ice bucket

Talia challenged Yofi and her mom; her mom challenged me.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=671430366283410

https://www.facebook.com/mitchwyle/posts/10152638658479269

Night Watch keeps getting better

James Mickens’ column in usenix magazine keeps getting better.  This month’s riff on systems programmers is spot-on.  Here is a representative excerpt:

I need mission-critical people; I need a person who can wear night-vision goggles
and descend from a helicopter on ropes and do classified things to protect my freedom while country music plays in the background. A systems person can do that.

Or, this one:

When it’s 3 A.M., and you’ve been debugging for 12 hours,  and you encounter a virtual static friend protected volatile  templated function pointer, you want to go into hibernation and  awake as a werewolf and then find the people who wrote the  C++ standard and bring ruin to the things that they love. The  C++ STL, with its dyslexia-inducing syntax blizzard of colons and angle brackets, guarantees that if you try to declare any reasonable data structure, your first seven attempts will result  in compiler errors of Wagnerian fierceness:
Syntax error: unmatched thing in thing from std::nonstd::__
map<_Cyrillic, _$$$dollars>const basic_string< epic_
mystery,mongoose_traits &lt; char>, __default_alloc_<casual_
Fridays = maybe>>
One time I tried to create a list<map<int>>, and my syntax  errors caused the dead to walk among the living.

It just keeps getting better.  Read the whole thing.

Day Trip to San Jose

I was in business meetings at eBay’s North (PayPal) campus today.  Many people who saw me in the hall ways scheduled phone meetings since I was booked up and had not extra time.  There is huge pent up demand for face meetings after my long absence.

When I arrived on campus, eBay’s Acme Labs was conducting octo-copter experiments in the parking lot.  I hope we get FAA clearance to deliver items to our customers before the evil everything store does.

Cubical decorations in building 15

Great meetings; lots more work to do.

Give up

http://www.theonion.com/articles/fasttalking-computer-hacker-just-has-to-break-thro,32000/

Best news all week!

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/04/report-google-to-end-forced-g-integration-drastically-cut-division-resources

The evil search giant ESG stops its own slow suicide.

Brilliant New-Age Humbug Generator

Back in the 1990’s we had a fantastic ecommerce web site generator someone coded up in perl.  It took random National Geographic pictures of bizarre primitive individuals for the executive team and random first-Internet bubble buzz word sentences for the mission, purpose, products, and services sub-pages.  It randomly generated some fantastic content-free web sites that were often better than real ones.  It was very inspirational.  It was called athenanow.com but alas, it was short-lived and cannot be found in archive.org.
Now we have a Deepak Chopra new-age web site generator:

It is wonderful.  And the author found another one for generating and tweeting smaller random New-Age BS here.

If anyone reading this knows where I can find the code or resurrected athenanow.com site, please contact me.

Spring Break in San Diego

Apartment on the beach (more photos here; video)

 

 

Sea World (more photos here)

 

 

UCSD Tour (more here)

 

 

San Diego Zoo (more photos here)

 

 

 

 

Berkeley Hall of Science & visiting friends in Fremont (more photos here)

 

Videos:

• splashing orcas
• play with dolphins 1
• play with dolphins 2
• Dolphins play with Frisbee

Tolerance and Coexistence

As a big fan of Ayan Hirsi Ali I was, of course, disappointed by the dogmatic intolerance of Brandeis University when they withdrew their invitation for her to speak on the topic of women’s rights.  It was therefore a pleasant surprise for me to discover that the Wall St Journal has published excerpts of her talk.

Read and learn!

Abridged Version of Remarks:  “Here is what I would have said.”

What aligns the timelines?

During this wonderful explosive “bubble time” of free social networking services we are actively giving away any semblance of privacy, propriety, and intellectual property to any and all who offer convenient services.  Each new social application produces a must-have, niche paradigm of connecting and communicating that leads us to sign up for their “free” service into which we cheerfully pour the most-intimate details of our lives.

But how can we go back and search for that great SMS, post, comment, picture, email message, thread, URL, or tweet we made two years ago?  Where is the unified history of activity?  When email dominated our interactions we could use desktop search or email search to find the thread.  Now, however, there is no unifying index that aligns our communications by timeline.

Will a slick, new “octopus” cloud-based service come into existence that tries to unify the services we use?   One hint at where we are going is this new cloud storage unifying system.

It abstracts the underlying services into one big disk in the sky.  You can peak under the hood to tweak and see what it is storing on which service, but it unifies them for you conveniently and allows you to use them all as one big disk.

Will the evil search giant’s “dashboard” evolve into such a unified timeline view?  Will their chrome browser crawl your history at other services (facebook, twitter) to mine out your posts, tweets, threads?

Which application or service aligns these disparate timelines?

Empower your Minions

 

device.modeOfTransport.on('changed', function(signal) { if (signal.previous === 'driving' && signal.current !== 'driving') { device.notifications.createNotification(car is parked here: ('
                + signal.location.latitude + ', ' + signal.location.longitude + ')' ).show(); } });

 

JavaScript may not be the best way to talk to your minions.  Wolfram Alpha’s natural  language seems more appropriate.  But now I shall never need to look for my car again.  It is likely someone has already written the JavaSript code for you to tell your minion what you need.