Software Geek

I remember the time well. I was 27 years old.
I finally had my own apartment for the first time. I still hadn’t bought a new car yet, but I was jazzed that I had a 4 year old Mazda RX 7. 4 Years old was as good as new to me, and driving a gold RX 7 back in the day was fun as well.

I still bought my suits used, although by then I did have 1 new suit I had bought at Neiman Marcus because my girlfriend worked there and brought me to one of their year end employee discount deals.

My business, MicroSolutions was about 3 years old and I would make 60k dollars that year. HUGE money for me. Back then, getting paid your age was good, double your age

was great. Around Christmas of that year, after many welcome hints from my then girlfriend, I decided to take every penny I had in my savings, $ 7,500 dollars and get engaged.

It was a beautiful ring that cost me exactly $ 7,500 dollars.

Long story short. I got engaged. She lost the ring a couple weeks after I gave it to her and before it was insured. We broke up. (the good news is that I was too young to get married and we are still good friends).

27 years old. Zero in the bank. Messed up in the head because of the breakup. The good news was that I had my business. The one thing that I could always focus on to the exclusion of everything else. A trait that would serve me well in business, but had more than a little bit to do with my breakup.

MicroSolutions was growing. But it could be doing better. The PC industry (more…)

Unlimited choice seems to be the defacto “nirvana” when it comes to any and all things video. We all want what we want, when we want it, how we want it, for free if at all possible.

The reality is that even though we may index everything and anything digital and use search engines thinking we truly have access to everything, that is far from the truth. Google users “choice” goes as far as their search algorithms take the first results page. Rare is the search that goes beyond the 1st page. Which is exactly why SEO is so important to so many

We don’t hunt through pages and pages of Digg or any other “wisdom of the crowds” engine. in fact, I’ve beg

un to use Mahalo (disclosure, Im an investor) more and more simply because it has a real person extend options beyond the basic algorithm.

Advances in storage technology have taken us to the point where we can and do put everything and anything on a hard drive and then make it available online. The choices far exceed our capacity to consume.

So how will we find new stuff ? New entertainment choices ?

Will it be purely from friends on social networks ? Will we verticalize and go to movie and music sites (or any other interest we may have) and join their social networks ? Will we just continue to trust Google and search engine algorithms to get us “the most relevant:” options with a suggestion here or there? Will it be a combination of the two ala Mahalo ? Or will we find “trusted brands” to guide us.

I know that TV ne (more…)

I am tickled pink ’n honored to announce the third release of Microsoft Tagspace *, a social bookmarking solution for technical professionals, like you. With this release, Tagspace becomes Microsoft’s first true social bookmarking application for the whole World Wide Web Web. Learn more about Tagspace and its potential to help you save, recall, and connect to the people, subjects, and Web-based resources that matter most to you here.

With today’s release, you can now use Tagspace to:

• Tag Practically Anthing on the Web–Apply tags to practically any site on the World Wide Web, excepting those that are known to contain offensive, malicious, and otherwise inappropriate content.
• Browse Member Tags–See what other users have tagged and view their personal tag clouds, by clicking on their display names.
• “Tag Drafting”–Subscribe to the RSS feed for a tag (like tagspace ).
• “Member Drafting”–Subscribe to the RSS feed for other members’ public tagged items (my Tagspace RSS feed here , by clicking on their names and subscribing to the RSS feeds associated with their tagged items lists. 

• “Tag Drafting ” and “Member Drafting” are excellent ways to stay up to date , diminish information overload , and approach what I like to call “domain omniscience “, at little expense to yourself.

(more…)

Foundations for Structured Programming with GADTs , Patricia Johann and Neil Ghani. POPL 2008.

