Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Of Mime and Men

2009-07-04T12:24:00.012Z

[in central London, an aroused crowd snaps photos of mime artists posing as tennis players]JS: "What's the point of that? You can take a photo of anybody and they'll always look like a mime artist on the picture..." #overheardatworkRelated:One-liners that made me lolNiniane: one-liners that made me lol

How to remove installed services via the command line

2009-03-16T21:36:00.000Z

[for future reference] sc delete [service name] MSFT docs for the Service Control: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/sc.mspx?mfr=true http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754599(WS.10).aspx http://support.microsoft.com/kb/251192

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

2009-03-04T00:06:00.006Z

Is Woody Allen at his best.The story and cinematic style are reminiscent of Rohmer's Pauline à la plage and Conte d'été.5/5 stars

Eccentric Java: oddities and corner cases

2008-10-21T19:23:00.024Z

Java Puzzlers is a worthy complement to Effective Java. It provides a collection of puzzles that illustrate obscure (and some times bizarre) behavior of the Java programming language and its core libraries. I've highlighted some of the book's puzzles below, grouped by Numerical, API, and OOP-related traps & solutions. § Numerical Traps Use the bitwise AND (&) instead of the MODULO (%) operator.

More underground map obsession

2008-06-07T12:24:00.001Z

London Tube Journey Planner (TubeJP) offers detailed public transport maps for LondonOn NY Turf offers routes for New York CityOn both services, a layer with the geographic transport routes (not their equivalent schematic diagrams) overlays the city maps.Related:A Taste of a Moscow Tube StationTube Map variations (great stuff!)Moscow TubeLondonTown Tube - The Real Thing

Not bad

2008-05-24T08:58:00.010Z

Jia (staring intently at my face):"Each part of your face is not perfect but when you put them all togetheris not bad":D

Hey! My life is O.K.! (happy, happy!)

2008-04-13T21:14:00.003Z

My Complete Far Side (50% off the original price!) arrived Friday morning and made my weekend in a way that can only be described by Zita Swoon's wonderful Bananaqueen belowSome classics:Gary Larson is brilliant.One thing, though: the 2 volumes are way too big and heavy -4 volumes would have been much better :)

(More) Resources For Learning Mandarin

2008-04-10T19:35:00.004Z

Another gem for my growing list of Resources For Learning Mandarin:Nciku contains a neat dictionary, conversations (text-to-speech, optionally annotated with hànzì and pīnyīn), Q & A's, tools, an awesome handwriting recognition tool that let's you draw Chinese characters, and plenty more cool stuff!Related:Resources For Learning Mandarin

RE: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?

2008-01-08T23:17:00.001Z

I found the article by Emeritus Professors Robert B.K. Dewar and Edmond Schonberg anecdotal and weakly supported.I describe the argument flaws by quoting and commenting in-line in the rest of this post."For example, Bjarne Stroustrup reports from Texas A & M University that theindustry is showing increasing unhappiness with the results of this approach."Here, the industry as represented by Bjarne

Types and Programming Languages Revisited

2007-12-30T15:33:00.002Z

My previous brute-force approach to list all the 4-dimension combinations of S = {(latent, manifest), (static, dynamic), (weak, strong), (nominal, structural)} typing -by filtering the desired tuples from the powerset of S - wasn't very efficient.It was a perfect example of The Danger of Naïveté: an inefficient algorithm that was nevertheless simple to devise and implement.Moreover, quoting The

Anchoring & Brainstorming

2007-12-29T11:28:00.000Z

From Quote of the week: Why brainstorming is a bad idea:"To their surprise, the researchers found that virtual groups, wherepeople brainstormed individually, generated nearly twice as manyideas as the real groups.The result, it turned out, is not an anomaly. In a 1987 study,researchers concluded that brainstorming groups have neveroutperformed virtual groups.Of the 25 reported experiments by

Types and Programming Languages

2007-12-28T22:38:00.000Z

This excellent overview of type systems by nostrademons @ reddit describes latent, manifest, static, dynamic, weak, strong, nominal, and structural typing, and places a number of popular programming languages on some of these dimensions.I got curious about listing all the possible combinations and then find programming languages to fill in the slots.I cooked up some quick and dirty Python code to

One-liners that made me lol

2007-12-07T11:24:00.005Z

(original theme by Niniane)"Don't let your beard get in the way of your typing"A comment on this Reddit thread.

