Professional Sports Is Very Interesting | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Professional Sports Is Very Interesting | The Onion - America's Finest News Source: "Whenever a ball is hit, put into a hoop, or carried to a particular point of significance, my mind instantly races to consider all of the action's possible ramifications: 'How will this affect future hittings, throwings, and carryings of other, different balls?' I wonder to myself. What a joy it is to closely follow a random group of men thrown together in one geographic location working together to win contests of athletic ability. Each and every victory of a team full of people I'll never meet over another team full of people I'll never meet is a complex web of nuance and metaphor to contemplate at great length."

YouTube - Johnny Lee: Wii Remote hacks

YouTube - Johnny Lee: Wii Remote hacks: "Johnny Lee demos his amazing Wii Remote hacks, which transform the $40 game piece into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer. A multi-ovation demo from TED2008."

Op-Ed Columnist - Time to Reboot America - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - Time to Reboot America - NYTimes.com: "These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions."

Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Another great article: Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
by Malcolm Gladwell.

Really liked the democratization of genius in the premise that a large class of them has to slog as hard and long as the rest of us.

Annals of Innovation: In the Air: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Just finished reading this article: Annals of Innovation: In the Air: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker .

My two takeaways are:

1. Malcolm Gladwell is a great writer. This is the first piece of his that I've read, and I like many things about it. I particularly liked the subject, the distinction between invention in art and science/technology, that the former is a unique, one-time thing while the other is a natural progression of ideas and emperical facts proposed by a bunch of people.

This obsession with the prodigy in technical fields reminds me of the superstar culture (or the rock-star culture in Bay Area tech companies). But rockstars don't exist in isolation, and that the other band members (or even other entourage members) are short-changed in most cases. Its quite evident in academia too, where the early bloomer gets a lot of mileage but at least in that case, the star student possibly does complete most of the assignments and projects singly, though I'm not sure how professors view collaborators and whether they give any points for assists.

2. Nathan Myhrvold is a very interesting guy. I suppose there are many capable polymaths but not all of them have his means. This may probably mean that he was either lucky enough or smart enough to recognize a big commerical opportunity when he saw one. If it's the latter, then that's another skill he should get credit for, because many technically brilliant people are either clueless or don't have the stomach for the bump-and-grind of the pursuit of commercial success, though one could argue that the pursuit of publication counts, grants and awards is possibly more bumpy.

Functional languages

Discovering Philip Wadler and his work has piqued my interest in functional programming languages. I was surprised I hadn't heard about him given his hand in XQuery and Java generics.

His latest project, Links seems very interesting with its promise of write-once, run-in-all-three-tiers.

Given that its implemented in Objective Caml, I thought that would be a good way to start learning about functional languages. To this end, I'm going to try implementing some CLR-type problems in Caml and post it here. Since I'm a beginner at this, readers are welcome to provide comments, corrections and improvements in my code.

Of course, Caml is not the only language to consider for learning functional programming. There's the grand-daddy of them all: ML (and it's New Jersey variant: SML). There's Haskell, another Wadler influence. Microsoft's F# is Caml-inspired. Martin Odersky is working on Scala.

All of these languages have elements which I find fascinating, and I'm hoping that starting with an ML will give me sufficient insight to comprehend these other languages correctly.

Dependency Injection with Guice

I'd heard about Guice being a Dependency Injection framework, and was curious to see how it differed from Spring.

One big difference seems to be that Guice, being Java code (plus annotations) is strongly typed. It can check dependencies at compile-time.

Bob Lee also mentions that ease of testing is a big motivator for Guice. I wonder how that limits Guice vs. Spring, for example.

The talk also mentions similarities to Seam. It looks like features from Seam and Guice are going to be blended into Web Beans.

Looks like playing with it is the next thing to do...

P.J. O'Rourke on Starbucked by Taylor Clark

I don't read book reviews a whole lot before buying them. I check to see if the book made it on a decent list, like a NYT or WSJ review, and whether I care about the subject.

But, I happened to read this review today. I don't think I care about the book, but I've discovered P.J. O'Rourke. One choice gem:

Clark talks a lot about the determination, drive and persistence of the Starbucks Corporation. But if those were the sole qualities of success, toddlers would rule the world. Clark makes much of Starbucks’s discovery that it could put one store close to another and both could thrive. But you can line a street with fire hydrants and dogs will use them all; that’s not necessarily a recipe for wealth, especially if you try to charge the dogs.

