interweaving ideas
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Advice to an IT Graduate
Will Code JAVA for Food (Even with Eclipse) Credit: cismet_geeks A newly-minted graduate in software development recently wrote me after finding my resume online, seeking career advice on how to succeed in the IT professional world. These were my personal thoughts; maybe other readers will have additional insights to add in the comments section: Dedicate…
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Net Neutrality is Free Market
While I do feel the late Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens was treated a little unfairly by the webbernetting-meme-machine over his Internet as a “series of tubes” analogy, I also know that the anti-net neutrality advocate was extremely ignorant of how the Internet functions, as are almost the entirety of American politicians with their non-technical backgrounds.…
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Memetic Association Exercizes with Science Tarot
Visconti-Sforza tarot deck, 15th Century If you’re looking to part a fool and their money, psychic readings are a great business*. Through the art of cold reading,by making statements that seem personal, but are true for most people, the psychic creates the illusion of having supernatural intuition about their client. For instance, they may say…
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Relating Thermodynamic Entropy to Information Entropy with Maxwell’s Demon
Brownian motion, the natural vibrations of atoms not at an absolute zero temperature, has long been the strategic key for anyone looking for a way to achieve the holy grail of reversing the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that a closed system will always move toward a state of increasing disorder. I previously covered…
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Cloud Computing’s Real Strength
cloud passing by Credit: Diego Sevilla Ruiz “Cloud Computing will revolutionize IT!” Really? What’s Cloud Computing? “Instead of people installing software on their local computers, future applications will run on host computers!” So Cloud Computing is just a funny name for a client/server Mainframe Architecture? “But it’s not running on a Mainframe! It’s running in…
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Science and Geekdom at the Rally to Restore Sanity 20101030
Vicky and I sat in traffic, stood in lines, rode the metro, hopped off the metro for a desperation pee-break (for me), stood in more lines, rode more metro, shuffled forward for hours in massive crowds, and mostly missed all but bits and pieces of Jon Stewarts closing speech for the Rally to Restore Sanity,…
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Happy Super-Duper-Mega-Maxi-Utra-Omni-Uber Awesome Powers of Ten Day!!!
Happy Super-Duper-Mega-Maxi-Utra-Omni-Uber Awesome Powers of Ten Day!!! 10/10/10 is not only an entire power of ten more awesome than the other 99 years’ worth of 10/10 days in this century, 101010 is also the meaning of life in binary! Take a moment of silent reflection at 1010 AM, for yet even two more powers of…
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Entropy of Imagination, a Creative Commons Ebook
Entropy of Imagination Credit: Moi Trapped in a World Running Out of Ideas… Thousands of years ago, before he was trapped on an isolated computer system, Flatline was programmed to conquer the world. Today he’s escaped back to the World Wide Web, where he hopes to find his way back to the real world. Except…
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Entropy for Information Systems
Entropy is a fairly easy concept to define, the measure of disorder in a closed system, and a rather difficult concept to grasp, but one that furnishes us with wonderful insights into the way the world around us operates. The amount of entropy in the Universe is ever-increasing, the energy concentrated in our sun is…
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Three Methods for Providing a Print View of a Web Page
Web developers put content online to be consumed, but we have little control over the mediums consuming it. Web pages are rendered on mobile phones, printers, televisions, and their semantic content consumed by a variety of bots, each with their own requirements and best-practices for layout. Here I’ll outline three commons solutions to providing a…
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Google Aquires the Semantic Web, or Why Metaweb Matters
Isaac Asimov Entry on Freebase With Google’s aquisition of Metaweb the searchopolis takes a stake in the seemingly-forever-emerging Semantic Web, a concept with endlessly verbose standards and few demonstrable applications for all it promises. I yawned when I read of Google’s move, remembering a few years ago when I explored Freebase, Metaweb’s semantic database. I…
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Diversifying Technofauna
Pager, Tamagotchi and Psion Organiser Pager, Tamagotchi and Psion Organiser Credit: steve greer Every time a new device comes around, the self-proclaimed techsperts start declaring the death of older devices. It’s boring to keep hearing critics say things like the Smartphone is the “death of laptops,” the Kindle is the “death of books,” and the…
