May 2010 Archives

http://www.stixfonts.org/

The mission of the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) font creation project is the preparation of a comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and print formats. Toward this purpose, the STIX fonts will be made available, under royalty-free license, to anyone, including publishers, software developers, scientists, students, and the general public.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems#P_versus_NP

Suppose that you are organizing housing accommodations for a group of four hundred university students. Space is limited and only one hundred of the students will receive places in the dormitory. To complicate matters, the Dean has provided you with a list of pairs of incompatible students, and requested that no pair from this list appear in your final choice. This is an example of what computer scientists call an NP-problem, since it is easy to check if a given choice of one hundred students proposed by a coworker is satisfactory (i.e., no pair taken from your coworker's list also appears on the list from the Dean's office), however the task of generating such a list from scratch seems to be so hard as to be completely impractical. Indeed, the total number of ways of choosing one hundred students from the four hundred applicants is greater than the number of atoms in the known universe! Thus no future civilization could ever hope to build a supercomputer capable of solving the problem by brute force; that is, by checking every possible combination of 100 students. However, this apparent difficulty may only reflect the lack of ingenuity of your programmer. In fact, one of the outstanding problems in computer science is determining whether questions exist whose answer can be quickly checked, but which require an impossibly long time to solve by any direct procedure. Problems like the one listed above certainly seem to be of this kind, but so far no one has managed to prove that any of them really are so hard as they appear, i.e., that there really is no feasible way to generate an answer with the help of a computer. Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin formulated the P (i.e., easy to find) versus NP (i.e., easy to check) problem independently in 1971.

From The Daily WTF:

Jeff emailed Carl an apology: "I withdraw my comments about the DAL and the UI being separate concerns. I was apparently mistaken." No sanely developed ASP.NET app would have access to Windows Forms objects. For the umpteenth time in his tenure, he re-invented the wheel and wrote his own DAL and business layer. In the end, Jeff was probably better off for it. The first rule of code reuse is that the code needs to be worth re-using.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/05/06/business/businessspecial/20100506-pack-ss.html#

Via Cool Tools:

Anki is a free, open source, flashcard program that is the best method I have used for memorization. I originally found it when I was looking for a better way to study for an EMT class. I quickly discovered one of the coolest features of Anki was the database of shared "decks" you can download for free. As it happens, another EMT student had already gone through the trouble of composing a deck that covered all of the material thereby saving me countless hours. The range of topics is astonishing but the most popular subjects appear to be languages (Japanese being the favorite) and vocabulary.

Anki

Via Lifehacker:

Next time you're hunting for icons, buttons, or other images to mock up or finish off a design, give Love Vector Free a look. It's a decent collection of free images that scale to whatever size image you're working with.

It's nowhere near the scale of the previously mentioned repository Open Clip Art Library, but Love Vector Free is pitched more toward web designs, buttons, and other functional pieces that designers and dabblers might be looking to use or draw from. Got a favorite source for free vector art elsewhere on the web? Pitch in a link in the comments.

http://www.globalnerdy.com/2010/05/09/new-programming-jargon/

Fear-Driven Development

When project management adds more pressure, such as by firing a member of the team.

From ThousandtyOne!

Question: I am in front of my computer ten to fourteen hours a day. I am supposed to be writing code. But I find that, I spend a lot of time getting distracted, surfing the web, trying to keep up with rails. Did you have any similar problems? What advice can you give to developers to keep on track and what motivated you to crank down and crank out a product?

Answer: I think the problem is you are trying to work fourteen hours a day. Who the hell gets anything productive done for fourteen hours a day? Try working five hours a day. If you only have five hours a day to spend on something, you'd focus your time a lot better. We've just gone down to four day work weeks. We are trying to work just eight hours a day. The amount of productive time I get out of that... two hours... three hours? I think people are just not willing to accept the fact that you can't, in a creative endeavor as programming, work for fourteen hours a day. It's ridiculous! If you could just get three great hours in per day, you would get a ton more done.

Full article...

Heyer was recommended by someone mentioned by LMB on her blog.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgette_Heyer

Beginning in 1932, Heyer released one romance novel and one thriller each year. Her husband often provided basic outlines for the plots of her thrillers, leaving Heyer to develop character relationships and dialogue so as to bring the story to life. Although many critics describe Heyer's detective novels as unoriginal, others such as Nancy Wingate praise them "for their wit and comedy as well as for their well-woven plots".

More Miles.

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-a-Paracord-Rescue-Belt/

The belt essentially has two main functions. 
1. The buckle is a high decibel whistle for attracting attention
2. The Belt section itself is a single length of 550 Paracord which can be unravelled literally in seconds for a whole manner of rescue techniques. 

In my opinion speed is what makes the difference in a survival situation. You can unravel the entire belt with one pull, there is no need to undo a whole series of knots or weaves.

Depending on the method you use to weave and the size of your waist, the belt can supply you with a length upwards of 70 feet of cord, This particular belt used 50 feet for my 32" waist  however i will explain how to increase or decrease the amount of cord you can carry while maintaining the same length of belt. 
Although the side release buckle means that the belt is not adjustable, there is about 15% elasticity in the belt so you need not worry if you put on a little holiday weght, your belt should be able to accommodate you.  The elasticity also means it will remain tight but flexible if you are wearing it during  outdoor pursuits.

