggest customer. Although I find tinkering endlessly enjoyable I rarely end up with a finished product because I’m more into the journey than the destination. I’ve been thinking about how much more satisfying tinkering would be if it occasionally resulted in something that was more like the dictionary definition of completion. My inspiration has been a recent post by Marc Andreessen on personal productivity, and a recent re-reading of the PSP and TSP management frameworks.

I remember reading that the most important thing about a consultancy practice (apart from customers) is to have a “pitch-able” methodology and a knowledge base. Inspired by this, I thought I’d create a list of things I think I need to develop a sufficiently documented, scrutinized, and understood “home tinkering” methodology with an emphasis on achieving a collection of finished products. I never thought I’d yearn for efficient leisure time, but there it is, I do.

Getting my home tinkering consultancy practice outlined should help crystallize my random thoughts into more consistent processes than I have now. It also opens it up for improvement through helpful suggestions.

My list of areas to discuss, document and make consistent is currently:

  • Tasks and To-dos
  • Documentation
  • Package, Test, Deploy
  • Source configuration management
  • Password Management
  • Data Backup

Over time I’ll write a page on each.

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links for 2007-06-09

9-Jun-2007
  • Life Size Chocolate Moose on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
    The famoose chocolate moose.
    (tags: chocolate moose badpuns)
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links for 2007-06-08

8-Jun-2007
  • blog.pmarca.com: The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity
    Marc Andreessen’s guided tour of productivity porn.
    (tags: productivity lifehacks procrastination work)
  • Ship aground, more at risk – National – smh.com.au
    Yow. That’s my favourite beach :(
    (tags: beach coal ship newcastle disaster)
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links for 2007-06-07

7-Jun-2007
  • F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
    Users give websites an F
    (tags: usability webdesign eyetracking development research)
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links for 2007-06-06

6-Jun-2007
  • EasyBCD 1.6
    Vista’s new Boot Configuration Data-related bootloader causes some pain dual booting to anything that isn’t Windows XP. This free utility claims to make the process easier.
    (tags: vista boot linux freeware utilities software)
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links for 2007-06-05

5-Jun-2007
  • rtpBreak – detects, reconstructs and analyzes any RTP session
    An announcement about a utility that’s better than VoIPong “rtpBreak detects, reconstructs and analyzes any RTP [rfc1889] session through heuristics over the UDP network traffic. It works well with SIP, H.323, SCCP and any other signaling protocol. In par
    (tags: security voip)
  • The benefits of forgetfulness: smaller search spaces mean easier recall
    Hooray for forgetfulness!
    (tags: memory science research goldfish)
  • Valve hardware survey shows gamers yet to embrace Vista
    No wonder really. HalfLife 2 dies about once an hour on my Vista/8800GTX rig :(
    (tags: games computing microsoft vista valve)
  • rtpBreak
    Better rtpBreak link
    (tags: security voip monitoring rtp tools)
  • Snipplr – Code 2.0
    Snipplr is a public source code repository that gives you a place to store and organize all the little pieces of code that you use each day. Best of all, it lets you share your code snippets with other coders and designers. Did we mention it works with Te
    (tags: code community development snippets software)
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