Brief pause
(even in the linking)
I’m in the middle of Ron Jeffries’s and Chet Hendrickson’s CSM training class.
Worth the effort, if you’re wondering.
Archive for March, 2009
links for 2009-03-30
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publications
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A number of very nice theses and whitepapers.
links for 2009-03-29
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ImageMagick resize filters code
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("Light page example" is what I have in mind)
links for 2009-03-28
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"This page explains how to make a bunch of repositories accessible through CGI using the hgwebdir.cgi-script and a webserver (apache or lighttpd). Once the script is set up, it is very easy to open new repositories."
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A technical conference schedule from my Dad's papers.
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"Let's go through a specific example of setting up a Semantic Forms-based wiki from scratch. Let's say that you want to create a wiki that shows all the books you have at home. We'll then go through the steps specified in "Getting started"."
links for 2009-03-26
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"A capable community applies the strengths (assets) of its members to improve the overall wellbeing of the community. It mobilizes community members and groups to begin an informed and purposeful journey from at-risk, to safe, and ultimately to thriving."
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"Parallel play is also sometimes observed in older children when playing video games…"
[and coworkers]
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"Today began the first in a series of meetings to discuss the possibility of creating a Kitchen Incubator in the Washington Street Education Center. This plan would take advantage of the existing cafeteria kitchen space by repurposing it for local entrepreneurs. As this was an initial brainstorming meeting specific details were not discussed rather a broad range of topics related to the success or failure of this new venture. The discussion was organized yet still very open and conducive for creative thoughts thanks to the presenting team of Victoria Bennett and Krissa Rumsey, of Washtenaw Community College."
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"The Arts Alliance is the local administrator of the Minigrant program, which awards grants of up to $4,000 to Michigan nonprofit organizations for high quality, locally developed projects that increase public access to art and culture. Organizations applying through the Arts Alliance must be from Livingston, Monroe or Washtenaw Counties. They may be arts or non-arts nonprofit organizations, public or private schools, cities, townships, or villages. Activities such as exhibits, performances, artist residencies, festivals, and conferences are eligible for funding. For more information or to download a Minigrant application and guidelines, see the FAQs."
links for 2009-03-24
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"The MI-SBTDC network is a grassroots advocate for small businesses working in partnership with local resources to strengthen companies. New ventures, in particular, may be unfamiliar with funding sources and support services. The MI-SBTDC works hard throughout Hillsdale, Jackson, Lenawee, and Washtenaw Counties to uncover opportunities and build relationships with organizations providing the extra assistance that makes a real difference to entrepreneurs."
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"Thanks to O'Reilly and the RailsConf organisers, we're introducing ActiveResearch, an extended satellite meeting at this year's RailsConf in Las Vegas. ActiveResearch is a great opportunity to meet and greet others working with Ruby and Rails in a scientific or technology discipline. We'll have some special guest speakers, a series of more informal lightning talks, finishing things up with a round table discussion of the state of the art, and some drinks and nibbles."
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"The best thing about raw data is that almost everyone knows how it works. This means that as far as the data (re)user is concerned, the datasets are text files (or perhaps a close variant) that they can download, open in some default application, and get some immediate use out of it."
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"Most inventors are unsuccessful, and most patents never get used. Countries that are full of inventive genius don't necessarily have booming economies. Spreading innovations is a haphazard process dependent on luck, or culture, or fickle government support… it's not a golden road to wealth and power. Innovating is an easy process compared to "un-inventing" huge installed technologies. Asbestos got yanked out of American schools, but asbestos bricks are all over the "poor world.""
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"Religion was also the main issue in the events leading up to Murray's break with the Randians: although Murray was an agnostic, his wife, JoAnn, was (and is) a Presbyterian. Apprised of this, Rand grilled Joey on the reasons for her religious faith and suggested that she read a pamphlet put out by the Randians that "disproved" the existence of God.
When Joey refused to recant her heresy, Murray was told that he had better find himself a more "rational" mate. That was enough for Murray. The break was finalized by his formal "trial" held by the Randian Senior Collective, which Murray declined to attend."
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"We are defined by what we build. It’s not just the engineering ambition that designed these structures, nor the 20 people who died building the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s that we believe we can and decide to act. I’m happy to report our new President agrees when he says,
“In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.”"
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"They’re boarding my plane. As I get ready to pack up my laptop and go, I feel as though I’m leaving something precious behind, and moving toward a future in which the landscape of my life has unalterably shifted. I don’t know what the future will be in this new place. But I don’t feel I’m alone."
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What's strangest to me about this piece is the comments, which seem to be from another planet. Certainly another culture.
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"This is a parse tree whose nodes are instances of Treetop::Runtime::SyntaxNode. What if we could define methods on these node objects? We would then have an object-oriented program whose structure corresponded to the structure of our language. Treetop provides two techniques for doing just this."
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"A "niche", remember, is a protected and hidden recess or cranny, not just another row in a big database. Ecological niches need protection from the surrounding harsh environment if they are to thrive. Simply putting lots of music into a single online iTunes store is no recipe for a broad, niche-friendly culture."
links for 2009-03-22
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"Consequently I think it is possible to think of AIG as the insurer-of-last resort to the United States’ own shadow financial system. That shadow financial system just operated offshore. There was a reason why investors in the UK were buying so many US asset backed securities during the peak years of the credit boom."
links for 2009-03-21
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"This is how I deal with the situation these days: If I get a new device, I just stuff any new cables right into the swamp of existing ones. And if I need to remove a cable, I optimistically pull on it, like a madman"
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"Before the English-speaking world was exposed to the fruit, the colour was referred to as geoluhread in Old English, which translates roughly into Modern English as yellow-red."