Its worth noting that this same technique can also be used to make a bracelet which i have pictured at the end of the instructable.

http://www.webbikeworld.com/lights/denali-led-lights/

With some simple but extremely effective enhancements, a proven base product has been turned into an excellent accessory lighting kit for motorcycle use.

Pretty much fully ruggedized and tested to survive the wear, tear and shock of typical motorcycle use, the Denali LED D1 light modules are the real deal.

For anyone concerned about power draw, effectiveness, on/off transition time, longevity and return on investment, this system will make most arguments moot and even better, it also creates a safer riding environment.

http://highslide.com/

I'm using this on TCFJR for smart image management.

I use some 1 ounce bottles with flip-up dropper lids for my shaving oil, but these bottles, with the dropper plug insert, would work better.

From essentialsupplies.com:

Our low density polyethylene bottles have a variety of closures to choose from including dropper orifice reducers and dropper over caps, standard CT white ribbed, Yorker spouts, and turret caps. Click on cap size for sprayers, lotion pumps and dispensing closures.

From 4lessdepot.com:

The MicroStream LED pen light features a super bright, high flux, 1/2 watt LED. Corrosion and waterproof construction with an unbreakable polycarbonate lens and pocket clip. Rubber push button tail cap "on-off" switching. Provides up to 20 lumens for up to 1.5 hours. O ring sealed. 3.5" long and includes (1) AAA alkaline battery.

http://openlike.org/

An open protocol to allow sharing the things people like in a simple and standard method between web applications.

This Eagle Creek Pack-It 2-Sided Cube does the dirty work for you by separating clean and dirty or damp clothes while keeping them all secure and organized in your luggage.

• 1 side features a breathable mesh top for quick identification of items
• Other side features a floating LinkSeal™ polyurethane and polyester mesh divider to keep your dirty or wet clothes separate from clean clothes
• Double-zipper design provides access to any part of the Cube
• Constructed of lightweight polyester and recycled polyester to stand up to frequent use
• Convenient grab handle makes transport easy

http://www.edsets.com/zumomic?category_id=74

Need a stand-alone mic for your Zumo so you can use your earbuds for all audio?  This is it.  Want to add a second mic to your Goldwing setup so you can make outgoing bluetooth calls without needing to split the mic or run everything through the intercom?  This is the second mic you need. 

This item is a combo of one of our wired microphones (choose a boom or surface mount model) with Molex connector, and matching 30" approximate length straight wire with a 2.5mm plug suitable for the Zumo 550 and many other consumer electronics devices that can use a dynamic microphone. 

Plug the 2.5mm plug into the Zumo and the other end into the EdSets microphone of your choice. 

From skorks.com:

The sunk cost fallacy, also known as the Concorde fallacy, is a very interesting phenomenon. What it basically boils down to is the fact that it is human nature to throw good money after bad. The more resources (time, money) we invest in something, the more likely we are to stick with it despite all the indicators of our venture being a failure (I am not going to give generic examples; you're welcome to check out the links above). It is therefore no big surprise that when it comes to software development, we're not immune. In fact we take the sunk cost fallacy to new heights of awesome :).

In the world of finance, the sunk cost is accepted. If the money is spent and can't be recouped, it can no longer influence any further decisions. On the other hand, in software, once we have spent any kind of effort/money on a feature/project, we just can't let go. We would much rather delude ourselves and everyone around us that we can still turn everything around and make it all come out for the better. Developers do it, managers do it, it's an industry wide trend. No matter how flawed the product vision turns out to be, we are much more likely to try to adapt the whole ecosystem to the flawed product/feature rather than starting over from scratch and building something that will better fit the ecosystem we have. More than that, we will go to great lengths, bring in extra people, do overtime, whatever it takes, as if we can make an incorrect decision right by sheer force of will and sweat. I am not just talking at the project level, even at the code level we (developers) will often stick with a technology/library choice through thick and thin long past the time we should have abandoned it and found something that fits our needs better. There are always, good reasons to justify all this, but what it comes down to in the end is self-delusion - the sunk cost fallacy at work.

Continue reading...

From Business Week:

Meet public enemy No. 1 in today's workplace

If you're reading this article sitting down--the position we all hold more than any other, for an average of 8.9 hours a day--stop and take stock of how your body feels. Is there an ache in your lower back? A light numbness in your rear and lower thigh? Are you feeling a little down?

These symptoms are all normal, and they're not good. They may well be caused by doing precisely what you're doing--sitting. New research in the diverse fields of epidemiology, molecular biology, biomechanics, and physiology is converging toward a startling conclusion: Sitting is a public-health risk. And exercising doesn't offset it. "People need to understand that the qualitative mechanisms of sitting are completely different from walking or exercising," says University of Missouri microbiologist Marc Hamilton. "Sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little. They do completely different things to the body."

From Cynical-C: