tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53577942011-12-13T19:53:36.197-08:00Press Ctrl-F to Search This PageAsimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.comBlogger1631100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-2961735373337270212008-04-09T08:05:00.000-07:002008-05-20T16:21:22.536-07:00

Check out Google App Engine. http://code.google.com/appengine/ There is a waiting list for developer accounts so I would recommend signing up ASAP. Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications. No assembly required. Google App Engine provides a fully-integrated application environment. It's easy to scale. Google

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-63731560681752329852008-04-04T07:51:00.000-07:002008-04-04T09:18:29.252-07:00

So the question is: Are we living in a matrix universe or is the real stuff really real and not a simulation. The simulation/matrix idea suffers from the problem of infinite regress - if this universe (u_0) is a simulation inside another universe (u_1) and u_1 is a simulation inside u_2, where does this end? If it ends at n then don't we have the same dilemma at u_n? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-62620311090321860142008-04-04T07:48:00.000-07:002008-04-04T07:49:19.430-07:00

HARD ALGORITHMS Work on hard algorithms problems. For example: (a) Speech: Hidden Markov Models. (b) Optimization: Monte-Carlo simulations, simulated annealing, etc. (c) Clustering. (d) Conjoint Analysis. (e) Operations Research: Simplex, and other algorithms. BUG TRACKING 2.0 Create a traditional web services company with a 2.0 abstraction twist. (a) First create a REST-ful XML

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1156010221261495512006-08-19T10:42:00.000-07:002007-09-26T09:42:49.756-07:00

Here is an example of how to use analysis to arrive at somewhat unconventional conclusions. See which of the premises and arguments look suspicious. * * * No single story has done as much to stereotype step-mothers as Cinderella. But why has this happened? Cinderella is a fictional story. Let's not stereotype all step-mothers based on this made up story. For all we know this is pure

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1106425385542232952005-01-22T12:23:00.000-08:002006-07-07T06:41:18.156-07:00

I wrote a small program that tells you how popular a word or phrase is on Google. It's a good way to compare different things for Google popularity. (See the end of this post for the code.) For example, to see how many times the words cat and dog appear on the web, I typed: gcount.sh cat dog. Here are the results that I got: cat 128,000,000 dog 83,000,000 Clearly, cat-lovers dominate

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105779673732390102005-01-15T01:01:00.001-08:002005-01-15T01:01:13.733-08:00

There is something about wikis that disturbs me and I couldn't quite put my finger on it before. Here is a stab at it. The trouble is that they don't play well with non-wiki sites. It's hard to integrate a blog into a wiki. Suppose I want to set up a shareware site. It's hard to do this on a wiki. I mean the wiki does not really make things easier for me. It makes them harder. It's usually easier

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105779661186436892005-01-15T01:01:00.000-08:002005-01-15T01:01:01.186-08:00

Here is a technique I have found useful for planning small projects: Write down the goal. Then write down the steps working backwards from the goal. For example, if my goal is to resolve a bug, I start with a list that looks like this: [ ] resolve bug Then with some thinking I come up with things I need to get there, and write them down higher up in the list. So I get something like: [ ]

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105779145446614652005-01-15T00:52:00.000-08:002005-01-15T00:52:25.446-08:00

1. The internet was hard to design (it did not happen earlier) because the software architects charged wtih designing networked communication systems assumed complete information was necessary. 2. The href style link is an innovation because it makes no assumptions about the link. It does not assume that the link exists, or that the browser knows or needs to know whether the link exists. 3. The

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105770876288256982005-01-14T22:34:00.001-08:002005-02-13T17:13:01.656-08:00

This analysis is based on voter data from CNN. Here is the URL: Link to http://www.cnn.com. My impression during the door-to-door interviewing was that people who supported Bush considered terrorism as the most important issue. Looking at the issues section, the thing to note is the percentage who found an issue important times the percentage of this segment that voted for Bush. This gives

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105770870985636512005-01-14T22:34:00.000-08:002005-01-14T22:34:30.986-08:00

Here are some more thoughts on how to get things done, when it is easier to come up with ideas than to implement them: 1. To accomplish projects you must finish them quickly. So write them in scripting languages like Perl, Bash, Python, or PHP. Do not write them in C/C++ or Java. Remember that the project is going to lose its charm quickly. A Perl hack is more likely to get done than a C/C++

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105764060937432352005-01-14T20:41:00.000-08:002005-01-14T20:41:00.936-08:00

The neat thing about ruby is its blocks and yields. So for example a function f, which takes three arguments and a block can be called as: f(a, b, c) { |x,y| more stuff }. This is what f looks like: def f(a,b,c) # do stuff with a,b,c z = yield x, y # do more stuff end Now yield can be inside a loop. Each time yield is called, it calls the block, and sets its two parameters to x and y. The

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105764048114861992005-01-14T20:40:00.000-08:002005-01-14T20:40:48.113-08:00

