January 2012
1 post
John Brady: The secrets of good business thinking
During his 24-year career at McKinsey & Company, latterly as head of the European Retail Practice, John Brady advised chief executives of consumer giants on all aspects of business. He retired in 2004, the year he joined Piper’s Advisory Panel.
1. Waste time gossiping
Believe in the power of gossip. Most of the really interesting insights I gained as a management consultant happened...
May 2011
15 posts
Chrome 13 introduces experimental hidden nav bar... →
How Dropbox sacrifices user privacy for cost... →
The company’s CTO described the deduplication in a note posted in the “Bugs & Troubleshooting” section on the company’s web forum last year:
Woah! How did that 750MB file upload so quickly? Dropbox tries to be very smart about minimizing the amount of bandwidth used. If we detect that a file you’re trying to upload has already been uploaded to Dropbox, we...
Building Mobile Web Apps the Right Way →
Microsoft releases Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS →
Using the toolkits, developers can use the cloud to accelerate the creation of applications on the major mobile platforms. Companies, including Groupon, are taking advantage to create a unified approach to cloud-to-mobile user experience.
Microsoft is making the library, sample code, and documentation for the iOS version of the toolkit available on GitHub under the Apache License. With...
The Next Drupal? Zotonic: A Modern CMS Written in... →
W3C to develop peer-to-peer browser standards →
The World Wide Web Consortium is to develop standards to enable direct peer-to-peer communications between browsers, without the need to go through centralised servers.
The standards could make it more difficult for repressive government action against web communications, according to members of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) working group assigned to developing the standards. The group...
Top 10 Data Center Stories: April 2011 →
Video: Google’s Data Center Security – April 22
Video: Inside Facebook’s Server Room – April 18
Green Revolution’s Immersion Cooling in Action- April 12
Video: Facebook’s ‘Penthouse’ Cooling System – April 19
Major Amazon Outage Ripples Across Web – April 21
Facebook Opens its Server, Data Center Designs – April 7
Microsoft Reveals its Specialty Servers, Racks – April 25
Facebook Unveils...
Conflict between Agile and Architecture →
Design Firms – Simon’s challenge involves the bank undergoing a new branding effort. In my experience, a bank’s internal marketing department partners heavily with an outside marketing firm for larger banding initiatives. Additionally, new branding efforts usually involve getting that new brand message out through a variety of channels.
Middle-ware/SOA capability – Given the overall growing...
Just How Dangerous Is Sitting All Day? →
Kingston DataTraveler 310 DT310/256GB Fake USB... →
Fake Kingston DataTraveler 310 DT310 256 GB usb flash drives are being sold on eBay for less then $25 US. Most are eBay sellers based in Asia. Listings are starting to appear for sellers registered elsewhere. Multiple item listings are frequently used.
WebSockets, RIA/JS and WCF Web API - Channel 9 →
WebSockets: WebSocket represents the next evolutionary step in web communication compared to Comet and Ajax.
WebSockets is a technique for two-way communication over one (TCP) socket, a type of PUSH technology. At the moment, it’s still being standardized by the W3C; however, the latest versions of Chrome and Safari have support for WebSockets.
Craig Kitterman and Paul Batum, whom you...
Another OS PoC from Microsoft - Drawbridge, OS... →
What is the underlying OS that runs this package? The Drawbridge paper details their work with no less than five operating systems that have been redesigned to run Drawbridge packages:
Windows 7. For those who think running a Windows 7 application on Windows 7 is not all that groundbreaking, remember Microsoft is trying to demonstrate portability across multiple operating systems. What...
Why Can't Developers Estimate Time? - PatchSpace... →
Why can’t developers estimate time?
We can’t estimate the time for any individual task in software development because the nature of the work is creating new knowledge.
The goal of software development is to automate processes. Once a process is automated, it can be run repeatedly, and in most cases, in a predictable time. Source code is like a manufacturing blueprint, the...
PaaS on OpenStack →
Anyone should be able to:
Build their own PaaS in a snap
Run on any cloud (public/private)
–Gain multi-tenancy, elasticity… Without code changes.
Provide a significantly higher degree of control without adding substantial complexity over our:
Language choice
–Operating System
–Middleware stack
Should come pre-integrated with a popular stack:
Spring,Tomcat, DevOps, NoSQL, Hadoop…
...
API Mapping from iPhone iOS to Windows Phone 7 →
April 2011
20 posts
Build Desktop Apps with Node.js Using WebApp →
Node.js contributor Tim Caswell pushed an initial release of WebApp, a framework for building desktop GUI apps with Node.js, to GitHub. The stated goal is to “Give node developers a way to have a desktop GUI to their node servers using HTML5 + CSS3 as the GUI platform.”
It’s still very early in the project’s life - Caswell notes that he’s not even sure he will...
Facebook Deals Launches Tonight & Groupon Doesn't... →
Social eXperience Platform (SXP) Powered by... →
Whether you know it or not, when you visit the Cloud Power site you’re most likely experiencing a service or application hosted on or utilizing the Windows Azure platform. Whether it’s the social media experience for videos hosted on the Microsoft Showcase site or visiting our Cloud Conversations section on the Cloud Power web site, you’re interacting with services utilizing the Windows Azure...
