A few weeks ago we hosted Robert J Sawyer over for lunch and he gave a pretty interesting talk about his upcoming book Wake. The books is about the Web gaining consciousness. I’m not even a huge sci-fi fan and I found it pretty interesting.
We spent the weekend doing some much needed decoration at the apartment. The most porminent of which is buying a lamp (several actually, but some are being delivered) for the living room and putting up circular mirrors on the living room walls at semi-random spots. Here’s a shot:
Oh yeah baby! (It looks even better in person).
We also put up a bunch of photos, some regular-ish mirrors for the entrance hall and bedroom, and also put up the remainder of these awesome circular mirrors in the study room.
I just spent 2 very warm weeks in Mountain View, CA as part of my orientation at Google. Unfortunately it’s time to go back to the -18C temperatures of Canadia. A bunch of people keep asking me how it was, so here’s the lowdown:
Awesome food (I made a counscious effort to gain 5 pounds in 2 weeks, lets see how it worked out)
Sweet weather (yeah I just have to say it again to rub it in)
Went on a 3-day trip to Vegas (we can call this my starting work bonus vacation)
I’m going to be working in the AdSense group (that’s where Google supplies ads for third-party sites and both Google and the publisher site make money from the clicks)
I don’t really yet know what I’m going to be working on, but even if I knew it’s possible I’d have to kill you if I told you
Orientation wasn’t super-useful because I’ve seen about 60% of it before – the other 40% was actually pretty awesome
Hanging with people I haven’t seen for 8 months was a lot of fun
I’m going to be working mostly in C++ so I spent a bunch of time in the past week cramming up on C++
To change levels safely with luggage cart, please use elevators…
…is what I just heard over the announcement system at SFO International airport. I think the main question here is: are people who take luggage carts on stairs/escalators actually smart enough to listen to announcements?
Even though I enjoy the hobo life as much as the next guy it was finally time to try and get myself some sort of habitat – no, the cardboard box doesn’t count. I’m happy to announce that in one short day of looking (and a couple of months of frantic checking online) we found a kick-ass apartment for January. So don’t worry, I won’t be hoboing it up and freezing in the cruel Canadian winter.
Now it’s time to use Planning Wiz to plan our apartment layout!
I grabbed a copy of Wikinomics from the bookstore a few weeks ago while looking for another book. It’s been on my radar since I heard all the buzz around it when it was published a couple of years ago.
Expectation: a survey of how the (relatively) new tools of online collaboration impact society and business.
Actual outcome: I don’t really know, the book was so badly written that I kinda lost the point of what they were saying around page 3…
So, is the book really that bad?
Well I have to admit they do have some interesting stories and anecdotes in there (let me summarize some of them here so that you don’t have to read the book):
Proctor & Gamble used InnoCentive to outsource much of their R&D (with great success)
Nettwerk – an innovative Canadian music label that actually embraces the digital age
Novartis publishes a free dataset from years of research into the genetic foundations of type 2 diabetes
There’s a bunch of other interesting case studies like the above, but you can get a sense for most of them from the notes at the end of the book. My question is: why is the book 319 pages?
Sure, maybe the book wouldn’t have sold at the 60 pages that the content actually deserves. But then again maybe the authors should have stuck to their principles that they’re advocating and published it on a Wiki! (where it would have quickly been edited down to a remove the 300x repetition).
In short, if you woke up today after a 20-year coma and you’re looking to find out what this whole web thing is about, maybe you should buy the book. Otherwise, just google for the above stories for some interesting reading and don’t bother. I’m going to try and sell mine, it’s just taking up useful space.
And don’t forget to paradigm shift your synergies going forward! *
Heard about this in the news a couple of days ago. A Dubai-based environmental design firm, TimeLinks, is planning to unveil it’s newest “structure”, which is really a city-within-a-pyramid, called the Ziggurat:
Behold, the Ziggurat
This thing will supposedly be able to house up to 1 million people and have no cars. You may ask, how will they live without cars?
Fear not! They’ll have modern transportation system within the structure that runs both vertically and horizontally. I’m envisioning the Futurama tube system…
This city is supposed to be carbon neutral, using only natural energy from the wind, water, sun and so on.
I think I’m going to start saving today for a chance of saving my soul in the city of the future!
I was selling some stuff on craigslist when and got a very generic email response from a potential buyer that said something along the lines of “I’d like to buy your item. Is the item available? Please respond urgently!!” That sounded a bit strange and spammy, so I responded from a special “Just for spam” email address saying it was available. Here’s what I got back in response:
Thanks for your prompt response,My name is Mike larry located in Utah, i am currently out of the state on a pastoral mission.
I am buying the item for our pastor who is recently getting married to a California woman that is working in West Africa Embassy as a wedding present.
So you will be sending it to them once you receive the confirmation of my payment. I would have love to pick it up by my self, but i am out of the state now on a pastoral mission And i don’t want to disappointed them.
Please send me a paypal request to enable me to make the payment right away. through paypal,or the information that i will use to send you a u.s postal money order,I will like this item to get to them before the wedding. i will add additional extra $180 USD during payment for the shipment cost, Because you will be required to ship it express through u.p.s to them.thanks
Mr Mike larry
Now I’m just eagerly waiting for that wonderful extra $180!!1!1!!
I’ve been learning Ruby on Rails for the past few weeks, and I’ve encountered an interesting question that I’ve faced a few times before and never really found a good answer to.
How do you read code?
And I don’t mean that in a metaphysical sense. I mean when you’re learning a new framework, language or technology you usually look at some code written in it to try and see how real world applications use it. These days you can pretty easily find Open Source code written in almost anything. What I find difficult is figuring how to read the code of these applications.
I’ve read a book about Ruby on Rails, so I understand the basics decently well. I’ve created a toy application just to see how to do it. But the jump from that to digging through source code for a full fledged real application is pretty huge. Where do you start? Initally I started looking at the models to try and understand the objects that the application dealt with. But I found that to be a bit confusing. Then I looked at some of the key controllers (like user authentication and those that handle the main pages) and also found that a bit confusing.
Finally I sort of settled on looking at a specific page in the app, looking through the view that generated it, then going to the controller that was invoked, and maybe looking at some helper methods and model code that I found there. I found that to be a reasonably understandable strategy. But I’m not really sure if it would have worked as well if I didn’t already have looked at some model/controller code before hand.
This is not specific to RoR. If you learn a new development environment, how do you figure out where to learn the code?
