Looks like Mark Baker is available for projects. Mark’s the man who first called out on the complexity of SOAP and advocated simpler technology, despite there being little business case for a consultant to rubbish complicated technologies that rake in the money. I wish Mark success.
This page is where I keep track of interaction design patterns. It will be particularly useful to implement these behaviors in JavaFX/Flex base-classes for nodes so that UX designer don’t have to nitpick over details like these:
If you have been reading my blogs for an length of time, you’d know that I’m a bit of a programming language wonk. If you enjoy learning about different kinds of programming languages, you’d be pleased to know there is another kind of language geekery known as “linguistic typology”.
For example, why is it that “spoon” and “fork” are feminine in Russian, but “fork” is masculine and “spoon” is feminine in Portugese? Native speakers can tell you because “it is just so”, but cannot tell you why. Linguistic typologists can.
It’s amazing what one can learn from public radio. More on it over here.
Even more amazing is language constructs like this:
In a number of languages, every statement must contain some marker of the kind of evidence on which it is based, such as whether the speaker saw it, heard it, inferred it from indirect evidence or learned about it from someone else. This grammatical category, indicating the information source, is called ‘evidentiality’.
Having a language like this is absolutely going to make pollies squirm. +1 from me.
A QANTAS jet was grounded in Melbourne, bringing up the number of newsworthy flight incidents to 4 in 11 days for the beleagured airline, The Australian reports.
The 737, registered as VH-TJU, is the same aircraft on which Qantas engineers found 95 defects that had been missed during contract maintenance work by Malaysian Airlines in Kuala Lumpur.
Are safety standards being lowered? The QANTAS chief pilot, Captain Manning, had this to say:
Australia’s high aviation safety standards are not being lowered to minimum world standards. But standards were being “harmonised” with the rest of the world
In other words, we are doomed.
Update 15-Aug-2008: Another small panel falls off a QANTAS plane.
This is an amazing sales patter about a somewhat illegal plant. (Note: I’ve no interest in these substances, but I was searching for something else and ended up at a myspace page that embedded this audio). The MySpace page had affiliate links to a vendor that sells these.
Terence begins by telling the audience the attributes of this legal plant, how it means you can store it, transport it, plant it, and consume it without fear of getting in trouble with the law. There’s an appealing emotional hook, I can imagine, for people who have been had a brush with the police for their drug habits. Then proceeds to describe how vividly one would use it. It’s the equivalent of a salesman putting the product in your hands - “There sir, feel how heavily built this pen is sir, the finest platinum, not like the cheap plastic material”. The overall pace was excellent.
If you are preparing a toastmasters speech, I’d recommend listening to it for instruction.
The ability of applications like Ultravnc and Hamachi to operate behind firewalls through NAT traversal intrigued me. Newport Networks has a whitepaper detailing current NAT traversal solutions for SIP:
Problem: … relies on the NAT opening pinholes to the outside world under the dynamic control of the UPnP client - maybe a SoftPhone on a PC. This capability is most likely contrary to most security policies and therefore may not be accepted by communications managers of corporate customers.
Problem: Most NATs in use today are symmetric. This means that they create a mapping based on source IP address and port number as well as the destination IP address and port number. STUN will not work with symmetric NATs
Refinement over STUN by using a proxy to relay packets
Enhanced NAT that can modify packets depending on whether protocol is SIP, or some other. However, it doesn’t really explain how a SIP phone behind a firewall can receive inbound calls. (UDP sessions are easier than TCP sessions?)
On the practical side of things, Heise Security has a light write-up on how Skype tries different methods, from direct UDP through to probing firewalls in order to tunnel a direct connection between two computers.
The Malaysian stock exchange (Bursa Malaysia) had to suspend trading on 3 July for an entire day due to system failure.
Sounds like all the planets were in alignment, two hard disk failures, one cpu failed, and connectivity issues. The secondary system couldn’t even start up in time. Uh uh, this would be costly.
Transcript:
I just want to go through the sequence of events of the trading system of the [Malaysian] stockmarket. There was one hard disk which was faulty. This was replaced as per standard procedure. About half and hour later, we found that the new disk was not able to recover data.
We have a system we have two disks running in parallel. This then triggered the failure of the second disk as well as one of the CPU. Half an hour later, we managed to restart the system and went about trying to reconnect with the brokers. We found that the brokers were unable to connect to our system. This normally takes about half an hour. By 8 am, more than half of the brokers were unable to connect to our system. We have a policy within Bursa Malaysia, where if more than one third of brokers were unable to connect to our system or to trade, we would suspend the market. This decision we took at 8:30am, and that point in time we took the decision to activate our backup site. This normally would take 3 hours. By 1 pm we noticed that the start up process at the back up site was taking longer than expected.