It occurred to me that there is a conflict between what I have been doing on my sites, and what I need to do to optimize Google ads. The purpose of a personal site (such as mine) is to publish ideas. From the perspective of ads, there is really no market for original ideas or thoughts. Original ideas don't lead people to make purchase decisions. The purpose of a well-oiled ad site should be

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105762507067634812005-01-14T20:15:00.000-08:002005-01-14T20:15:07.066-08:00

Builder AU has an interview of Damian Conway (which is also posted on Slashdot). Here are some interesting comments that Damian made about the nature of software development: It seems that every few years a new development technique is hailed as the start of the Programming Renaissance, the Golden Age of Scientific Software Development. And none ever is. [...] Of course, the problem

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105741764266265242005-01-14T14:29:00.000-08:002005-01-14T14:29:24.266-08:00

GROWN-UPS AND CHILDREN The grown-up and the child principles form a duality along a continuum. For example, IBM is a parent. Apple is a kid. In the middle Apple tried to become a parent and almost went out of business. Google is clearly a kid. Their acquisition of KeyHole.com only makes sense if you look at them this way. The whole company feels like a kid's room. There are giant inflatable

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105741678369500332005-01-14T14:27:00.000-08:002005-01-14T14:27:58.370-08:00

1. Google has recently released http://desktop.google.com, which lets you google your hard drive. It is quite good. Also the size is small. The download is about 400k. The memory footprint is about 1 Meg. In other words, you could fit this on a single floppy. 2. The user interface is IE. The application spawns a tiny web server and then connects to it with IE. In other words the application has

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105732672766775822005-01-14T11:57:00.000-08:002005-01-14T11:57:52.766-08:00

Here is a post that John Baez posted on usenet, that I think is worth reading: ________________________________________ From: John Baez (baez@galaxy.ucr.edu) Subject: Re: Help, I'm arXiv drowning! Newsgroups: sci.physics.research Date: 2003-03-05 13:47:02 PST Serenus Zeitblom wrote: > These days I seem to spend more time reading and trying to > understand arxiv postings than doing actual

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105726659057886822005-01-14T10:17:00.000-08:002005-01-14T10:17:39.056-08:00

There are two key things to keep in mind in exams: (a) to not stress out, (b) to allocate the time optimally. Of these allocating the time is the most important point. Here's usually how I did the time allocation: 1. Divide the total time available by number of problems and then round down to 5 or 10 or 15, to get a rough idea of how many minutes per problem I had. 2. Skim through the exam

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105726123073792852005-01-14T10:08:00.000-08:002005-01-14T10:08:43.073-08:00

Here is a link to a news story about research on impulsiveness in blue jays and the importance of short-term rewards for them: Link to story. Here are some excerpts from the story: > In experiments with blue jays, David Stephens, a professor of > ecology, evolution and behavior in the [University of > Minnesota's] College of Biological Sciences, found that birds > presented with a choice of

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105722814202491942005-01-14T09:13:00.001-08:002005-01-14T09:13:34.203-08:00

There is a subtle problem with XP. These problems are hard to get at. Often I know something is wrong, but I can't quite explain it. There is a phenomenon, which I have noticed and Ward Cunningham also mentioned in a conversation, and this is that after a while XP teams tend to get bored with programming. There are different explanations for this. Regardless of what explanation we come up with

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105722809693475222005-01-14T09:13:00.000-08:002005-01-14T09:13:29.693-08:00

I am struck by the fact that Godel's proof is really simple and elegant. It has the same flavor as Russell's paradox (consider the set that contains all the sets that don't contain themselves -- does this set contain itself?). The trick of expressing mathematical statements as numbers seems obvious now given that we do this in computers all the time, but was probably a little less accessible in

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105722770088939662005-01-14T09:12:00.003-08:002005-01-14T09:12:50.086-08:00

One of the things that gets in my way of getting things done is that if the task is not interesting, I find it hard to get motivated to do it. I know people who don't view things this way. Normally, this ability to discriminate between boring and interesting things is a weakness. The guy who can put his head down and crank out whatever code the customer wants wins every time. But if applied

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105722767976832602005-01-14T09:12:00.002-08:002005-01-14T09:12:47.976-08:00

I am much better at thinking up stuff than at doing stuff. I use a lot of little tricks to stay focused and to get things done. Thoughts and ideas are effortless. Execution is hard. In our conversations about entrepreneurship and money, we have focused on ventures that are based on tangible products. In fact most of the economy is based on tangible products so this focus is natural. Since

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105722766053360972005-01-14T09:12:00.001-08:002005-01-14T09:12:46.053-08:00

I have always resisted an instinct to focus on concepts at the expense of experience. Even though I prefer to think about what to do, it seems more fruitful to act, to engage with the world, to get real feedback. But accumulating real experiences is so time-consuming and hard and tedious. And so why resist the attraction to concepts. Why not just engage with concepts and abandon the pretense