Looks like I'll have to read more of his stuff..

Wireless networking..but what about power?

For the past few years, wireless networking came with the promise of being untethered by wires. You could sit in a cafe and work on your LAN. Wireless sensor motes could be scattered in a forest or on the ocean, and would faithfully transmit data. Intel even ran some ads a few years back, where a user would be working on a Centrino-equipped laptop in the middle of a nice, green lawn.

And I would always think, what happens when these gadgets run out of power? What we really need is to be able to transmit power wirelessly.

Voila!

Closures in Javascript

This is one of the most accessible explanations of closures (in Javascript, specifically) that I've read.

Pipes for the web

I used to think of web service orchestration as (UNIX-like) pipes for the web, where the output of one operation can be fed as the input to the next one.

So I was surprised to stumble across Yahoo Pipes. It's an RSS data (for now) processing and transformation service. It would be more interesting to able to wire together arbitrary web services (they do mention that's coming), but this might be worth checking out.

The other issue with a public mashup/data-flow service accessing public data is that joins, transformations and rendering take precedence over authentication and authorization, both of which are critical first steps in an enterprise application.

OpenInfoCard

I just joined the OpenInfoCard project; quite excited about it. It's a CardSpace selector plug-in for Firefox. Once Vista starts rolling out and people start playing with CardSpace on IE7, maybe they'll playing with CardSpace selectors on the other browser, and the other other browser.

Backpack, Sqeet and RSS feeds

While playing with Backpack, I came across this posting on caching RSS feeds on Backpack. It turns out that Squeet serves up items from your RSS feeds into your in-box at a pre-designated time. It also gives you the ability to pause and resume feed delivery.

Squeet also lets you import your favorite RSS subscriptions as an OPML file. Stoked at this discovery, I exported my Google Reader feeds as OPML, imported them into Squeet and proceeded to examine the resulting OPML file.

I was shocked to discover that most of my feeds were listed multiple times in the Squeet reader. It turns out that in Google Reader, a tag is a top-level outline and it's children are the feeds that are tagged with that attribute. So the same feed would be listed multiple times, if it were tagged with multiple attributes.

For e.g. Adam Bosworth shows up both in distributed systems as well as blog

<outline title="distributed-systems" text="distributed-systems">
<outline text="Adam Bosworth's Weblog" title="Adam Bosworth's Weblog" type="rss" xmlurl="http://www.adambosworth.net/index.rdf" htmlurl="http://www.adambosworth.net/">


<outline title="blog" text="blog">
<outline text="Adam Bosworth's Weblog"
title="Adam Bosworth's Weblog" type="rss"
xmlUrl="http://www.adambosworth.net/index.rdf" htmlUrl="http://www.adambosworth.net/"/>

The Squeet OPML import utility, which seems to ignore the tags, parses this as two (or N) distinct feeds. It would be nice if the import utility detected duplicates.

Fearing the deluge awaiting my inbox tomorrow morning, I looked for a way to delete the duplicates. I could export the Squeet feeds as OPML (thereby elminating the tag nesting), transform the OPML file and import it again. But, Squeet doesn't allow for an imported OPML file to over-write the current subscriptions.

So it was that I spent a good deal of time clicking (and confirming) each delete..

Coming back to Backpack, the actual coolness of the original post is that you can direct the periodic Squeet e-mail of your RSS items to the unique e-mail of a Backpack page you can set-up as your feed cache. Since I have a large set of subscriptions, a better idea would be to let the feeds get served into my inbox, and selectively forward interesting posts to the Backpack page to be cached.

In any case, I'm happy to see my RSS feeds in my inbox, and not have to go to a separate feed portal. Another way to do this is to use Mihai Parparita's Greasemonkey script to get my feeds in my GMail in-box, but the Backpack solution lets you archive the feeds as well, an useful third dimension.

From Google Calendar and Desktop to 37Signals' Backpack and .Mac's iDrive

I spent some time looking at the .Mac last night, and was pondering the value of a move from Google's multi-machine Desktop Search, Calendar, and possibly, even Reader to a combination of Basecamp, Campfire, Backpack from 37Signals' suite and, iDisk, Sync and Backup from the iMac suite. So it's funny that I came across this posting today, which discusses the mechanics of the reverse move.

