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Mon Feb 08 22:38:45 PST 2010
At a previous employer we made tensile testing equipment.
Now for tensile testing
a material you cut it into a dogbone shape
and then pull at each end of the dogbone, plotting out the
change in length of the specimen against how much load is on
the specimen. Once you have all that data you can
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Mon Feb 08 07:44:51 PST 2010
Space.com:
The NASA budget request, which actually included a slight budget boost up
to $19 billion, would cut out the Constellation completely, extend the
International Space Station's mission through at least 2020, and set
aside $6 billion over five years to support commercial
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Mon Feb 08 06:30:08 PST 2010
I've been working on a Ruby database driver for Ingres. Most of the work has been in C, but I finally have my Ruby code (via C) fetching data from the database.
Now I'm starting on the Ruby on Rails portion. It involves adding a lot of additional calls that I didn't have in place. It's actually a pretty big test suite
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Anton Zuiker
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Sun Feb 07 18:58:46 PST 2010
[observations]
Like each February of the past few years, I’m floating on a high from the success of the ScienceOnline2010 conference, but also reaching for a return to balance in my life. Planning the conference takes a lot out of me.
“Go away,” Erin suggested. “Take a weekend to yourself and reconnect with
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Rafe
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Sun Feb 07 09:51:13 PST 2010
[commentary]
Facebook’s coming at it from a corporate position. It’s basically like AOL in 1997 — everything is there and there’s no need to go anywhere else.
Matt Haughey say something both true and profound.
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Rafe
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Sun Feb 07 07:42:34 PST 2010
[commentary|economy|jobs]
Most people know that the employment situation right now is pretty terrible, but the precise way in which it is terrible is poorly understood. The absolute numbers are very high, but the suffering is not evenly distributed. The statistic I see getting thrown around a lot is that unemployment for college educated people
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Sun Feb 07 06:30:08 PST 2010
One my college buddies, Eric Star is at Evoca, a very cool startup. I'm not going to try to tell you everything they do... I'll just say that they let you post audio "blogs" and make them searchable. There are free accounts and professional level accounts as well.
Here's an article about them over at TechCrunch.
Eric
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Rafe
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Sat Feb 06 07:14:07 PST 2010
[commentary|health care]
If there’s one person I listen to on health care, it’s Atul Gawande. His piece on the problems with fee for service in health care was probably the most influential piece on health care costs that anybody wrote last year. Salon magazine just ran a new interview with Gawande about his book on checklists and
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Sat Feb 06 06:30:08 PST 2010
I finally got myself a MacBook Pro. This is the first Mac I've every owned or spent any serious time on, so I guess I'm what the Mac folk call a "switcher". Given that I've spent a lot of time on Windows and Linux boxes, I thought my impressions might be of interest to others thinking about this new Intel Mac
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Rafe
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Fri Feb 05 20:55:52 PST 2010
[commentary|amazon|books]
Most of the posts about the throw down between Macmillan and Amazon have talked about the “agency model,” as opposed to the model that Amazon prefers for the Kindle. Teresa Nielsen Hayden explains how the model works:
At the heart of the model is the proposition that ebooks aren’t essentially different
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Fri Feb 05 06:30:08 PST 2010
A short article I wrote entitled The Cornerstone of a Great Shop was published in the spring edition of Methods and Tools. It's a great online only magazine, available via PDF or HTML.
Jared
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Thu Feb 04 06:30:08 PST 2010
A project that I've been working on has involved calling C code from Ruby code. It was much easier to do than I anticipated and I thought others might find it interesting.
Why would you do this? Suppose you have a bit of Ruby code that's too slow in a key portion of your program? You can easily move that bit of code
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Rafe
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Wed Feb 03 16:19:35 PST 2010
[commentary|health care|politics]
The metaphor of the bike shed discussion has served me well over the years. Here’s a theory of how it applies to politics:
In the book “Stealth Democracy” (which I previously blogged on here), John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse argue that voters have very weak policy preferences. Indeed, you can get a
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Rafe
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Wed Feb 03 10:03:49 PST 2010
[commentary|copyright|libraries]
Jessamyn West on the value of libraries:
My Jessamyn corollary to this is “With enough libraries, all content is free.” That is to say… if the world was one big library and we all had interlibrary loan at that library, we could lend anything to anyone.
