/​replace “design” with “science”/ as well

“For­tu­nately, we can learn from other fields. Film­mak­ers oper­ate in a sim­i­larly agile fash­ion, film­ing scenes in an order dic­tated purely by logis­tics. To ensure vision, coher­ence, and nar­ra­tive con­ti­nu­ity they employ spe­cial­ists: direc­tors and script super­vi­sors. On the web, design­ers can play a sim­i­lar role, but must vol­un­teer and adapt it for them­selves. This means get­ting involved in writ­ing user sto­ries and try­ing to guide prod­uct own­ers away from over-​​hasty solutions.”

“The open source blo­gos­phere fea­tured two arti­cles the last week of Decem­ber 2008 that inac­cu­rately draw software-​​market his­tory time­lines from which the authors then inac­cu­rately posi­tion the place of open source soft­ware in the infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy (IT) mar­ket. I doubt if the state­ments are inten­tion­ally mis­lead­ing; they are most likely the result of igno­rance or sloppiness.”

Start­ing at “Page Segmentation(1)” in particular…

“I want to focus on the met­rics of the strat­egy trades. The per­for­mance sta­tis­tics are below. I find them noth­ing less than stel­lar. The met­rics that I found espe­cially appeal­ing are high­lighted in green.”

” MCM: Well, the lawyers in the case refer to him as a high-​​IQ For­rest Gump, by which they mean that he seems to have been present at the scene of every dubi­ous elec­tion of the last eight years. We’re talk­ing about Florida in 2000. We’re talk­ing about Ohio in 2004. We’re talk­ing about Alabama in 2002. He seems to have been involved in the theft of Don Siegelman’s re-​​election for gov­er­nor. There’s some evi­dence that links him with the Saxby Chambliss-​​Max Cle­land Sen­ate race in Geor­gia in 2002. To be Karl Rove’s IT guru seems to have meant basi­cally set­ting it up so that votes could be elec­tron­i­cally shaved to the dis­ad­van­tage of the Democ­rats and the advan­tage of Republicans.”

“About once a year I dab­ble with try­ing to setup a video stream­ing server so I can watch movies on my Mac which doesn’t have a DVD reader on it. Usu­ally this all falls apart because the debug loop is the scale of a DVD, the free tools are all full of per­son­al­ity, and the world of video encod­ing is quite con­fus­ing. This time I think I got it. So here some tricks I picked up along the way.”

“A logic ques­tion. Which finan­cial pro­fes­sion­als would be more likely to be audited: bad ones or good ones? Log­i­cally, I would say good ones – if you’re bad, you want to hide it – if you’re good, you want to prove it. Now I’m not say­ing all audited pro­fes­sion­als are good, or all unau­dited pro­fes­sion­als are bad, but on par I think it’s fair to say that audited pro­fes­sion­als are better.”