GADTs are at the cutting edge of functional programming and become more widely used every day. Nevertheless, the semantic foundations underlying GADTs are not well understood. In this paper we solve this problem by showing that the standard theory of datatypes as carriers of initial algebras of functors can be extended from algebraic and nested data types to GADTs. We then use this observation to derive an initial algebra semantics for GADTs, thus ensuring that all of the accumulated knowledge about initial algebras can be brought to bear on them. Next, we use our initial algebra semantics for GADTs to derive expressive and principled tools — analogous to the well-known and widely-used ones for algebraic and nested data types — for reasoning about, programming with, and improving the performance of programs involving, GADTs; we christen such a collection of tools for a GADT an initial algebra package. Along the way, we give a constructive demonstration that every GADT can be reduced to one which uses only the equality GADT and existential quantification. Although other such reductions exist in the literature, ours is entirely local, is independent of any particular syntactic presentation of GADTs, and can be implemented in the host language, rather than existing solely as a metatheoretical artifact. The main technical ideas underlying our approach are (i) to modify the notion of a higher-order functor so that GADTs can be seen as carriers of initial algebras of higher-order functors, and (ii) to use left Kan extensions to trade arbitrary GADTs for simpler-but-equivalent ones for which initial algebra semantics can be derived.

(more…)

The little b project is an effort to provide an open source language which allows scientists to build mathematical models of complex systems. The initial focus is systems biology. The goal is to stimulate widespread sharing and reuse of models.

The little b language is designed to allow biologists to build models quickly and easily from shared parts, and to allow theorists to program new ways of describing complex systems. Currently, libraries have been developed for building ODE models of molecular networks in multi-compartment systems such as cellular epithelia.

Little b is based in Common Lisp and contains mechanisms for rule-based reasoning, symbolic mathematics and object-oriented definitions. The syntax is designed to be terse and human-readable to facilitate communication. The environment is both interactive and compilable.

Yet another biological DSL.

As usual, it is best to start by looking at some sample models.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2671

Darren keeps asking me why I’m not posting everything on the site, and my major push-back is that it wasn’t easy. It still isn’t as easy as I would like, but my concentration on some new tools is a start. PDDrop is a red-dot tool that allows you to log-in to PD through the web services interface, obtain a listing of your current projects, and then use the tool as a drop target to place zip files that can then be added as releases. The entire process takes about 15 seconds, maybe a bit more if you are verbose with your notes, and then the release is on the web.  Very nice if you ask me. The current release has been posted using the tool, so I’m in the process of a dog food release. If you have an account on PD where you can manage your own projects then you’ll definitely find this useful. If you don’t, then bug Darren to add you. We only have about 30 registered users and only a few projects.

Project Distributor :: DigiTec Web Consultants :: Project Distributor Client Tools

 

http://weblogs.asp.net/justin_rogers/archive/2004/10/29/249767.aspx

A couple months ago I agreed to do an interview with a major national magazine that I enjoy and respect. I rarely do face to face interviews because I have significant trust issues with how an interview can be reflected in a story.

I try to stick exclusively to email for all my interviews. In this case I made an exception because I had developed a good relationship with the magazine.

The interview process was unexceptional. Meaning that it went well. The writer and I got along and I thought it was a fun interview to do.

The article came out last week and I liked it. No problems at all.

Then yesterday, the person who interv

iewed me, who is also a blogger, decided to blog about our interview. The blog ran on a site that he is associated with, but is not affiliated at all with the magazine the interview was for. He never asked, nor told me that our interview would be blogged about. While I respect the magazine, I am not a fan of the site he works for, or of its affiliated site that the blog ran on. A point I let him know. I would not have done the interview had I known he would blog about it for this site.

Live Help SoftwareJabber/XMPP based Live Support Software for your website. Be in touch with your clients!www.jbTop.com/>As it turns out, he did not clear the blog with the magazine either.

So he traveled on their dime to do an interview for their magazine and then used the interview to generate a blog for his site from a subject that was not expecting to be blogged about.

Ethical or not ?

Permalink  | Email this  | Linking Blogs  | Comments

http://www.blogmaverick.com/2008/01/23/is-this-ethical-for-a-blogger-journalist/

Comments (0)