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105722757381326382005-01-14T09:12:00.000-08:002005-01-14T09:12:37.380-08:00

Nicholas Carr appears to be an example of someone who comes up with ideas, but not with implementations: http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/info.shtml Max McKeown is another such person. This weekend I spent some time googling Arundhati Roy, who appears to be another example. Here's what I found out. She studied architecture in school, then fell in love, moved to the beach and sold cakes for a few

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105711264008044302005-01-14T06:01:00.000-08:002005-01-14T06:01:04.006-08:00

One of the neat things about math is that reuse is extremely simple and pervasive. Since mathematical proofs are written for people you can easily allude to someone else's proof and expect the reader to get it. You can say, "based on the result by this other person in this other paper, we know that X is true", and then you can continue from there. In computer science it is not as easy. You can't

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105708135408395622005-01-14T05:08:00.000-08:002005-01-14T05:08:55.406-08:00

I was reading that Mac has a much more vibrant shareware community than the PC. As Robert Putnam would put it, the Apple community has more social capital than the Windows community. In the Windows world everyone is out for himself. In the Apple world on the other hand people are more conscientious about paying shareware costs. Apple attracts the kind of people who send off their checks to PBS

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105702497244977752005-01-14T03:34:00.001-08:002005-01-14T03:34:57.243-08:00

Here is a simple way to engage that I used in the past but then I forgot about it. I remembered it because I was thinking about my frame of mind during job interviews. The technique is simple: Focus. Push your mind like it is a muscle and pay attention to every nuance. Pay attention to every word being spoken by the other person. Pay attention to the task at hand. Whatever it is, put your whole

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105702451128710012005-01-14T03:34:00.000-08:002005-01-14T03:34:11.130-08:00

The way object-oriented programs decouple and intertwine is an optimal way to structure systems from certain perspectives -- e.g. it optimizes use of system resources. But how does it fare with reuse. And I see much more reuse (of my own code) at the Unix command line application level than at the class level. My command line applications live forever, while my GUI applications are dead on

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105702420388609532005-01-14T03:33:00.001-08:002006-07-27T08:47:46.396-07:00

I finally figured out how to use setuid in a Ruby CGI script so it can create and append to files using my effective uid. Incidentally, the same setuid trick should work just as well for other scripting languages such as Perl and Python. In the past I had made the directories writable by everyone, so that the web account ("nobody") could write to them. This always made me nervous. Here is the

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105702418612830922005-01-14T03:33:00.000-08:002005-01-14T03:33:38.613-08:00

Education has two elements: (a) learning new concepts, (b) repetitious exercises that ingrain those concepts into our minds and let us see their implications. In self study, I've noticed that I spend almost all my time doing (a), and pay no attention to (b).

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105701781507198082005-01-14T03:23:00.000-08:002005-01-14T03:23:01.506-08:00

Here is an excerpt from an interview of Ward Cunningham, on the nature of complexity and simplicity: I actually enjoy complexity that's empowering. If it challenges me, the complexity is very pleasant. But sometimes I must deal with complexity that's disempowering. The effort I invest to understand that complexity is tedious work. It doesn't add anything to my abilities. A friend

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105698518545663102005-01-14T02:28:00.000-08:002005-01-14T02:28:38.546-08:00

THE IMPORTANCE OF REFLECTION There is a value that is pushed in XP and also in business school, which is that action trumps speculation. However, despite believing this for some time, I have not harvested any significant gains from this. Action is pointless unless there is reflection. We act all the time. It's only by reflecting that we can make progress. Consider, a principle such as

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105698373974095112005-01-14T02:26:00.000-08:002005-01-14T02:26:13.973-08:00

When I say that reuse is difficult in object-oriented systems, I am not really talking about classes which cannot be reused because they are too intertwined with the classes around them. Rather I am talking about classes which should be easy to reuse but are not. Even if I write a seemingly transplantable class such as Complex, or Vector, it does not transplant well. There is a wiki page about

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105693984916454692005-01-14T01:13:00.000-08:002005-01-14T01:13:04.916-08:00

When I first started programming for a living I had this vision that I would need to spend some time coding up useful libraries for the first few years and then I could make a living just by patching them together. I was eager to invest the hard work for a short period because I expected to reap a rich reward over a much longer period. Unfortunately, this optimistic scenario has not played out

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105693975162726512005-01-14T01:12:00.000-08:002005-01-14T01:12:55.163-08:00

One of the interesting but incorrect assumptions I have noticed in evoting discussions has been that if a computer was going to change your vote it would have to show this to you. People assume that if they pushed the button to vote for candidate B and the computer registered that as a vote for candidate A, that in this case the computer would be forced to report this to you on a confirmation

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105689352366571372005-01-13T23:55:00.000-08:002005-01-13T23:55:52.366-08:00

I was recently reading the speeches by Charlie Munger. Search Google for the links. I found them really interesting because it suggested to me that my previous position (that analytical thinking does not apply to the real world, except in extremely specialized fields like mathematics) might be wrong. Based on the last few lines from the speech he gave at Harvard, it seems to me that his approach

