Intersting Links from Hacker News - 2008-02-07

• Fall of the MS empire
• Add "pwn" before youtube in the url of any youtube video to download it
• The Economy According To Mint
• Memcached Tech Talk with Mark Zuckerberg
• Git - Intro to Rebase
• Augmented Reality - FLARToolKit Demo
• I am not saying that I am a genius but I fit almost all of this. I only disagree with the part about relationships. I am very happy and have not lost interest in mine. ;)
• Ceiling Height Can Affect How A Person Thinks, Feels And Acts
• CouchDB and Me

Intersting Links from Hacker News - 2008-01-28

• The power of small teams
• Apparently MochiKit has build in support for deferreds which I have only seen in the Twisted Python framework which is pretty sweet.
• Maatkit makes MySQL easier and safer to manage. This might suck or be super cool but it seemed interesting.
• Principal-agent problem
• Being more than programmers. (this yielded the link above)
• Consistency and availability in Amazon’s Dynamo
• Exchange vs Open Source
• Why Software Engineering Sucks
• Hack && Ship
• Teen goalie designs pads to trick shots
• It would be cool to have this for buffalo
• Crazy dashboard of now
• Why bad taste rules in business endeavors, and why that's a problem for creative industries.
• Innovate Like Chris Rock
• Hilarious
• Great info about the pilot that landed in the Hudson

Quote me on this:

There is a long and drawn out story that I was going to write about but I will let the reader create a story around my quote.

A technologist is more than the sum of their potential documentation.

Goals for 2009

Dan posted his 2009 goals and I thought that I better get mine out there before it's February.

- Stop failing at blogging regularly.
- Get down to 200lbs from my current 268lbs.
- Read the rest of the O'Reilly perl books by the end of June.
- Learn Python in the second half of the year.
- Learn CouchDB.
- Be able to play 3 songs on my violin which I currently have no idea how to play.
- Read 30 other books. (This is my first books goal so I am starting low.)

Book: Cathedral and the Bazaar

It seems that the Cathedral and the Bazaar has an impact on anyone who reads it. For me it put many things into words that I have not been able to myself. There were a couple of parts that had a strong impact.

But there is a more fundamental error in the implicit assumption that the cathedral model (or the bazaar model, or any other kind of management structure) can somehow make innovation happen reliably. This is nonsense. Gangs don't have breakthrough insights—even volunteer groups of bazaar anarchists are usually incapable of genuine originality, let alone corporate committees of people with a survival stake in some status quo ante. Insight comes from individuals. The most their surrounding social machinery can ever hope to do is to be responsive to breakthrough insights—to nourish and reward and rigorously test them instead of squashing them. (Full Section)

This next one is from Magic Cauldron:

The brutal truth is this: when your key business processes are executed by opaque blocks of bits that you can't even see inside (let alone modify) you have lost control of your business. You need your supplier more than your supplier needs you—and you will pay, and pay, and pay again for that power imbalance. You'll pay in higher prices, you'll pay in lost opportunities, and you'll pay in lock-in that grows worse over time as the supplier (who has refined its game on a lot of previous victims) tightens its hold. (Full Section)

Every single person who does anything at all with or relating to technology should read this book.

This was a great post about Twisted with several great paragraphs about reading and understanding source code that ring very true. Below is a bit that I found meaningful.

Experience is multidimensional. Learning is experience, not rules. When you really jump into this stuff, it will surround you. You will have an experience of the code. For me, that is a mental experience akin to looking at something from the perspective of three dimensions versus two. When I've not dedicated myself to understanding a problem, the domain, or the tools of the domain, everything looks very flat to me. It's hard to muddle through. I feel like I have no depth perception and I get easily frustrated.

Read the whole post here.

Quotes from PPW2007

"Klingon is not a human language."

"HERE, I WILL READ YOU THE MOUSE GENOME OVER SKYPE"

"Hey, my password is 'cj5kQ85$1zsr', where's my candy?"

"Is that a gatling run on top of that camel?"

"f**k beziers,.. look at those gradiants"

"We've secretly replaced the last argument with crystals."

"Sock puppets are the new live demo."

"emacs is a great os with a terrible editor."

[13:49] srg?
[13:49] second row guy

"You're only young once. You can be immature forever!"

"I have been told there are 'normal' programmers here, but I am not sure how to separate them from the crowd. Does that mean that we are blending with them, or as the Evil Spock told us, it is easier for a civilized person to act the other way?"

"... because in a university environment we'd have to install a firewall backwards, to protect the internet from our students."

[16:17] <****> [my boss said] because "perl is not mantainable"
[16:17] <****> my boss didn't like my response
[16:18] <****> "your mom isn't maintainable"