Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Buffalo Open Coffee Club on Systems and Experts


A couple weeks ago at Buffalo Open Coffee Club we got into a great conversation about systems, how they fail, and experts (or less than experts) that were involved. As I am currently reading Inviting Disaster this subject was already on my mind and I had some links to share.

This interview with Denny Fitch is one of the most riveting stories I have ever heard. Watch part one and then tell me that you didn't have to watch the rest of them. This relates to our discussion on two fronts; First, Denny is an expert pilot and knows every detail about his aircraft. Second, he gives an exceptionally detailed description of how he dealt with a situation thought to be so unlikely that the manufacturer never came up with a contingency plan.

I always find pictures showing the phisicality of the internet interesting. Yet another fragile system.
Once you watch this talk by Dave Thomas you will forever view the people working around you with his scale of expertise. Working in a group with common knowledge of this material allows you to interact with people and teams much more effectively.

While it is a bit of a tangent this talk by Jeff Hawkins was referenced as well.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Links and Notes for 2010-09-20

  • [GO] Jefferson's Letter to Peter Carr 9/19/1785

Links and Notes for 2010-09-15

  • [GO] Blade Runner: Hades Landscape | Douglas Trumbull - Immersive Media and Visual Effects

Links and Notes for 2010-09-09

  • [GO] Monstrous Discrepancies

Links and Notes for 2010-09-05

  • [GO] cortesi - 3 Rules of thumb for Bloom Filters

Links and Notes for 2010-09-02

  • [GO] The problem is...

Links and Notes for 2010-09-01

  • [GO] Conflict Minerals and Blood Tech -- The Adventures of Accordion Guy in ...
  • [GO] Giles Bowkett: Magnificent Footage Of Hummingbirds Being ...

Links and Notes for 2010-08-26

  • [GO] What Happened to Yahoo
    I normally assume that everyone reads Paul Graham's essays and don't post them. This one is an exception.

Links and Notes for 2010-08-25

  • [GO] Laurie Santos: A monkey economy as irrational as ours | Video on TED.com

Links and Notes for 2010-08-24

  • [GO] Scott Rafer's Blog

Links and Notes for 2010-08-10

  • [GO] Nuclear Fusion Reactor | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
    Well if the LHC doesn't get us I guess this will.
  • [GO] A Week in Middlesbrough | Andrew Hyde
    Great video about The Difference Engine which is a Tech Stars-ish incubator.

Links and Notes for 2010-08-05

  • [GO] Happy Git Commits // Collective Idea
    Greatest. Idea. Ever.

Links and Notes for 2010-08-04

  • [GO] YouTube - Aimbot in real life
  • [GO] Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech -- Signs of the Times News
  • [GO] Of/By/4 - in 18 minutes

Links and Notes for 2010-07-28

  • [GO] Amusing Ourselves to Death by Stuart McMillen - cartoon Recombinant Records
    Ahhhh crap.
  • [GO] YouTube - Robert Johnson interviewed at Velocity 2010

Links and Notes for 2010-07-26

  • [GO] If you have...

Links and Notes for 2010-07-25

  • [GO] ongoing by Tim Bray * D.P.H.

Links and Notes for 2010-07-23

  • [GO] Paul Graham - The Top Idea in Your Mind

Links and Notes for 2010-07-16

  • [GO] Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man | Video on TED.com

Links and Notes for 2010-07-05

  • [GO] Hopeful Monsters and the Trough Of Disillusionment - Blog - BERG

Links and Notes for 2010-06-30

  • [GO] Always ship trunk
  • [GO] Does More Money Motivate Higher Performance?
  • [GO] Wondermark >> Archive >> #634; Accomplishment measured in Decibels
  • [GO] Don Norman Talk (Author of The Design of Everyday Things)

Links and Notes for 2010-06-29

  • [GO] How MIT Could Help With A Different Approach to the BP Gulf Crisis
  • [GO] "Risk Takers" The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 5 on Vimeo

Links and Notes for 2010-06-03

  • [GO] The Power of Why
    "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it."

Links and Notes for 2010-06-02

  • [GO] The Scary Robots Are Coming

Links and Notes for 2010-05-11

  • [GO] YouTube - @Google & YouTube present A Conversation with Conan O'Brien
  • [GO] Netflix Culture

Links and Notes for 2010-05-05

  • [GO] Playing With Moon Rocks and Duct Tape at the Dinner Table | OnOrbit

Monday, April 26, 2010

Links and Notes for 2010-04-22

  • [GO] stackoverflow answer to adding two numbers with js
  • [GO] Grace Murray Hopper
    After four decades of pioneering work, Admiral Hopper felt her greatest contribution had been "all the young people I've trained." She was an inspirational professor and a much sought-after speaker, in some years she addressed more than 200 audiences. In her speeches Admiral Hopper often used analogies and examples that have become legendary. Once she presented a piece of wire about a foot long, and explained that it represented a nanosecond, since it was the maximum distance electricity could travel in wire in one-billionth of a second. She often contrasted this nanosecond with a microsecond - a coil of wire nearly a thousand feet long - as she encouraged programmers not to waste even a microsecond.