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"I was amazed that the Journal of Cell Science has the wherewithal to publish an essay like this. Kudos to the author of the essay and the editors of the journal. "
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"Machinist generates data for the fields you don't care about, and constructs any necessary associated objects, leaving you to only specify the fields you do care about in your tests."
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"My experience so far, as I explore what Cucumber can do, has been largely positive. Where I was starting with Cucumber and only a vague idea of how the user interaction would play out, writing the scenarios at the Cucumber level felt very valuable and gave the development a clear path that I wouldn't have otherwise had. That said, there is extra code being written, and it's clearly possible to get really tangled in getting the step definitions right."
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"Turns out, Scott Fleckenstein and Tom Preston-Werner have already solved this problem for us, allowing bi-directional data exchange between Erlang and Ruby via Erlang Ports. As far as Erlang is concerned, this communication pattern is seen as direct communication with another Erlang process, which also means we can transparently invoke our Ruby interpreter whenever we need it! To get started, gem install erlectricity: Erlectricity allows a Ruby program to receive and respond to Erlang messages sent over the Erlang binary protocol."
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"The key, then, is to have good jobs waiting for workers when they are displaced due to inevitable (and desirable) technological change or to jobs moving overseas, jobs that are every bit as good or better than the jobs they left. That is where we are falling short. "
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"Antenna arrays have been studied and used for years, but the latest NIST work provides several new twists. Unlike the typical case in which antenna arrays boost signals to or from a distant target, a first responder’s radio would be relatively close to the portable transmitters, ideally within the perimeter of the array. More importantly, since disaster sites rarely allow for niceties of design, NIST studied the benefits of a fast and imprecise technique—randomly placed antennas combined with coarse signal matching. The signals produced by the radio and portable transmitters need to operate at the same frequency and roughly in phase, such that the radio waves are fairly well synchronized and thus build on each other. Phase-matching was performed manually in the experiments but might eventually be possible remotely."
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"But what if the underlying basis for the model is wrong? That is the message of Merritts and Walters’ Science article. It “was like a bomb, in a good way,” says Frank Pazzaglia, a geology professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. Earlier generations of geomorphologists had recognized the widespread nature of legacy sediments but had attributed them solely to high post-settlement erosion, he says. “More recent workers had focused on the processes, such as how does sediment move, and less on the history. Now we have both pieces. Furthermore, by adding the hard data on milldams, Merritts and Walter have made this legacy better understood.”"
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"Our study shows the extent and severity of land degradation measured in terms of loss of net primary productivity, making allowance for climatic variability. Overall, a quarter of the world's population depends directly on these degrading areas. The worst-hit areas are Africa south of the Equator, SE Asia and S China. The worst-affected countries, with more than 50 per cent of territory degrading are, in Africa, the Congo, Zaire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Sierra Leone, Zambia and the most affected (95 per cent degrading) Swaziland; in Asia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Korea and Indonesia. In terms of the rural population affected, the greatest numbers are in China, with nearly half a billion, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Brazil. The usual suspects, such as the African Sahel and around the Mediterranean are much less affected."
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"On his authority as Admiral of the battlestar Galactica, Edward James Olmos addresses a crowd in the United Nations chamber and gets them to condemn the use of the constructed term [edited] “race” with a shout of “So say we all!”"
links for 2009-03-20
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"Lenders are offered returns based on a rolling six-month average so dud projects will be offset by sales of profitable ones. It takes just a few deals to strike it big, Huynh and Stack say, and because it is a community that is not just passionate but also knowledgeable, better projects are likely to get funded.
The promise of returns is enough to get former investment banker Andrew de Montille excited.
"I put money in the bank not because I consider it as a charitable investment," says de Montille. "Rather, I am very confident that some of the projects will do well enough to be profitable to the investors.""
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"Analysts, regulators, and politicians are beginning to recognize that most if not all of the widely touted benefits of modern finance redounded only to its purveyors. The decidedly retro Canadian banking system, with simple products, high equity requirements, and relatively modest securities operations that focus on domestic customers, is the soundest in the world."
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"Welcome to HackingCongress! This site is just starting up as of March 14, 2009 — the goal is to be a hub, or at least a links page, for the developer community surrounding the intersection of civics and technology especially (but not exclusively) as it relates to the U.S. Congress."
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"The thing that finally condemns the entire "baseball" idea, however is this: even with all these improvements, the game is no fun at all.
We tried baseball, and it didn't work."
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"… Yet, it seems like other parts of the movie industry are having a lot of trouble understanding this, as recent efforts around the globe have forced the closure of a number of fansub sites — even ones that don't provide the actual movies to download at all, just the subtitles. Yet movie studios an the courts are ruling that just creating translated subtitles is infringing. In one case, it appears that a site was shut down just for linking to such an "unauthorized subtitles.""
links for 2009-03-18
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"Standards create opportunities to do stuff. These opportunities may well be patent worthy. So if you want to grow out the thicket around the emerging standard you just lock some smart guys in a room and start them brain storming. Some of what they come up with will be obvious, but that hardly means you won’t be able to capture a patent for it. Just to add to fire to the shit storm it appears that Redhat’s patent is for the mind bogglingly obvious idea of transfering XML data over AMQP. Of course any patent worth it’s lawyering starts with some broad claim and then get’s more focused."
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