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105689256360720702005-01-13T23:54:00.000-08:002005-01-13T23:54:16.360-08:00

Here is a more concrete discussion on why reuse is so hard in object-oriented systems, compared to the Unix command line. Let's consider a thought experiment. Suppose you wanted to write a blog program. How easy would it be to reuse the wiki-to-html converter (WikiText) in it? Let's not get distracted by abstract metaphors and ideas. Let's just focus on the mechanics of reuse. How easy or hard

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105681469436249592005-01-13T21:44:00.000-08:002005-01-13T21:44:29.436-08:00

It's interesting that spam always targets adults and adult interests -- never children: vicodin, other painkillers, porn, cheap cigarettes, ways of making money from home, mortgage refinancing offers, rolex watches, etc. Spam represents in a crude form the things that drive grown-ups. In some ways the books that we read, the TV that we watch, the work that we do, the lives that we live, it has

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105673916287620292005-01-13T19:38:00.000-08:002005-01-13T19:38:36.286-08:00

I am not really criticizing wikis or suggesting that they should be avoided. I am trying to think why there are so few things in software that are like Unix command line utilities, which can hook up with each other so easily. And specifically why wikis are not like this. While linking wikis to each other is possible it is not particularly easy, which feels weird. It seems analogous to the

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105670697422448612005-01-13T18:44:00.000-08:002005-01-14T08:49:44.123-08:00

Here is the weird thing about that last thought on education. It occurred to me in a dream. Someone pointed this out to me in my dream last night.

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105665764173948312005-01-13T17:22:00.000-08:002005-02-13T17:02:17.173-08:00

Here is an excellent discussion of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem by George Green: Link to http://www.sciencechat.org. George Green writes: > For any [consistent, recursive] axiom-set S, of sufficient > strength (to have a godel sentence), there is a sentence G(S) > that is true in some models M(S) and false in some other > models M(S) (this [along with the completeness theorem] is why > G(S)

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105665709645565252005-01-13T17:21:00.001-08:002005-01-13T17:21:49.646-08:00

I was reading Jeff Sutherland's notes on SCRUM: Here is a link. This is a really good slide deck. SCRUM seems to leverage these psychological principles a lot more than XP. XP does this also, but SCRUM appears to be built on them. For example, he recommends insane and unachievable goals. Here is an excerpt from slide 28: > Project team is offered extremely challenging goals with wide >

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105665682361694122005-01-13T17:21:00.000-08:002005-01-13T17:21:22.360-08:00

Here are some reflections on how children differ from grown-ups. This is all speculation. I am just thinking out aloud. Maybe something here will stick. PARADISE LOST There is an idea that childhood is a perfect state and then somehow we eat the forbidden fruit and thrust out of paradise. I just want to call that out. This is not to invalidate the idea. In fact the appeal of the story of

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105665642193085942005-01-13T17:20:00.000-08:002005-01-13T17:20:42.193-08:00

There is a duality between the sloppy just-get-it-done principle, and the transcendental make-it-pristine principle. This also reminds me of the parable of the Tower of Babel, which is somewhat cryptic and initially confusing. The order created by man is destroyed by God. The idea being communicated here is that order is temporary and an illusion. The underlying reality is always messy, and it

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105662374388859502005-01-13T16:26:00.000-08:002005-01-13T16:26:14.390-08:00

Economic theorists like Hayek and the Austrians really have no experience in running real economies. And yet they are able to theorize. In fact their lack of real experience might make it easier for them to ignore the details. It might make it easier for them to theorize with abandon and to construct theories that are much more elegant than they would have been if they were constrained by the

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105662345711166542005-01-13T16:25:00.000-08:002005-01-13T16:25:45.713-08:00

It's interesting that academia is essentially a pyramid scheme. You publish a paper, and share your ideas. As more people cite your work your ideas become more valuable. As people cite the people that cite you, their work gains credibility, which in turn increases the credibility of your work. The people who originate a new field sit on top of the pyramid. Newton alludes to this pyramid when

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1105662244832218002005-01-13T16:24:00.000-08:002005-01-13T16:24:04.833-08:00

I just did some number crunching in Excel, to measure the impact of a system change on the average build time. Playing with numbers in Excel is fun. I know all the limitations of data manipulation. But the fact is that it's just fun to probe deeper into the data to test hypotheses and to see things that are not obvious on the surface.

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1102364166735302342004-12-06T12:16:00.000-08:002004-12-06T12:16:06.736-08:00

Here is an interesting way to fly.