At that time, together with our vendors, we had resolved the problem at the primary site.
We tried to resume the afternoon session from the primary site, and this was targetted at 3 pm, and we were aiming for the market to resume at 3:15pm.
At 3:15 pm we noticed there were some preopening orders which were being keyed in. But we noticed there many brokers site which were unable to connect to our site. There were connectivity issues being encountered.
By 3:30pm, we were still unable to resolve the connectivity issues and we decided to suspend the market for the rest of the day.
However, because some pre-opening orders were keyed in at 3:15. We noticed there were some orders which have been matched. We subsequently cancelled these matched orders. …
Ran into this interesting post by by Tom Rafferty with a run down of popular Web 2.0 tools a company can use to communicate with their audience.
The biggest takeaway from the talk is that Web 2.0 is democratizing the web, in a way beyond what 1.0 had to offer. One man one vote means that corporations are no longer in complete control of their message. They may have the money to spend on advertising, but this is always in competition with people who have the time to air their grievances and adulation publicly. Just as companies used to have media relations officer, and subscribe to media monitoring services, living in Web 2.0 means that companies need web monitoring services and a strategy to respond faster to key conversations that are happening about your company on the web.
The writers killed the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull by
1) Trying too hard to set the sidekick up for a future spin-off
2) Telling the audience that knowledge is gold, but then kills the villianess by filling her with knowledge
3) Turning an action show into a cheesy father-son reunion. Indiana had too much to prove to his son that he was a worthy father, and ended up being too sure-footed. The past shows had a cocky Indiana but he was often wrong. The most recent rendition of Indy had turned him into a super-human.
4) Not making the flying saucer play “re-mi-do-SO-so”
5) Action sequences not up to par with the previous ones. There were no huge rolling balls, nor roller coaster chases. Again, unnecessarily too much screen time was given to Shaun Bellouf. This show is more of a warm-up for Henry Jones III than a curtain call for Henry Jones II.
Having trouble reciting alphabet names over the phone? Here’s a truly Australian wordlist you can use.
Aratula
Brisbane
Chinchilla
Dalby
Eromanga
F - ?
Goondowindi
H - ?
Illawarra
Jindabyne
Kallangur
L - ?
Melbourne
Nebo
O - ?
Perth
Queensland
Roma
Sydney
Tasmania
Uluru
Victoria
Wogga Wogga
X -?
Yamba
Z - ?
I was wondering why my posts aren’t showing up at the Planet Python aggregator. It turned out that Wordpress 2.5.1 broke feeds. More information at http://www.onebigdog.net/feedburner-and-wordpress-251/. Direct link to patches <a href=”http://trac.wordpress.org/changeset/7843″>here</a>.
Drayton Bird posted a wonderfully written rejection letter from the BBC.
If link appears broken, here’s a link to the image.
Drayton notes that the operative sentence reads:
“You may also like to note that calling our head of human resources a skank ho does not gain you any plus points when being shortlisted for a position.”
If your Zope application is unstable (i.e. crashing) running ZODBCDA against Oracle drivers, try turning off Connection Pooling.
Ford Harding wrote: “Sales mean survival”, and Rain Making is aimed at teaching what most schools (engineering, accounting, law) have neglected to teach - knowing how to build a business, and to have “more control over one’s destiny.”
I was fortunate to receive a review copy. It’s a good read, and I know of a few friends who’d also be interested in what Mr Harding has to share.
Ford divides his book into four parts:
I) How Professionals Build Reputations and Generate Leads
II) Building Networks: How Professionals Develop a Sustainable Source of Leads
III) Sales Tactics: How Professionals Advance and Close a Sale
IV) Tactics to Strategy: What works and What Doesn’t
In Part I, Ford explains how articles are written for newspapers and trade journals, how to build relationships with reporters and the pitfalls of working with reporters. Ford offers this pithy advice - on how to get one mentioned in a news report.
“Be quotable“, he wrote. “One decent quote is the difference between dog food and caviar“.
Ford also introduces the idea of running seminars and other events to build visibility.
Part II tackles the etiquette of networking and client development. Ford has helpfully provided a page of checklist to overcome resistance of professionals to spend time on client development. For me, it really demonstrates that Ford understands how professionals think, and then gives concrete steps to get out of the rut.