Mistakes that cost lives

2007-09-30T21:40:00.000Z

From The Economist Plenty of blame to go around, Sep 27th 2007:"On September 5th Mattel had told an American Congressional committee thatits recall of 17.4m toys containing a small magnet that could be swallowed bychildren was due to a flaw in the toys' design, rather than productionflaws in China."From a BBC article on the 13 August 2007:"The boss of a Chinese toy firm involved in a huge safety

The eight rules of Dean Carney

2007-09-29T23:18:00.000Z

From the [very entertaining] book Ugly Americans by Ben Mezrich, the tale of Ivy League traders playing the Asian markets:Never get into something you can’t get out by the closing bell. Every trade you make, you’re looking for the exit point. Always keep your eye on the exit point. Don’t ever take anything at face value. Because face value is the biggest lie of any market. Nothing is ever priced

5 Business Ideas

2007-09-20T22:09:00.000Z

Share my ISA (of dubious legality)On the one hand there is a number of people constrained by the ISA limits but keen on investing their money in a reduced risk, tax efficient way; on the other hand, only a small number of people uses or maximises their ISA.I see an opportunity to restore the supply-demand balance: investors could agree to "lend" money to the non-investors and maximize their ISAs

Facebook is the new MySpace (definitely)

2007-09-19T18:23:00.000Z

Morning chat I overheard on the tube:...Little Girl 1: I wanna get into facebookLittle Boy: yeah, everyone's in itLittle Girl 2: wha' is it?Little Girl 1: it's kinda like myspace...my sister's in it too. I really want to join...

Fight for Kisses

2007-09-18T21:48:00.000Z

Barclays needs central bank loan too

2007-09-15T22:56:00.000Z

From the BBC Business News, 31 August 2007:Barclays says that a "technical breakdown" in the UK's clearing system forced it to borrow £1.6bn from the Bank of England.It is the second time this month that the bank has tapped into the central bank's emergency credit line, sparking fears it is facing a cash crisis....On 20 August, Barclays was forced to take out a £314m loan from the Bank of England

Better living through (unit) testing and advice

2007-09-05T07:40:00.000Z

A few weeks ago I (accidentally) found out that a pet-project of mine, the cross-lingual instant messaging, wasn't working anymore. Debugging showed the "3rd party translation sub-system" was always returning an empty translation.The fix revealed my development and maintenance process was flawed:It was time consuming to identify the root cause;My unit tests didn't address that particular scenario

Rhino + Maven for JavaScript compression @ build time

2007-09-02T10:45:00.000Z

AJAX-based Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) make heavy use of JavaScript. To improve the user experience of RIAs we can minimize the number of (JavaScript) file requests and reduce their size.These concatenation and compression operations can be done on-the-fly or at build time.On-the-fly techniques intercept requests and perform merging and/or compression in real-time. They are simple(r) to

Reusable Advice - Part II: Unobtrusive Notification

2007-08-31T22:47:00.000Z

Besides encapsulating behaviors that affect multiple classes into reusable modules, AOP can also be used for unobtrusive notification tasks.Instead of browsing application logs looking for exceptions, for example, I like to have the application itself email me the exception stack-trace and the arguments that caused the error when something goes wrong.Here's an example advice that sends an email

Compulsive Attention Seeker

2007-08-18T18:40:00.000Z

A few weeks ago, I approached a TfL staff member (let's call him SM) after failing to exit the gate with my Oyster card. Chat transcript below.Me: "Hi, I can't get out and the machine keeps telling me to seek attention..."SM (grinning and slowly printing each word in my head): "seek attention? Are you sure the machine told you to seek attention"?Me (mildly annoyed and a tad confused): "Yes, it

Resources for learning Chinese (language & culture)

2007-08-12T20:20:00.004Z

http://chinesepod.com/ Download free .mp3 podcasts with the basic, free account. Each lesson is a short and entertaining conversation between an English native and a Chinese speaker. There is also plenty of activity in the discussion panels, where community members help and discuss spoken and writing details about the lessons. http://fsi-language-courses.org/ Very thorough and authoritative

Beginner's Chinese

2007-08-12T05:36:00.000Z

I know I'll be 'intermediate material' the day I am able to karaoke to this song...

CRUD unit-testing checklist

2007-08-10T00:36:00.000Z

I'm writing a unit-test code generator for CRUD operations to keep me from repeating myself. In preparation for this, I'm compiling a comprehensive set of CRUD unit-tests beyond the eponymous ones.So, for a given business object Foo I may want to test:Createpublic void TestCreate_NullFoo { try { PersistenceServices.create(Null); } catch(PersistenceServiceException pse){ return;

Sunday Talks: Scalability @ YouTube

2007-07-22T23:21:00.000Z

I've been watching the videos from the Seattle Conference on Scalability talks. These are my notes from the YouTube Scalability talk by Cuong Do, YouTube Engineering Manager. It's pretty amazing how a team of only 9, including 2 developers, 2 sysadmins, 2 scalability architects, 2 network engineers, and 1 DBA, grew YouTube from Null to delivering over 100 million videos/day (prior to the Google

Sunday Music: Interpol & White Stripes

2007-07-22T22:41:00.000Z

Icky Thump, the new White Stripes, is brimming with creativity and is at least as good as any of its predecessors (including my favorite side project). It's such an inspired creation. Jack White is by talent possessed.Our Love to Admire was my introduction to Interpol, and I can say am quite pleased to have made their acquaintance.

CSS clean-up @ build time

2007-06-20T21:32:00.000Z

Here is a simple Maven goal to optimize CSS delivery at build time and low cost.