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1101195931628210112004-11-22T23:45:00.000-08:002004-11-22T23:45:31.626-08:00

William Sobel provides this brief example on how to access MAPI from Ruby: # Open a MAPI session session = WIN32OLE.new('Mapi.session') session.logon('_Your Account Name_') # Get the INBOX messages = session.inbox.messages messages.each do |m| m.subject = m.subject.sub(/\[ruby-talk:[0-9]+\] /o, '') m.update end The page is no longer available on the web. However you can view a Google archive

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1100932665659599782004-11-19T22:37:00.000-08:002004-11-19T22:45:53.986-08:00

Here is a rather sobering calculation. Suppose I live for another 35 years. That's 365.25 * 35 days = 12784 days. Just about 12,000 days. That's all I have left. Given the speed with which days and weeks pass, I am certain I will use up all 12,000 before I know it. I had always assumed this was a much larger number. Realizing this fact, that that there is so little time left, creates a

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1100913388363151982004-11-19T17:16:00.000-08:002004-11-19T23:01:01.046-08:00

Here is a time lapse video of how the Bellevue NE 8th bridge (over 405 North) was constructed. The whole thing is quite surreal, especially the shots of the sunrise and the sunset. Here is the video.

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1100910779137616412004-11-19T16:32:00.000-08:002004-11-19T16:32:59.136-08:00

John Roller has some excellent tips on how to get the Adobe Acrobat reader to open up faster. Here is the URL.

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1100304165984377302004-11-12T16:02:00.000-08:002004-11-12T19:19:54.226-08:00

Alexandre Gueniot is looking for work and has created an animated resume (with music). Here is his resume.

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1100301537798525852004-11-12T15:18:00.000-08:002004-11-12T15:18:57.796-08:00

John Archer has made a really neat time lapse video of the recent lunar eclipse using Microsoft Movie Maker 2. Here is the URL.

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1100301394957665382004-11-12T15:16:00.000-08:002004-11-12T15:16:34.956-08:00

You can now download free beta versions of Visual Studio. Here are the links: Download Visual C# Express Edition Beta. Download all Express Edition products. The Express Edition products includes Visual Basic, C++, J#, etc. Download SQL Server Express Edition Beta.

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1100300548143707842004-11-12T15:02:00.000-08:002004-11-12T15:02:28.143-08:00

Anatole Beck proposes an interesting approach to elections. He calls it Proxy Representation, and describes it here: Link to Beck's article. Here is how it works. Beck writes: "[Each] voter would decide which of the candidates he would be willing to empower with his proxy in the legislature, and vote for them all in a preferential ballot. [...] Each of the elected candidates would then have a

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1100226732423858252004-11-11T18:32:00.000-08:002004-11-11T18:32:12.423-08:00

Pay no attention to the invisible men: they.re supposed to be invisible. Here is the URL.

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1100223181906248622004-11-11T17:33:00.000-08:002004-11-11T17:33:01.906-08:00

This is the neatest site I have seen for a while: The Directory of Open Access Journals. DOAJ is a directory of academic journals that are publicly available online. Here is the URL: http://www.doaj.org.

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1100222934991877602004-11-11T17:28:00.000-08:002004-11-11T17:28:54.990-08:00

http://iftf.org IFTF is a nonprofit research group that speculates about the future. They also have some interesting blogs: http://blogger.iftf.org/Future

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1099388550566405592004-11-02T01:42:00.000-08:002004-11-02T01:42:30.566-08:00

You can now send direct feedback to Microsoft on their developer tools here.

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1098128242725463052004-10-18T12:37:00.000-07:002004-10-18T12:37:22.726-07:00

Excerpt from http://www.tradetricks.org/archives/001002.html: If you work in a big infrastructure with tons of routers, servers and the rest, you can usually tell how the whole operation is running right from your own desk, since your computer will have the proper tools for monitoring. But management doesn't always understand this -- if there's a problem, they may perceive you as just sitting

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1097822236832171592004-10-14T23:37:00.000-07:002004-10-14T23:37:16.833-07:00

Is purposelessness a good idea? A direct response to this would not make sense. Here are my thoughts on why a response would not make sense. 1. The whole concept of something being a "good idea" only makes sense in the context of a purpose. It's good if it takes us closer to some ideal. Purposelesssness cannot be purposeful. It cannot fulfill some higher goal, or appear to be a good idea in the

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1097394761741995592004-10-10T01:52:00.000-07:002004-10-15T00:00:25.376-07:00

Here is an excerpt from the Manifesto on Futurist Programming: Computer "Science" terms exposed: * Structured programming = slow. * Modular = bloated. * Extensible = late. * Reusable = buggy. * Object-Oriented = slow and bloated and late and buggy. * Top-Down Design = hard to use. * Standard Compliant = slow and late and hard to use = obsolete. * Automatic =

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1097391897852118492004-10-10T00:04:00.000-07:002004-10-10T00:04:57.853-07:00

We see in our daily lives that we set goals and then we achieve them. We act and our actions have consequences. And so we extrapolate from this, and begin to feel that our lives, and the existence of our species too must have a purpose. It troubles us that this purpose is not obvious. So we imagine a personal God, and then use him to define an overarching purpose, within which we can make sense