Be sure to read the whole thing. It reminds me of a 2002
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Rafe
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Wed Feb 03 07:43:24 PST 2010
[commentary|politics]
Since it was posted yesterday, I have been both horrified and fascinated by the results of this DailyKos/Research 2000 poll of Republicans. It’s impossible to cherry pick the results from the list to make my point because so many of them are so very distressing. Andrew Sullivan posted a great explanation of what
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Wed Feb 03 06:30:08 PST 2010
In a meeting today AJAX was mentioned and several people asked what it was, so I thought I'd pass on a just a little bit about AJAX.
AJAX just means that the web page you are hitting is getting updated without reloading the entire page. Think about most web sites. If you click on a link, or a tab, or anything, the
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Rafe
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Tue Feb 02 16:11:08 PST 2010
[commentary|politics]
I beat up on the Republicans a lot, but I want to point out the alternative budget proposal put forth by Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan. His proposal eliminates the deficit and takes care of the entitlement crisis. It does so by eliminating Medicare and giving seniors vouchers they can use to buy health insurance. If
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Tue Feb 02 15:06:31 PST 2010
http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/
http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/
http://activitystrea.ms/spec/1.0/
http://backend.userland.com/blogChannelModule
http://backend.userland.com/creativeCommonsRssModule
http://base.google.com/ns/1.0
http://base.google.com/ns/1.0
http://conversationsnetwork.org/rssNamespace-1.0/
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Rafe
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Tue Feb 02 10:42:20 PST 2010
[quotable|performance|php]
Today I’m excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we’ve reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less
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Paul
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Tue Feb 02 06:32:17 PST 2010
[general]
In December, Cheerwine was widely available in Chapel Hill. In February, there is not a drop of the dark cheery NC iconic beverage to be found in Orange County stores — and worse –; there are not even empty slots on the shelves; the shelves have been remarked as if Cheerwine never existed!
Until February
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Tue Feb 02 06:30:08 PST 2010
I saw a great post on Ed Burnette's ZD Net blog about developing
software The Eclipse Way. It had some great quotes and the ideas can be applied nearly anywhere. It's not Eclipse specific
by any means. It's about developing good software.
Some of the good quotes:
Project health is stronger than saying "quality".
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Rafe
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Mon Feb 01 11:42:56 PST 2010
[commentary|amazon|books]
People are weighing in since Amazon “capitulated” (their words) to Macmillan yesterday. The most entertaining rundown was written by John Scalzi. The most insightful was written by Tim Bray.
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Mon Feb 01 06:30:08 PST 2010
I was so tired the week that I wrote My Long Week that I left off the best story. I wouldn't have even remembered it but I told it to someone at work and he reminded me.
Again, as with the original story, if you disgust easy, don't read this one. If you want a hint, just look at the Google Adsense ads I have on the
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Sun Jan 31 14:53:16 PST 2010
As some of you know, I'm currently in transition, taking a sabbatical or as I like to call it.....funemployed. Below I'm going to post some links to the magazines we produced as Calliope as well as some writing samples so I can point potential employers here. Feel free to check ...
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Sun Jan 31 11:38:38 PST 2010
I was in California earlier this week, but on Lynne's advice I moved
up my return flight as the threat of snow grew.
The snow began to fall on the cab ride home, leaving me just an hour
or two window to test the generator and refill all the gas tanks.
That was Friday night.
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Sun Jan 31 06:30:08 PST 2010
Over the last two weekends I've been at conferences in St. Louis and Boston. (I've got to get another hobby!) At both locations I was involved with the Birds of a Feather session for architecture.
I found it very interesting that in both cities, SOA and it's usage was discussed. Teams using SOA technologies (like Web
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Sat Jan 30 14:53:16 PST 2010
If you’re like me, you can barely remember what you had for lunch much less the name of that fabulous merlot you ordered at the restaurant on date night. Or how about that pinot they were tasting at the art show over the weekend? You liked it a lot. But ...
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Sat Jan 30 06:30:08 PST 2010
Last week was a Long Week... and the story is pretty funny, so I thought I'd share it. However, be forewarned... this story is not for those with a weak stomach. :)
Last weekend I was in St. Louis on my first NFJS conference of the year. I called my wife Sunday morning to say good morning and she was in tears. She had
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Fri Jan 29 14:53:16 PST 2010
Revolution in Durham has a metropolitan vibe and is yet another hit in Durham's flourishing library of foodie hot spots.
The restaurant is Executive Chef Jim Anile's baby and it is a broad departure from his last gig at Il Palio at the Siena Hotel in Chapel Hill. The menu is ...
