So, it’s been decided: I’m going to run the Chicago Lakefront 50K in two weeks. I’ve been reading a collection of ultrarunning stories since I bought it for myself a few months ago, and I’ve been contemplating ultramarathons seriously since I attempted my first marathonish distance (WARNING: PICTURES OF MY SWEATY HAIRY CHEST! DO [...]
Archive for March, 2006
The danger of psuedo-openness
21Mar06As I was walking across campus in the beautiful snow today, I had a little revelation:
The biggest threat to Free Software (Free as in Freedom) will not be proprietary software, it will be psuedo-open software.
The web has always been sort of open source. If you are using Firefox, you can look at the code [...]
Risk, Uncertainty, and Doubt
20Mar06Jean Tabaka of On Be(come)ing Agile writes about the difference between risk, uncertainty and doubt in software development and how she feels this difference highlights the primary motivations for Agile software devemlpment methodologies:
When we assume that more analysis and more calculation will reduce risk, we are assuming that risk is all that that stands between [...]
Vacation in Pictures
20Mar06Spring Break in Boulder: I skied, I slept, I ate well, drank well, and played a lot of Mario Kart. Full photoset is here
Fixing Firefox and Google
19Mar06Firefox’s status bar has been annoying me for a while because it’s such a waste of space. The only thing I use it for is to check what the URL of a link is before I click it. It’d be great if firefox would just show me the URL of each link in [...]
On Brackets
19Mar06All of this talk of brackets makes it seem like watching sports is all about predicting who is going to win and why. Am I the only one who doesn’t care that much who wins?
I don’t watch much sports, but when I do its from the perspective of an athlete. I love [...]
One Laptop per Child
15Mar06Chris Blizzard just posted a piece about the software for the OLPC project. I’ve been really inspired by the project and every time I read about it I get an intense desire to be a part of it, but until now I haven’t been sure about how to get involved. There are some [...]
Goodwill
07Mar06
IMG_2279
Check out the Disney’s Animal Kingdom t-shirt. That thing cracks me up.
Pizza was insanely good. But what was even better than the pizza was the Cilantro Pesto we made. I figured: “Cilantro Pesto… that’s going to be harsh! Only just tolerable embedded in pizza with other strong flavors like onion and [...]
Open Source Knowledge Transfer
06Mar06In the Open Source world, there’s a bit of a knowledge transfer problem. It’s hard for new developers to get into an existing codebase, and it seems like little of the accumulated wisdom of older developers gets passed on.
But what if people started adopting a model similar to the one we use in academia? [...]
Google Video, two months late
04Mar06Google finally got around to approving the video I uploaded on January 2nd. Fast service there, folks.