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1096826100202836852004-10-03T10:55:00.000-07:002004-10-03T11:02:44.326-07:00

Here is an interesting solution to music and software piracy. The Potato System. The basic idea is this: replace the adversarial relationship between content originator (producer) and content distributor (pirate) with a win-win relationship in which the producer pays the pirate commissions for distributing the software. The producer provides the accounting infrastructure for collecting

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1096769104747589122004-10-02T19:05:00.000-07:002004-10-02T19:05:04.746-07:00

One important ingredient that's missing from my personal innovation is a lack of an ecology of ideas. I have an idea. If I implement it, or write about it, it lives. If I don't implement it, it just goes away and dies. There is no space for half-baked ideas. What I need is a space for half-baked software ideas. A space where ideas can live with no pressure to be implemented. Here is a

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1096416373393473062004-09-28T17:06:00.000-07:002008-06-12T11:54:18.272-07:00

I heard a talk by Max McKeown at Microsoft last week. Here's what I found interesting. One reason for his success might be that he speaks his mind. He spoke a few years ago about "Why Everyone Hates Microsoft". Now he goes around companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google and acts as a kind of cross-fertilization mechanism for ideas on how to improve the company: how to innovate, how to

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1096331072231431012004-09-27T17:24:00.000-07:002004-09-27T17:24:32.230-07:00

I stumbled upon some books by Daniel Quinn. While the books are interesting, what is even more interesting is the structure. The books are designed as a series of conversations between a 12-year old girl and her mentor (who happens to be a 600-pound gorilla). I think a conversation might be a great way to discuss the ideas that we talk about. This stuff does not work well as a textbook. The

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1096330878317277082004-09-27T17:21:00.000-07:002004-09-27T17:21:18.316-07:00

1. While incremental improvements are the recipe for real innovations, the world recognizes and rewards breakthroughs. So create breakthrough incrementally. 2. Idea from Senge: Share information about your innovations. This creates an open market for innovations. It lets you to take advantage of the natural competitiveness among potential partners by making you equally available for

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1096330844818092022004-09-27T17:20:00.000-07:002004-09-27T17:20:44.816-07:00

1. I am reading Peter Senge's The Dance of Change. An interesting idea he starts with is that the underlying metaphor for the current phase of our civilization, the hidden assumption that defines all thinking, is the concept of the machine. We see everything as a machine. Managers are expected to drive organizations. The manager is the intelligent driver, and the organization is the machine that

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1096330689544264402004-09-27T17:18:00.000-07:002004-09-27T17:18:09.543-07:00

I am trying to articulate what leads to good and deeply satisfying refactorings. The term "small steps" does not quite capture the spirit of it. Yes, it is about taking very small steps, and it is about taking lots of them over time. However, the key thing is slowness. Perhaps unhurriedness would be a better word. Or another way to express this is mindfulness. To move mindfully. Here is a

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1096330614829807642004-09-27T17:16:00.000-07:002004-09-27T17:16:54.830-07:00

Here is a continuation of yesterday's thoughts on actions and consequences, which is a really a conversation about cause and effect. 1. Yesterday I read a book on using small steps to make big improvements ("One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way" by Robert Maurer), which discussed how Japanese companies use small improvements to achieve their goals. The author applies the same

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1096330536757627002004-09-27T17:15:00.000-07:002004-09-27T17:15:36.756-07:00

Here are some thoughts I had this morning that I wanted to write down before I forgot: There are two kinds of passion. Passion related to the process, and passion related to the end. There are other ways to describe this. We could call the first one, something with an immediate pay-off, and the second one, something with a long-term payoff. Again there might be other ways of slicing passion,

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1096330432169851142004-09-27T17:13:00.001-07:002004-09-27T17:13:52.170-07:00

I had another extremely positive programming experience today. There was a task that was estimated at 12 hours and we finished it in 4. There was a lot of refactoring and repositioning old code to make it do the new things that we needed to do. 1. I want to figure out what is going on here, why I am enjoying programming now. If I understand this I might be able to recreate this experience at

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1096330383306329682004-09-27T17:13:00.000-07:002004-09-27T17:13:03.306-07:00

I just had an extremely positive refactoring experience. We refactored out a piece of code so that we were able to reuse it for several different cases. Once we extracted the essense of the repetition, we got several cases for free. When refactoring creates leverage like this it is extremely satisfying. This made me wonder, what leads to more of this kind of high-leverage refactoring? Why did

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1096330214640741342004-09-27T17:10:00.000-07:002004-09-27T17:10:14.640-07:00

At its core mathematics is a kind of merciless refactoring where we take statements that are true and generalize them as far as we can. We cut out all the specifics, or refactor them out and the see what's left. For example, this dog weighs more than this cat. This is a general statement which might be true. But now if we refactor out the specific animals, and also the concept of "weighs" we are

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1096329986366516402004-09-27T17:06:00.000-07:002004-09-27T17:06:26.366-07:00