Links and Notes for 2010-04-18

  • [GO] Two weeks at Google >> Bogle's Blog
    Always interesting to hear about how things are done at Google.
  • [GO] The Rest of the Lenna Story
    This is an interesting story but for some reason I am not surprised.

Links and Notes for 2010-04-14

  • [GO] You should aim to be the geek they never forget. - Scott Rafer's Blog
  • [GO] Pay attention New Zealand | Red Alert
    "What a pity international governments don't seem to be able to make an agreement to ration finite resources like tuna, atmospheric carbon or fossil fuels, but instead devote their time to making an international agreement enforcing controls over something that costs no resources to copy." - Comment from Colin Jackson
  • [GO] Gabor hits Send: Insightful in Intervals
    I like the interval to be about a week.
  • [GO] Gabor hits Send: The Collapse of Complexity
  • [GO] What's your focus? - Warpspire

Links and Notes for 2010-04-13

  • [GO] Google App Engine Blog: TweetDeck and Google App Engine: A Match Made in the Cloud
    As a TweetDeck user I found this interesting.
  • [GO] Lessons Learned Bootstrapping Harmony - Ordered List
  • [GO] The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell - The Tech
  • [GO] ZURB - Super Awesome Buttons with CSS3 and RGBA
  • [GO] Don't Core Your Workarounds - Modern Perl Books, a Modern Perl Blog
  • [GO] 100 Pixar characters drawn to scale
  • [GO] Mapping GitHub - a network of collaborative coders
  • [GO] Streamgraph code is available and open source
  • [GO] ongoing by Tim Bray * An Android Side Project

Monday, April 12, 2010

Links and Notes for 2010-04-11

  • [GO] How to Get Into Stanford with B's on Your Transcript: Failed Simulations and the Surprising Psychology of Impressiveness

Links and Notes for 2010-04-10

  • [GO] How To Report A Bug - Journal of schwern
  • [GO] Facts about Schwern - Journal of schwern
    Schwern does not commit to master, master commits to Schwern.
  • [GO] The Story of TOMS Shoes - BIL Conference
    I think I will be buying some of TOMS Shoes.
  • [GO] How to Do Cool Things Around the World - BIL Conference
  • [GO] Use your skills to help others | FlowingData
  • [GO] The Best SLA I've Seen In A While

Links and Notes for 2010-04-09

  • [GO] Zoom Zoom - template emotion

Links and Notes for 2010-04-08

  • [GO] rc3.org - Extreme agility
    "Release management? We don't have "releases" in the traditional sense. When something is ready, it gets deployed. We might try to deploy a few things at once, but we don't have some number with a deadline that says "on this date we're releasing this version with features X, Y and Z." I guess that's "continuous deployment," if you want to label it."
  • [GO] Common Queries Tree

Links and Notes for 2010-03-29

  • [GO] Why Modules and Plumbing - Modern Perl Books, a Modern Perl Blog

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Links and Notes for 2010-03-24

  • [GO] Giles Bowkett: Future Future Yum Yum Yum
    Oh look. It's the future.
  • [GO] European Parliament Rips Global IP Accord | Threat Level | Wired.com
  • [GO] Theory of Change (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
  • [GO] http://chris.prather.org/been-there-done-that.md.html
  • [GO] F.C.C. Plans Have Potential to Accelerate the Roll Out of the Sustainable Network - O'Reilly Broadcast
  • [GO] Mind the information gap | (Scott Rafer's Blog)
  • [GO] The Reason So Many People Are Unemployed (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
  • [GO] Pro Git Bloggin' - GitHub

Links and Notes for 2010-03-21

  • [GO] Why writing software is not like engineering
  • [GO] Basics: Finding pin 1 - Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
    A little part of me continues to be interested in hardware. I found this entry about finding pin 1 very cool.