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Paul
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Fri Jan 29 07:29:16 PST 2010
[general]
Double news day on Wednesday.
I did some bits for and article in the Durham Herald-Sun on the iPad and education — even before the product was unveiled. I think this last part isn’t great for journalism, so you can see that I hedged my bets on what the thing would do or had I seen it and the DRM
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Fri Jan 29 06:30:08 PST 2010
Ted Neward's blog has an interesting entry on evaluating a language based on the number of keystrokes (not even lines) that it takes you to express a concept. This should, naturally, lead to a more productive team, since more of the details are wrapped up the well-tested language libraries, not code that you've
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Thu Jan 28 14:53:16 PST 2010
One day it was an outdoor specialty store, the next it was a restaurant. At least that's what it felt like when I was walking down Franklin Street one afternoon and discovered the restaurant officially named Cypress on the Hill. Located at 308 West Franklin Street, it's in the spot ...
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Thu Jan 28 06:30:08 PST 2010
Lecando's Haven product is a continuous integration and continuous testing system; it runs your tests in parallel across many different machines. This looks great for anyone who wants commercial support for their continuous integration systems as well as massively parallel testing. It looks like a great idea, and like
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Wed Jan 27 14:53:16 PST 2010
Pretty much anyone who's ever asked me for a restaurant recommendation knows that I'm a big fan of the West End Wine Bar on Franklin Street. In fact, it was one of the places that convinced me that relocating to Chapel Hill from San Francisco would be "ok." (I was ...
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Wed Jan 27 06:30:08 PST 2010
Not only is it still alive, it's getting better! For those of you wanting to run Rails in a Java runtime, do not despair. Charles Nutter posted today with a JRuby Progress Updates: JRuby on Rails, IRB, and the Future.
It's a great read on several different levels. If you are porting any of the scripting languages to
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Tue Jan 26 06:30:08 PST 2010
If you haven't seen it, Amazon Connect is a new feature on Amazon that just recently went live. It's author's blogs hosted on the Amazon book page. It's a pretty neat idea, but I doubt that most of the people who are reading this would need to visit the Amazon page to track me down. :)
On the other hand, there are a
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Mon Jan 25 06:30:08 PST 2010
Courtesy of Digg.com, here's a tutorial on Apple's Developer Connection titled Using Ruby on Rails for Web Development on Mac OS X.
This Rails thing is getting more and more mainstream every day! ;) I think it might make it.
Enjoy!
Jared
btw, it seems that Mike Clark is the author.
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Anton Zuiker
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Sun Jan 24 20:07:32 PST 2010
[blogtogether-nc]
Last week’s ScienceOnline2010, our fourth annual science communication conference in North Carolina, was our biggest, best and most successful event yet, and from the long list of blog and media coverage and the Flickr pictures, YouTube videos and Twitter mentions of the conference (all using the tag #scio10), it
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Sun Jan 24 06:30:08 PST 2010
Bruno Melloni passed on his experiences introducing a team to a new language or technology. It's good enough to pass on, so here you go.
So, with Bruno's permission...
Thank you! Ship It! rocks.
For the last 15 years I have been following the principles you describe in the Ship It! book. And for 15 years people
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Sat Jan 23 06:30:08 PST 2010
I'm going through Dave and David's Rails book and parts of it just amaze me. How much code would it take in your language of choice to do the following:
Pull all the data from a database table
Filter out the data by some value on a single column
Sort the data
Granted, this isn't rocket science.
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Fri Jan 22 06:30:08 PST 2010
I've had two people today express an interest in Rails and I've ended up pointing them both at the Rails video page, and that's my limit. Once I've sent information to two people in a day, it gets posted here. :)
The page starts with Show, don't tell: Seing is believing" and then has links to several very impressive
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Thu Jan 21 06:30:08 PST 2010
This is a great bit from the Creating Passionate Users site. It deals with recent discoveries that show new input and different experiences can actually help to improve your brain. It also covers how a lack of new experiences can wither your brain! Use it or lose it isn't just for arm muscles.
Here are some great
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Wed Jan 20 06:30:08 PST 2010
Another gem from Esther Derby's blog.
Jerry Weinberg on the AYE blog
From the post:
Jerry Weinberg finds wisdom in Japanese proverbs in this post on the AYE blog
If I were to give advice to a young professional starting out in the world, I could do no better than quote three Japanese proverbs:
We learn
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