Part III. There are many books on “closing the sale” that advocate techniques that border on unethical. In Rain Making, I find the advice sensible, and inviting. There are no high pressure tactics. Instead, he recommends starting with a high level need to create compelling openers. He even offers a few well tested themes to get a presentation going.
Part IV is a relatively small section on high level strategy. I didn’t get much out of this section, as the discussion has moved from tactics to strategy, and I suspect I am not quite ready for strategy yet.
Although there are tomes of books devoted to marketing, I find Ford’s voice credible because he cut his teeth running a location consultancy, not a marketing consultancy. He understands how professionals dread the idea of selling and how professionals think. For instance, he debunks “Non billable time is wasted time” before he gets to chapter one.
Furthermore, I could not think of many professions that tackles a niche more unique than location consulting (helping companies to relocate their business) and thriving, despite building contractors offering to provide location consulting in exchange for their business. Running this kind of consultancy requires one to be careful with how marketing resources are used. Ford Harding doesn’t try to list every marketing trick in the book, instead he delivers advice with great precision. This is what he said on networking:
I suspect that more time is wasted on so-called networking than on any other area of the professional services. This is disturbing because the value of time spent on marketing far exceeds the value of out-of-pocket expenses in most firms. That so much is spent for so little shocks my puritan soul.
Ford Harding writes with a kind voice. It is almost like you are sitting with the principal in the boardroom at the end of a long day, cold beer in hand, and the principal of your company is recounting war stories and giving you concrete advice on what you need to do to progress your career.
I would like to add that this book is a good antidote to Keith Ferrazi’s Never Eat Alone. There are not many people who can muster Keith’s extrovert self to execute the kind of events Keith wrote about, but Ford’s approach is very doable - and I suspect - that the results are more measurable.
My recommendation - if you are a professional, and you think you can do better things for your company, visit his blog first, and see if you think his approach is suitable for your business.
Scientists put “suicide genes” into their living creations so that if they escape the lab, they can be triggered to kill themselves
Shades of John Parker Hammond?
Three problems with this.
1. Getting a Master’s degree is a problem because I would have to actually finish my Bachelor’s first.
2. Getting a Bachelor’s degree is a problem because I would have to attend school to do it.
3. Attending school is a problem because I have Attention Defic–OH LOOK! PONIES!!
Check out this self perpetuating viral link generation technique:
I’m evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they’re letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.
It covers:
- The best blogging techniques.
- How to get traffic to your blog.
- How to turn your blog into money.
I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.
Steal this technique and put it into your playbook.
Somebody get this guy into direct mail. Quick.
When the initial excitement of taking delivery of my new pen started to wear off I realised that I shouldn’t just write for the fun of it, this should be a serious enterprise, so by the second day of ownership I started to take a little more care of what I wrote. I used it to sign three letters, and in each case was perfectly happy with the neatness of handwriting that I was able to achieve.
Review at Amazon. | via reddit.com
Here’s a Compact Inverted Calendar for Business Cards, good for 2008 and 2009.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31
2008 2009
Jun Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Feb Mar Nov
Sep Dec Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Jun
Jan Apr Jul Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Sep Dec
Oct We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu Apr Jul
May Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Jan Oct
Feb Aug Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th May
Mar Nov Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Aug
Sources: invertedcalendar_py.txt
Tags: calendar
It is far better to tell those fearful [of terrorists] that in a far away land, there are fathers, mothers, sons and daughters who fear us, and some who even hate us, because of what their political leaders and religious leaders tell them about us. Some of them would even venture to our lands to kill us, on the basis of the lies spread by their leaders.
And there are amongst us, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters who fear them, because of the fear mongering that our leaders put in our heads. Some of us even hate them, and want to go over their countries to kill them. Their fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.
Such kind of violence and harmful thoughts are self perpetuating. With each innocent killed, there will be even more who truely believe that each is a threat to one another, who believe that each are not human, eat their young, kill their parents and harm their women.
When the Berlin walls came down, the ordinary Russians were surprised to learn that Americans are very likeable and quite unlike the monsters their leaders warned them about. This is only natural, for we are all humans with the same desires and fears.
Back during the cold war, no one believed that it will ever end. But the walls did come down. So too, however impossible it seems now, one day Muslims and Christians will no longer fear one another.
We have to learn to trust our heads that all humans tend to think and fear in the same way. In the end, all of us want each other to live and let live, to continue with our own way of life, to see our children grow up, to love, and to be loved.