Links and Notes for 2010-03-19

  • [GO] Managing risk by deploying incessantly - Esoteric Curio

Friday, March 19, 2010

Links and Notes for 2010-03-17

  • [GO] Perl Hacks - Crufty Old Perl
  • [GO] The Awesomeness of a Hackathon

Links and Notes for 2010-03-16

  • [GO] YouTube - What matters to you // me? - VFS
  • [GO] YouTube - German Coast guard trainee

Links and Notes for 2010-03-14

  • [GO] Unweaving the Rainbow on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
    I wish I was exposed to this sort of science when I was this young. There needs to be more of that if we hope to inspire kids to go into the sciences.

Links and Notes for 2010-03-12

  • [GO] MF Bliki: VersionControlTools

Links and Notes for 2010-03-09

  • [GO] Scaling Puppet with Git | Bitfield Consulting

Monday, March 8, 2010

Links and Notes for 2010-03-05

  • [GO] canviz - JavaScript library for drawing Graphviz graphs to a web browser canvas
  • [GO] tbaggery - Smack a Ho.st
  • [GO] How Genetics Works | FlowingData
  • [GO] YouTube - Pedigree Dogs ad shot 1000 FPS using the Phantom camera
  • [GO] iProcessing
  • [GO] The 99% Rule - Modern Perl Books, a Modern Perl Blog
  • [GO] CWE - 2010 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors
  • [GO] doane paper grid+lines

Friday, March 5, 2010

Links and Notes for 2010-03-04

  • [GO] Seth's Blog: It's easier to teach compliance than initiative
  • [GO] What's That? (94) on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  • [GO] Gabor hits Send: "Brilliant Only in Tiny Bursts"
  • [GO] How Software Engineers and Designers Can Increase Their Focus
    "You become more productive by getting into the habit of doing actual work regularly, not by constantly thinking about how you can get more work done."
  • [GO] Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com

Links and Notes for 2010-03-02

  • [GO] Bruce Perens: Inside Open Source's Historic Victory -- Datamation.com

Links and Notes for 2010-02-27

  • [GO] Derek Sivers: Weird, or just different? | Video on TED.com

Links and Notes for 2010-02-25

  • [GO] Scott Rafer's Blog - Santa Quote
  • [GO] Watching the birth of Flickr co-founder's gaming start-up | Geek Gestalt - CNET News

Links and Notes for 2010-02-20

  • [GO] A Perl Programming Maintenance Checklist - Modern Perl Books, a Modern Perl Blog

Links and Notes for 2010-02-16

  • [GO] Chunking, Subtlety, and Whitespace - Modern Perl Books, a Modern Perl Blog

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Links and Notes for 2010-02-14

  • [GO] The genesis and usage of Data::Dumper::Concise and Devel::Dwarn
  • [GO] Scott Rafer's Blog - At 3:02, Doug Stanhope explains why you watch the news and scare yourself
    It's good to know that I'm not the only one who thinks we should all just chill out a little.
  • [GO] Mosquito Death Ray in Action at TED [VIDEO]
  • [GO] Blasting Mosquitoes out of the Air on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
    ...wishing I was at TED.
  • [GO] YouTube - Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age Randy Nelson
  • [GO] Edwin Catmull - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Links and Notes for 2010-02-13

  • [GO] Calendar About Nothing: Tracking Open Source Contributions

Links and Notes for 2010-02-09

  • [GO] Bad Nomenclature >> Blog Archive >> A rant about PHP compilers in general and HipHop in particular.
  • [GO] Twitter Code Swarm on Vimeo

Links and Notes for 2010-02-05

  • [GO] Stevan Little's Blog: On Frameworks ...

Links and Notes for 2010-02-04

  • [GO] Scott Rafer's Blog - Decade Clock
  • [GO] Xemu's Long-Winded Game Industry Ramblings - AGDC 09 - World of Warcraft Operations
  • [GO] In praise of git's index - plasmasturm.org
  • [GO] It's So Hard When Contemplated In Advance And So Easy When You Do It

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Links and Notes for 2010-01-17

  • [GO] YouTube - iPHONING MY WAY TO RETIREMENT $.70 AT A TIME by Eugene Lin, Ep 44

Links and Notes for 2010-01-13

  • [GO] Second Life Blogs: Technology: Diary of a Paranoid Mysql Upgrade

Links and Notes for 2009-12-23

  • [GO] hub - git with github - GitHub
  • [GO] Video: Node.js by Ryan Dahl - JSConf.eu - The JavaScript Conference

Links and Notes for 2009-12-16

  • [GO] RJBS Advent Calendar - Like DATA, Only Less Stupid
  • [GO] RJBS Advent Calendar - 12-07

Links and Notes for 2009-11-29

  • [GO] Cary Fowler: One seed at a time, protecting the future of food | Video on TED.com

Links and Notes for 2009-11-28

  • [GO] Dan Ariely on our buggy moral code | Video on TED.com