There is a discussion on Slashdot about "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering" by Robert Glass. Here is a link. The book looks interesting. But even more interesting is the format. It might be easy and even fun to write a book as a kind of a list, where the points do not have to form one continuous line of thought. This single-line-of-thought format is painful both for the reader and I

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1096329853450737372004-09-27T17:04:00.000-07:002004-09-27T17:04:13.450-07:00

Let me refine what I said earlier. Here's it is in a pill: Choose your adversaries carefully. You eventually become your adversary. Mediocre adversaries breed mediocrity. Adversaries provide a structure to the infinite search space. Without adversaries there is no conversation. At every job there are people that are drawn to opposing me. They like rules too much, or they refuse to accept that

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1096329802195981902004-09-27T17:03:00.000-07:002004-09-27T17:03:22.196-07:00

I had a really good weekend. It all started when I read through an interview of Bill Gates by David Allison of the Smithsonian Institute. http://americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/gates.htm I had read this a while back, and then stumbled on this again on Saturday. The interview hints at principles, but does not lay them out. Let's start from the beginning. Suppose you want to start a venture

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1095374283102852892004-09-16T15:38:00.000-07:002004-09-16T15:38:03.103-07:00

I just had an extremely positive refactoring experience. We refactored a piece of code so that we were able to reuse it for 5 different cases. The last two fell out for free. I've noticed that when refactoring creates leverage like this it is extremely satisfying.

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1094253236080382142004-09-03T16:13:00.001-07:002004-09-03T17:46:48.766-07:00

Continuing with the thoughts from the previous essay, there is a third type of reasoning. Let's summarize the first two types first. The first kind of reasoning is sequential reasoning, where each assertion follows the next through a chain of implication. The archetype of this kind of reasoning is Commander Data from Star Trek. The second kind of reasoning is generalizing and

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1094253225497053602004-09-03T16:13:00.000-07:002004-09-03T16:13:45.496-07:00

Here are some thoughts related to the INTP style of thinking. GENERALIZING AND SPECIALIZING 1. INTP thinking follows a pattern of generalizing and specializing. Going from the concrete to the abstract and then from the abstract to the concrete. The big payoff for INTP thinking is to (a) organize a multitude of seemingly disconnected phenomena as the manifestations of an underlying principle or

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1094252313127799762004-09-03T15:58:00.000-07:002004-09-03T15:58:33.126-07:00

1. This week I experimented with using a course style grading scheme to organize my time. I set deadlines on tasks and then completed them. I will touch on different seemingly unrelated topics and then connect them together. 2. The problem with most time management schemes is that there is neither any reward for finishing on time nor is there a penalty for being late. Certainly there are rewards

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1094251039938898302004-09-03T15:37:00.000-07:002004-09-03T15:37:19.936-07:00

Here are some ideas on metrics, grades, and measurement that I have been thinking about for some time. THE GRADE GAME 1. Grades are a game. There have been three phases in my relationship with grades. (a) Initially I was brainwashed by the system to really care about grades. I worked as hard as I could to get A's in everything. (b) At some point I saw through the lie. I took the red pill and

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1094249164361714822004-09-03T15:06:00.000-07:002004-09-03T15:06:04.360-07:00

I have been using Rico Medellin's technique to turn work into play. I bought a stopwatch from Fred Meyer. To pay bill I timed how long it took me to pay each bill. The first one took 6:32 minutes. With some focus I was able to bring this down to 4:25, which is my current record. In one case I had to call up Verizon to verify the amount. I stopped the watch so that the phone call didn't mess up my

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1094248952548650282004-09-03T15:02:00.000-07:002004-09-03T15:02:32.546-07:00

This is what happens to your blog when you get Slashdotted: Here is a link to the site. Total visits: 47,217 Visits today: 80,925 Last hour: 32,592 Note that the number of visits today is almost twice the total visits to the site in its existence. Here is the slashdot story.

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1094248760514081292004-09-03T14:59:00.000-07:002004-09-03T14:59:20.513-07:00

Here are the concrete ideas I have so far for turning work into play: - Call it play. - Write bug reports that are poems. - Do things beautifully. Create art for no reason. - Bring toys to work. - Turn work into a game. Create a board and pieces and move them around. Using index cards is a little bit like this. This is why XP calls planning, The Planning Game.