Migrating Windows Phone 7 Applications to Windows... →
Google Offers, A Groupon Competitor, Goes Live →
Google OffersGet amazing deals of 50% off or more at the best places to eat, shop and stay. Subscribe now and you’ll get offers in your inbox when Google Offers launches in your city.
The geeks strike back: despite enduring an... →
1. Software Engineer
2. Mathematician
3. Actuary
4. Statistician
5. Computer Systems Analyst
6. Meteorologist
7. Biologist
8. Historian
9. Audiologist
10. Dental Hygienist
Silverlight on Android Tablet - Moonlight it is →
Predator better than Kinect? →
Revolutionary Object-Tracking Video Software Released as Open Source Read more: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/2310-predator-better-than-kinect.html
http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/
http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/tld.html
SharpKit brings C# productivity to JavaScript... →
JavaScript Architecture →
Gavin King unveils Red Hat's top secret Java... →
What I like
The overall vision: learn from Java’s mistakes, keep the good, ditch the bad
The focus on readability and ease of learning/use
Static Typing (find errors at compile time, not run time)
No “special” types, everything is an object
Named and Optional parameters (C# 4.0)
Nullable types (C# 2.0)
No need for explicit getter/setters until you are ready for them (C# 3.0)
Type...
1 tag
Battle of the 85mm f/1.4 Lenses →
snappy - A fast compressor/decompressor →
Google has open sourced Snappy, a compressing/decompressing library that processes data streams at minimum 250MB/s-500MB/s on a single core Intel Core i7 processor.
1 tag
Radiation Detected In Drinking Water In 13 More US... →
Milk samples from Phoenix and Los Angeles contained iodine-131 at levels roughly equal to the maximum contaminant level permitted by EPA, the data shows. The Phoenix sample contained 3.2 picoCuries per liter of iodine-131. The Los Angeles sample contained 2.9. The EPA maximum contaminant level is 3.0, but this is a conservative standarddesigned to minimize exposure over a lifetime, so EPA does...
The experimental bees and flies - so I learned a... →
Experimental bees and flies The management of meaning six if you only fly the same amount of bees and put into a glass bottle, and then the bottle flat, so that the window toward the bottom of the bottle, what happens? you will see bees constantly want to find the exit on the bottom, until they collapsed and died of exhaustion or starvation; and flies will be in less than two minutes, to...
Nuclear industry propaganda about low-level... →
HELEN CALDICOTT: … Up to a million people have already died from Chernobyl, and people will continue to die from cancer for virtually the rest of time. What we should know is that a millionth of a gram of plutonium, or less, can induce cancer, or will induce cancer. Each reactor has 250 kilos, or 500 pounds, of plutonium in it. You know, there’s enough plutonium in these reactors to kill...
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CIRRUS Personal Jet →
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Epic cabin-class turbine and VLJ aircraft →
Facebook Co-Founder's Collaboration Startup: Asana →
Asana Open House from Jerry Phillips on Vimeo.
Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace? →
Some of my observations:
The stack isn’t the real problem. That’s almost silly. Look at Windows, .Net, etc and they are all quite capable of scaling if used correctly. Facebook started with LAMP, but along the way they changed everything about it such that it would be hard to say they were still using LAMP in the end. Twitter went through a similar phase with RoR. You can’t...
March 2011
26 posts
SharePoint Tries to Keep Up - Technology Review →
Why any new collaboration tool will run up against competition from Microsoft.
1 tag
Hasselblad H4D-40 Medium Format DSLR Camera Kit... →
Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science... →
Object-oriented programming is eliminated entirely from the introductory curriculum, because it is both anti-modular and anti-parallel by its very nature, and hence unsuitable for a modern CS curriculum.
1 tag
REMOS - Two seater in the sky →
How to disrupt Wall Street →
Retail banks. Retail banks make money on fees and by paying low interest rates on deposits and then doing stuff with those deposits (buying stocks, mortgages, issuing credit cards, etc) that gets them a much higher return. To disrupt them you need to get people to stop depositing money in them. Zopa and Prosper are trying to do that. Unfortunately the regulatory system seems to strongly favor...
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Akka Project →
Akka is the platform for the next generation event-driven, scalable and fault-tolerant architectures on the JVM
UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering Air Monitoring... →
The calculated exposure to the public is so low that the consuming of ~500 liters of this water would only increase dose by the same amount received by taking a cross-country airplane flight.
Learning Server-Side JavaScript with Node.js →
1 tag
CPUsage, a Grid Computing... →
CPUsage provides developers with a SETI@home-style grid computing platform. CPUsage offers computer owners rewards in exchange for access to their unused CPU resources. It then licenses those resources to customers for CPU intensive applications such as scientific analysis and graphic rendering. All the data stored on users’ computers is encrypted.
CPUsage offers customers a pay as you...
Samsung's Laptop Is Lighter, Thinner Than a... →
“Scientific Linux”
– Scientific Linux - Downloading Scientific Linux
Big Data Team-Up: IBM Netezza and Revolution... →
Ways to help Japan during this crisis →
Make donations to the Red Cross through the iTunes Store using the iTunes payment system and on the front page of Amazon.com using the Amazon Payments service
Make donations to a number of nonprofit organizations at PayPal.com
8 ways to help at Yahoo News
7 ways to help at mashable
3 ways to donate at dpreview
Resources and Person Finder services at Google