If we use cost as an argument, it is the same as debating whether to buy a Windows-based laptop or a Mac, which is a premium vs. commodity argument. From the few years, it's clear that for many people, the premium commanded by the Mac is worth the cost. In other word, cost is no object for people who are looking for the best value.

In the same vein, I think a certain subset of people will prefer premium services to Google's free imitations. A case in point is 37Signals' Calendar, which is part of their Backpack offering, and which Google has done a remarkable job at benchmarking! I think I'd willing to pay five bucks a month for Basecamp's product, just because it has the Mac factor going for it viz. thoughtful UI, thoughtful integration, uniform user interaction patterns, and a better set of implemented use-cases, for e.g. the Always-on day view.

I think the same subset of people is also willing to pay a little extra to acknowledge the beauty and feel of good innovation.

How does Google make money?

I don't understand how Google makes so much money from ads.

I've spent at least 10-12 hrs a day, connected to the web, for work and play, say for the past 10 years, and I must've clicked on a sponsored ad, a handful of times..that's less than 10 ads in the past 10 years. Of course, this obviously also includes previous incarnations of relevant ads like DoubleClick's and Overture's.

So where are all these clickthru's coming from?

P.S. The irony of the Google AdSense box on my own blog hasn't escaped me! I'm just curious about who these folks are.

Some Google products and their benchmarks

It struck me the other day that certain Google products I use reminded me of some other products out there, except that the Google ones were just a tad off, either in features or look-and-feel. OS X's Dashboard widgets look more polished than Google Desktop Gadgets, and 37Signal's Backpack looks better and does more than Google Calendar.

Given that both Blogger and Google Maps (or YouTube, for that matter) were brought in through acquisition, what are the truly great user products that Google has developed in-house?...GMail?...It clearly builds great infrastructure (MapReduce, GFS, BigTable, even Search..as a platform for other products, like Desktop or GMail or Book), but what about inspired user products?

Apple - Product releases

A little while after Apple announced the first MacBook Pro Duos , an inventory of pre-configured MacBooks arrived on Amazon, and was cleared up in double-quick time. Just as that happened, upgrades to the new MacBook Pros were announced .

Lucky for me that I procrastinated on the previous lot, because a new lot showed up on Amazon. I did go ahead and order one last night, which should get to me by sometime next week. So it was with trepidation that I opened up this press release this morning, but was relieved to find that the MacBook Pros remain the same.

How long will my relief last, I wonder? I'm guessing Christmas. But, given that the Core to Core 2 upgrade has come to pass, what could Apple possibly release near the holiday season? An early peek at Leopard perhaps?

High finance

I've been reading this lately: Amazon.com: When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management: Books: Roger Lowenstein. As impressive as the actual story, is how Roger Lowenstein managed to put together the entire book in a year or two, and write such a compelling narrative about it, capturing both the technical (at least to me) and the emotional aspects of it.

Fascinating..this talk of spreads, swaps, repos, volatility, hedges, paired trades, options and bonds..To paraphrase Sienfeld, "..Bulls, Bears, people from Connecticut.."

There's more of this good stuff here.

UPDATE: Now, where have I heard this before? What is with September and volatility?

Authenticated and private feeds

Came across this: Authenticated and private feed, the other day. Building authentication, authorization and security into the feed reader is one way to go. But, this effort would have to be replicated across all the feed platforms out there.

A better way would be to leave these platforms to do one thing well, and push the aforementioned functionality into a web services intermediary, like SOA Software's Network Director, which supports HTTP Basic Auth and role-based subscriptions to feeds.

In addition, it also supports digital signatures (signing and verification) on feeds, and tag-based aggregation of these feeds. This is the ability to define a virtual ("aggregate") feed, which is a boolean expression on the tags (or labels) applied to the underlying ("concrete") feeds. For e.g., if the New York Times feed is tagged "nyt" and the Wall Street Journal feed is tagged "wsj", one could define a new aggregate feed called "news", defined as (nyt OR wsj).

Technology News: Portals & Search: Google Founders Start For-Profit Philanthropy

Technology News: Portals & Search: Google Founders Start For-Profit Philanthropy

Always thought "for-profit philanthropy" was an oxymoron before this.