joev

My (former) home network backup solution had a truecrypt volume created locally, and rsync'ed to my offsite backup provider (rsync.net). It did not have to send the entire volume for small diffs; in my experience, Truecrypt keeps local changes local in the volume.

That's not what the "Entrepenurial Walk of Fame" sitting in front of the Kendall Square Marriott says.

http://boston.tumblr.com/post/10274370791

This. Please, somebody, take my money!

Buildings also need to be maintained and retrofitted. Around here in Cambridge, there are countless residential and commercial buildings that were built before the days of electricity and air conditioning, and even plumbing in some cases. The maintenance costs often far outweigh the initial building costs, even given inflation.

David is spot on when it comes to the complexity of the documentation; it's great that it's exhaustive, but it would be nice to have the "here's how to use it" documentation near the "here's how to implement your own collection type" doc.

Another trend I see in Scala is the abuse of symbols-as-method names. I see a lot of Scala (and Lift) code that looks like

  val foo = bar ~-> 45 <~< "Fred" %% x

with little commonality of convention.

TI calculators were toys for children. Real Engineers use HP!

Lots of good memories with my HP-48G, until it got stolen just before I graduated.

Oblig: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website

It would be creepier if you put someone else's head on the doll.

That reminds me; the saison I've got going in the secondary needs to be bottled this weekend.

(Didn't read the article)

Maybe we should stop kicking out the people from foreign countries with the advanced degrees they earn here.

They apparently care about a missing hockey puck.

"[The] FBI's Regional Crimes Task Force in Chicago reviewed the Chicago police sergeant's video and determined with "100-percent certainty" that Miller picked up the puck."

http://sports.espn.go.com/chicago/nhl/news/story?id=6452071

The Data Liberation project is at least a token attempt to ward off accusations of Google lock-in:

http://www.dataliberation.org/

It is interesting to see that Apple positions their retail employees more as an extension of their support and brand marketing operations, and less of a simple direct sales channel. Their employees seem to know a lot more about the products than places like Best Buy. That may due to the relatively few things they sell- I notice AT&T store employees are very knowledgeable about the products that they sell, but when you talk to them about service plans, then you start to get the obfuscation and snake-oil sales.

This contributed to me "switching" to an Android phone, rather than upgrading to an iPhone 4. I had an iPhone 3G (not the GS), that recently came out of contract (purchased 9/2009). The phone was working fine for me, I had no reason to upgrade, other than the fact that the phone was much slower since the introduction of iOS 4. Apple's latest iOS release no longer supports the 3G; abandoning hardware this close to release doesn't really sit well with me, especially since an AppleCare support contract extends out to three years.

Then the GPS tracking fiasco came about, since I couldn't figure out if the 3G was affected, and Apple refused to release a new release for 3G customers, even though this is a security-related issue, I became fed-up and got an HTC Inspire 4G (aka Desire HD) instead, and don't miss the iPhone at all. Maybe in two or three more years I'll come back to iPhone. Maybe not.

s/easier/less costly/

Coral cached version:

http://www.loper-os.org.nyud.net/?p=401

Consider that Apple has neglected the non-Pro MacBook for quite a while: it still uses a Core 2 Duo processor, and the MacBook Pro line includes a small-form-factor 13" machine that uses the i5 and i7 chips.

If this rumor has any legs, I can definitely imagine Apple moving to ARM for the MacBook Air and MacBook, to which will greatly benefit in terms of battery life and size along with its iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV bretheren. Most of these customers will be using the App Store, so the "fat binary" problem is probably much less of an issue, since Apple can mandate that submitted apps must be bundled for both platforms, which shouldn't be much of a problem if XCode supports it. They will remain with Intel for the MacBook Pro and desktop lines, for customers who need the CPU power, and are less sensitive to power usage.

Agile development practices are at the point of their adoption cycles where the hype has died down, and the chaff has been thrown out. Organizations of all sizes have adopted agile practices, from small startups, to global megacorps, with varying levels of success.

Agile development isn't a sexy, novel new thing these days. That doesn't mean it's "jumped the shark", it means it's a fairly mature and understood practice.

Cool. There are some classics in there.

http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol27-1948/articles/bstj2...

This joke is now old enough to drink in the US.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt

I have high hopes for this series; I really enjoyed Peter Michaux's "Scheme from Scratch" series, from which the author says gained inspiration for his series:

http://peter.michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch-introdu...

I would argue that avoiding vendor lock out is a major reason Open Software exists: with an OS database, nobody can tell you that you can no longer use the DB software unless you pay the proper licensing and maintenance fees.

You'll be locked into a particular database vendor anyway: it's no harder to migrate away from MySQL that it would be to migrate away from DB2. It just so happens that the open source "vendors" don't charge licensing fees, and if things go way off the rails (community implosion, commercial "takeover" of the primary contributors, etc), at least you'll have access to the source so you can run your app on it for as long as it makes sense to do so.

The banks seem to have plenty of money sitting in their coffers to loan out. I've never heard of a (healthy) bank- even smaller neighborhood banks- run into trouble because the wealthy aren't stashing all their cash into their checking accounts.

After the IPO (and other secondary offerings), "the market" usually doesn't drive a corporation's funding. Companies can make some small out of money from releasing new stock, but not counting things like bond issuances (ie, borrowing from people or banks), they don't benefit from people playing the market.

That HDTV was probably built in China, not Japan. Even so, a lot of that money stays behind, in the distribution and retail channel. Someone's got to drive the trucks from the ports to the stores, for example.

The whole thing, from lathering to cleanup, takes me around 15 minutes. Many people can do it faster, but this gives me time to wake up.

The Futur, choice of Bill Adama! (Though most people think it looks like the Vision, I can't tell)

Anyway, you can probably get started on the cheap if you have any living male relatives born before 1950. They probably have some old vintage Gillette razor that works just as well now as it did when they got it. Or, if you live near an antique or consignment store, you can find razors there cheap, probably between $5 - $10. They're easy to clean, too.

Take a look at the MIT Open Courseware math classes. These are particularly good when you're on the train. You can find them online on Youtube, iTunes U, or at their site:

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/

Understanding calculus helps you to understand the relationship between functions, which is very useful with doing FP-like things in your code.

I agree with geebee. I generally buy new and drive it into the ground. I bought my current car new for $25k in 1998, and I can probably comfortably squeeze another year out of it, before expensive stuff starts to break. I'm in the market for a new car, again in the $25k range.

It's not about the car's purchase price, it's about how much that car costs you to own over time: how much it depreciates in a year, and how much it costs to maintain it. I think I'm at about $3k per year for my current 1998 car (not counting gas), assuming it has zero resale value (which isn't the case).

One killer feature that the iPod had, was a very straightforward way to put the music you already had in "atom" form (CDs) into the device. Even now, Apple does not force you to use their infrastructure or retail establishment to add content to the device.

I have lots of books that I haven't read yet. I have lots of books that I would like to read again. I don't want to have to re-purchase my books just to be able to read them on an eReader device. If there was a way to either scan in all of my books, or provide a way to download previously scanned versions after providing proof of ownership, that would seal the deal for me. I don't care about 3G connectivity. I can even live without 802.11, as long as I could sync via USB.

An ebook reader doesn't need to play videos or MP3s. That's what my phone is for :^)