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1094245397654941082004-09-03T14:03:00.000-07:002004-09-03T14:03:17.653-07:00

More reflections. If I was asked to play tetris for 8 hours a day I might find that boring as well. Part of this seems to be that working for N hours creates a desire for not working. It makes me look forward to 5 PM when I can stop working. Work defines itself by what you cannot do. If I forced myself to play tetris for 1 hour that too would be oppressive. So how can we fix this. I don't know

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1094245261941232742004-09-03T14:01:00.000-07:002004-09-03T14:01:01.940-07:00

I was doing origami during a break today. It's incredibly fun and relaxing. But then I thought: what if this was my job? What if I was being paid to do this, and I *had* to do this. What if my job was to invent new paper shapes. And as I imagined that it became less fun. So is the difference between work and play just how we approach it? There is certainly an element of this. I mean if we were

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1094245134886142742004-09-03T13:58:00.000-07:002006-07-12T08:03:16.583-07:00

Here are some more thoughts on the difference between play and work. Initially I thought that play was more unstructured than work. But that is not true. Play can be both highly structured (marathon running, tetris, tennis, chess) and highly unstructured (surfing, ice skating). Is play physical? Not necessarily. Video games, chess, go, are examples of mental playing. But it is interesting than

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1093992030639695062004-08-31T15:40:00.000-07:002004-08-31T15:40:30.640-07:00

I went to a talk by Peter Spiro today, who works on the Microsoft SQL Server. One of the interesting things he talked about was the layered architecture. The idea is that you build your system in layers. Note this is not the same as object-oriented design. The rule is that each layer can only make calls into the layer below it. It may not call layers above it. And it also cannot skip a layer

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1093469532531705352004-08-25T14:32:00.000-07:002004-08-25T14:32:12.530-07:00

Link to the Seattle Times article. Here are some excerpts from the article: 1. [Michael Grady, a Seattle bus-driver, strives to be the best. On the job] Grady is strategizing: Did I make that turn smoothly? Was I close enough to the curb? Am I the best? 2. Grady, an Eastside driver for King County Metro, is heading to the state "roadeo" in Yakima, where he'll compete behind the wheel of a 40-

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1092341019354379562004-08-12T13:03:00.000-07:002004-08-12T13:03:39.353-07:00

The Procrastinating Monkey Some excerpts from the article: Monkeys like humans procrastinate when working towards a distant goal. As they get closer to the reward they become focused and efficient. By disrupting the brain's chemistry researchers have found a way to monkeys into workaholics. Barry Richmond: "They [monkeys] work more efficiently -- make fewer errors -- as they get

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1092182366358694632004-08-10T16:59:00.000-07:002004-08-10T16:59:26.356-07:00

Here are some techniques for enjoying mundane work: - Make a todo list - Estimate and time each task with a stopwatch - Do it beautifully for no reason - Solve the general problem - Look for ways to automate the work - Look for ways to improve the process - Adopt playful attitude - Alternate work with play The technique of using a stopwatch is inspired by Rico Medellin's technique of turning

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1090949333235248882004-07-27T10:28:00.000-07:002004-07-27T10:28:53.236-07:00

The todo list should contain goals, not the steps to achieve them. It should define "what" not "how". It should present a picture of the world as it will be after the goal is achieved. Think of the todo list items as little tests. It should be easy to check whether a test passes (the goal has been achieved) or whether it fails (the goal has not been achieved). Here is an example of a bad todo

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1090879270747741722004-07-26T14:59:00.000-07:002004-07-26T15:02:30.773-07:00

Here is the single Google link I found searching for the "fallacy of goal-setting". http://www.arespress.com/AresPages/Heal/Heal.html It's interesting. Here are some excerpts: Goals, especially the highest and finest, work like overvalued ides, the roots of delusions that nourish great canopies of sheltering paranoia, those spreading ideals of size and import which

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1090827249545587982004-07-26T00:34:00.000-07:002006-07-12T08:12:43.556-07:00

Here are more ideas on turning work into play. This is fun. 1. When writing checks try to write as beautifully as possible. Practice hand-writing in different fonts. E.g. hand-write the check in Gothic. Or create a baroque font with excessive adornment. Write with flair. 2. I remember now that I really like writing with flair. E.g. I wasted a lot of time making my math homework beautiful.

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1090827044016713362004-07-26T00:30:00.000-07:002004-07-26T00:30:44.016-07:00

For both physical and mental work turning it into play definitely requires some creative thinking. Feel free to share any ideas you have. I am planning to take crayons to work for the iteration meeting, so we write down tasks in crayons instead of markers. I suspect it will be a different experience. Here are some ideas to make programming fun: 1. Pair with a bear. Let's call this

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1090826619795941692004-07-26T00:23:00.000-07:002004-07-26T00:23:39.796-07:00

So now the question arises: How can we apply the Fish insights to programming? What is flair programming? Here are some ideas on this. MEET JEROME Watching Matrix Revolutions last night it occurred to me that programs should have names. Instead of calling a program Source Control Manager, why not call it Jerome? We like interacting with and responding to living things. This phenomenon is

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5357794.post-1090826436932197342004-07-26T00:20:00.001-07:002006-07-12T08:01:31.966-07:00

One technique for turning work into play is to do the same action playfully. Yesterday when I was swimming it occurred to me that instead of treating swimming like work, why not treat it like play. So I started acting a little crazy. Instead of swimming straight I zig-zagged, then I started spinning like a dolphin, then I touched the floor of the pool. The space of things that can be done in a

Asimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14141500729962703817noreply@blogger.com0