brothers always come first
if you have a small apartment, then fret not, you can still invite eleven foreign lawyers over for lobster - ''But our apartment is tiny and the academic lifestyle is always a lesson in living small. We didn't have enough plates or silver, and people were sitting on stones and footlockers. Why then did I not only permit but invent and organize this egregious invasion of my own precious privacy? Well, you never know when, or where, you're going to need a good lawyer..'' - it's not what you know, it's who you know.#
peter lindberg links about The History of Hollywood Dramaturgy - Dramaturgy, ''The art of the theater, especially the writing of plays.'' - the article talks about how modern dramaturgy is rooted in something Alexandre Dumas did to help him write - ''He got the idea of employing 12 writers to help him get all his ideas down on paper and, therefore, was party to the first writing factory.'' - peter says, ''What's interesting is that Dumas needed to create a dramaturgy with a strong structure for his team of writers to work within.'' - knowing peter, he thinks this is interesting because of it's connotations with regards to the software development process, since he doesn't specifically say this i'll have to guess what his thought is - a dramaturgy is kind of like a company "Methodology" of an advertising firm or a consulting firm, it is built up because one person who is already good at something decides to write down what works, but talent doesn't scale so the users of "The Methodology" solve all problems the same way whether it's the best or not because they follow a book not their minds - i think this is an orthogonal idea to "writing factories" pumping out what some people want but not things that are great writing. - maybe i missed the point?#
nova qualifies the comment on numbers of words of a particular culture as a "measurement" of said culture - an article is linked on the "myth" of the thousands of Eskimo snow - ''The message: learn from the Inuits. Change your language and change your company. Want to improve quality? Generate 39 different ways to talk about subtle differences in quality. Want to be more team-oriented? Find 39 different ways to discuss your commitment to teamwork. Want to be more customer-focused? Well, you get the picture.''#
from clay is a bit on web addiction - he quotes Pavel Curtis of PARC, ''I am concerned about the degree to which people find virtual communities enchanting. We have people who use LambdaMOO who are not in control of their usage who are, I believe, seriously and clinically addicted. . . . These people aren't addicted to playing video games. It wouldn't do the same thing for them. They're communication addicted. They're addicted to being able to go out and find people twenty-four hours a day and have interesting conversations with them.'' - and adds, ''One of the curiosities of social software is the way it denatures much of the anxiety of face-to-face communication (as anyone who has been involved in an email mediated courstship or breakup can attest), but the very fact of that denaturing can make it appealing enough to be addictive to some.''#
clay also interprets the small world experiement -#
The authors of the study (still running at smallworld.columbia.edu) found that the average chain was indeed around 6 people, and that the usual search tool was "forwarding by characteristic" -- says Watts "If you're trying to send something to Siberia, you don't think, 'Who do I know with a lot of friends?'" Watts remarks. "You think, 'Who do I know who is Russian?'
The most important finding, though, was that while chains can be connected in a few hops, few are. Of over 60,000 volunteers, only 384 chains, around 3%, were actually connected. This poses a challenge for the Friendser/LinkedIn/YASNS services -- there is a huge difference between latent and active social fabric.
the RIAA and MPAA wrote a letter to Arnold - ''Having been an Engineer all my life, I am currently worried about the pending rise of the machines, machine intelligence, and uncontrolled advancement of technology. Your experience dealing with Skynet has shown your leadership in this area and I hope we can count on you in the future. ''#
"Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty." - Bacchus' Motto#
danny o'brien writes about choosing your implementation language based on your successors - ''That said, your successor does need to actually know the language. Most of the people I can imagine maintaining this code will know Perl but not Python. Python doesn't take that long to learn, but reading Python to take on someone else'se project just isn't much *fun*. Sitting down to learn someone's Perl, while tough, does teach you about the way they were thinking when they wrote the application. Python's clarity, I think, cuts down on its expressiveness in depicting why certain decisions were made. When I had to hunker down and learn POE or Moveable Type, for instance, I came away with a very deep understanding of how it was supposed to work. It was fun, albeit time-consuming. I sometimes have problems doing the same with slabs of Python code, just because they can be very lacking in personality.''#
azarok has a nice review of SWAT, I saw it too and agree with him - ''The cast choices were a good fit for this film. Collin Farrell is one lucky SOB, first he's cast with Al Pacino and now Samuel Jackson. It's nice to see LL Cool J get thrown more lines than usual as he could use a step up from the supporting cast role. Michelle Rodriguez will forever be typecast it seems, but I'm all about tough chicks.''#
goldtoe got to see the TMBG documentary, Gigantic - i want at it - ''In talking about the happy-sad mix of most their songs, John Linnell says something like "It's not really interesting just to watch someone's heart break." It's much more interesting to wrap despair in this complex wrapper of accordion punk rock.''#
tony pierce writes about the recall election - ''when it became obvious that california was in trouble gray davis asked the republican federal government for help and didn't get any. then he made some bad deals with texas republican energy companies - one of whom was affiliated with vice president Cheney. as a result of those bad decisions we now find ourselves caught up in a "recall" election on his ass. its not like he lied about weapons of mass destruction. its not like he lied about nukes in africa in his state of the union. its not like he gave kick backs i mean tax breaks to the rich and bribes i mean refunds to the populace as the economy hits record lows.''#
ted leung wants more disconnected functionality - ''I live on an island. I use buses and ferries for transportation. I wait a lot. It's the perfect time to catch up on stuff that's piled up in the aggregator. If you don't give me the whole content, I can't read your feed when I'm waiting in line for the boat, or commuting on the boat. Ray Ozzie is right. We need disconnected functionality. But we not only need disconnected functionality, we need the data so that we can work disconnected. So I want all the content in the feed. [-] I don't blog nearly everything that I read, but I do remember that I read about something. FeedDemon doesn't have a capability to search the feeds that it keeps on disk (it also limits how many items it will keep). I want to be able to search the stuff that I read (or saw go by). In order to do that I need the content on my disk to do the search. I know about Feedster. Every time I've tried to use feedster to do this, it either took to long for me to find it, or I didn't find it at all. So I want all the content in the feed. ''#
an article on kuro5hin about why a new filesystem is important and a summary of the motion of filesystems towards database-like functionality. - i'm very interested in this idea. i don't like the idea having to build things (like database caching and databases) around things that don't do their job right (databases and filesystems, respectively)#
via slashdot is an article about a new kind of great ape - this is really about Big Foot!#
brian carnell reports, ''Pentagon Caught in Stupid Lie'' - ''The Independent reports that the U.S. dropped napalm on some Iraqi positions even though back in March it claimed it had destroyed all napalm stocks back in 2001.''#
john gruber continues on bad os x drivers - ''Several readers commented via email that my Zio saga was a prime example of why they don't like using installers in general, preferring instead drag-and-drop from a disk image or folder. I agree, but drag-and-drop installation isn't feasible for items that need to be located in privileged locations, such as /System/Library/Extensions/. An installer can put things anywhere after prompting for administrator authentication. But that's exactly what makes people uncomfortable, and understandably so. Once granted admin privileges, an installer can stick things pretty much anywhere it wants.'' - i think that this sort of thing could be gotten around, if i can drag and drop an application in '/Applications' and OS X will auto-discover the "Services" that it offers, then why shouldn't I be able to drag a driver in to '/Drivers' and auto-discover the extensions - I hope that the os x people will do this.#