ideonexus

Month: March 2009

  • Remember Snow?

    When I was a kid, it was guaranteed we would get at the very least one good school-closing snowfall a year. It was like a bonus holiday, where all the neighborhood kids would come out for snowball fights, sledding, and maple-syrup snow cones. The snow was always gone in a day or two, leaving a…

  • Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History: Butterflies and Plants

    With final exams, school projects due, work projects due, and the rest of life, I’ve been stressing and slacking on uploading science photos to my flickr account. I’m glad I took the time to get to it tonight for an hour or so of naturalist zen. Lacking anything more profound, I’ll just say this: Butterflies…

  • Thinking in Different Programming Languages

    For seven years, I wrote computer programs in Visual Basic Script (VBScript), a Microsoft programming language used in building WebPages from information in a database. As part of a paradigm shift where I work to open-source software, in the last six months I have had to learn and develop software in Hypertext Preprocessor script (PHP).…

  • ALD09post Ada Lovelace Day: Esther Dyson

    Happy Ada Lovelace Day! In celebration of Ada Lovelace, only child to Lord Byron and author of the world’s first computer program in 1843 for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, bloggers everywhere are running posts about one of their favorite women in tech. So this year I’d like to introduce everyone to Esther Dyson: Esther Dyson…

  • CIS510 Advanced Systems Analysis and Design: The Systems Analyst as Polymath

    A PDF of this Paper is available here. I. Introduction The book Systems Architecture describes the function of the systems analyst as performing “activities of the business modeling and requirements disciplines,” and goes on to expand the possible responsibilities into “business modeling, requirements, design, and management of a development project (Burd, 2006).” As this paper…

  • Patterns in the PHP Random Function

    When you make the finding yourself – even if you’re the last person on Earth to see the light – you’ll never forget it. – Carl Sagan Inspired by Oranchak’s post on Genetic Algorithms, I decided to revisit a project I left off on a few months back, the end result of which is to…

  • 10 Books Meme

    Chriggy played with this on facebook, and the meme is totally something I can support: This can be a quick one! Don’t take too long to think about it! Ten books you’ve read that will always stick with you! First ten you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Principia Discordia, Malclypse the Younger…

  • Physics, Life and Mind

    General Jan Christiaan Smuts is probably equally remembered for his support of apartheid in South Africa and for originating the concept of holism, understanding systems as a whole, as opposed to reductionism, understanding them as the sum of their parts, in his book Holism and Evolution. Einstein found the work as impressive philosophically as his…

  • CIS512 Enterprise Architecture: Information Systems Proposal for XYZ Hospice

    A PDF of this Paper is available here. I. Organization Environment and Requirements A. Hospice Care Although Hospice Care makes no attempt to prolong life or cure patients, the service of caring for individuals in their final days is an extremely demanding profession. Hospice Care volunteers provide basic medical care, including prescription medicines and non-invasive…

  • Flash Fiction: Entropy Quest

    Saasnoah hesitated before stepping purposefully into the abyss. Once she had passed the rift nothing was visible except the light from the lab behind her, and, as that slowly sealed, all was darkness. As far as she could tell, she was still alive. This fact she could once again credit to the mathematicians back at…

  • The United State’s New CIO, Vivek Kundra

    Vivek Kundra at the Announcement for the “Applications for Democracy” Technology Contest Winners Although the mainstream media pretty much glossed over it (because covering our country’s IT infrastructure is too complex for them), I was eager to hear all about President Obama’s choice of federal Chief Information Officer, but even this Whitehouse Press Release was…

  • Science Slaying Beautiful Hypotheses

    The great tragedy of Science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. – Thomas Huxley The recent news of scientists identifying the bodies of Tsar Nicholas II’s missing children, confirms they were executed in 1918 and ends nearly a century of fanciful stories and speculation about the possibility of his youngest…