General Musing

Move by Dos Rios // Move is a technology garment designed by...

Fri, 11 May 2012 23:36:33 +0200

Move by Dos Rios // Move is a technology garment designed by Electricfoxy that guides you toward optimal performance and precision in movement in an ambient, precise, and beautiful way. From daily activities to sports activities to expressive movement, it provides a softer, poetic, and more personal approach to physical performance that helps you eleviate incorrect physical movements, which can lead to chronic pain or even long-term damage. The more precise you can move, the faster you improve your fitness and overall health. The Move experience consists of a wearable technology garment and mobile app. The garment includes 4 stretch and bend sensors located in the front, back and sides. Together, they read your body’s position and muscle movement, assess whether it is correct, and provide real-time feedback to correct it through haptic feedback components located in the hips and shoulders. A mobile app allows you to assess, manage and customize your experience. For more information, visit the project site at http://bit.ly/JqKe8D Credits JENNIFER DARMOUR Director Producer Edit http://bit.ly/KHvtlL ISSARA WILLENSKOMER Cinematography Director Producer Music Producer Art Direction Color YAQUE SILVA-DOYLE Cinematography PAUL BRESLIN Producer SAM ROHR Animation and Compositing http://bit.ly/JqKe8H SCOTT DOUWES Animation + Compositing http://bit.ly/ISg8O5 LEO LAM Lighting http://leolam.com/ MUSIC Music written, recorded, and produced by James Key http://bit.ly/JqKe8J LINDSEY WATKINS Hair + Makeup http://bit.ly/ISg8O7 CATHY VU Talent http://cathyvu.com/

Post on science reform

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 18:32:50 +0200

The current way in which we do science is plagued by many fundamental problems.

One of them is that we don’t do enough replications. There are many reasons for this. While everyone agrees that it is crucially important for science as a whole to do so, the individuals who would have to do the work have very few incentives (and actually quite a few disincentives) not to replicate. This is a tragedy of the commons scenario. The question is what to do about it. I think this won’t change until the incentive…

Chris Said

My post on science reform. If you agree, please share this.

It’s the incentive structure, people: Why science reform must come from the granting agencies.

Another day, another New York Times report on bad practice in biomedical science. The growing problems with scientific research are by now well known: Many results in the top journals are cherry pi….

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It’s the incentive structure, people! Why science reform must come from the granting agencies.

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 18:32:49 +0200

Reblogged from The File Drawer:

Another day, another New York Times report on bad practice in biomedical science. The growing problems with scientific research are by now well known: Many results in the top journals are cherry picked, methodological weaknesses and other important caveats are often swept under the rug, and a large fraction of findings cannot be replicated. In some rare cases, there is even outright fraud.

Really liked this book.

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 18:32:48 +0200

Really liked this book.

Just Finished Reading: The House of Silk #sherlock #holmes #books

Like Anthony Horowitz I’ve always liked Sherlock Holmes, perhaps it is because my mother joked that I was related to the sleuth. Or because I visited 221B Baker Street as a child. In any case…

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Just Finished Reading: The House of Silk #sherlock #holmes #books

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 18:32:47 +0200

Like Anthony Horowitz I’ve always liked Sherlock Holmes, perhaps it is because my mother joked that I was related to the sleuth. Or because I visited 221B Baker Street as a child. In any case I am much enamored with the genius of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and as have been disappointed with many other tributes to the creator. And I was shocked whet James Randi revealed in his book that Doyle was a firm believer in the fairies of Cottingley Glen.

The House of Silk is an enthralling book, filled with the subterfuge which can be expected from a Holmes tale. It combines two overlapping stories and can be placed in the middle of the canonical Holmes series. It touches on subjects which, although they would not be out of place in Victorian Britain, might not be expected in a Holmes story. Standing on its own the novel is good, and seems well researched. As an amateur nitpicker I would have loved to find a inconsistency or glaring error, and didn’t.

It certainly can be called a good Holmes novel.

Image source: Amazon

Filed under: books Tagged: book, books, detective, holmes, sherlock
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Colgate-Palmolive paying customers with coupon offer #oops #fail

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 18:32:45 +0200

Oops!

Colgate-Palmolive bids to snatch back coupon offer that meant it PAID customers to buy its hand wash

By combining coupons and supermarkets’ own promotions, savvy shoppers were getting Palmolive’s hand wash for free or being paid to buy it.

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Friends don't let their friends photocopy coupons #fraud [UPDATE]

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 18:32:44 +0200

The coupon issuers may print in the fine print that they are void if copied and that any other usage constitutes fraud all they want, if the retailer accepting the coupon thought it was in anyway important they would ensure that the don’t allow invalidated coupons to be passed as valid. In many store they scan the coupon and verify its validity, just like they verify that the money you pass is not counterfeit.

It’s easy to blame the consumer for “misuse” of the system, and in designing the system they are making this kind of behavior easy. And when they fail to address this to the liking of the retailer they will probably cause mistrust of their coupons by certain retailers.

They should take this as a signal that they should make their system more robust rather than punish the consumers. This is why I much prefer solutions such as NFC for coupons.

UPDATE: Obviously the Eagle Tribune deleted this comment.

Friends don’t let their friends photocopy coupons » Lifestyle » EagleTribune.com, North Andover, MA

Welcome to our online comments feature. To join the discussion, you must first register with Disqus and verify your email address. Once you do, your comments will post automatically. We welcome your t…

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Would You Glue a Smart Card to Your Cellphone? #nfc

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 18:32:43 +0200

Would You Glue a Smart Card to Your Cellphone?

In an attempt to kickstart the electronic cash revolution Barclays Bank in the U.K. is giving customers stick-on cards for their phones. There is a hint of desperation about the move.

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Nice article! #estimation #psychology

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 18:32:42 +0200

Nice article!

muonlab » Why you suck at estimating – a lesson in psychology

We all suck at estimating, regardless of how experienced we are. This is a fact that you should accept. Most of us are either ignorant to this or in denial. There are many ways we try to hide our inad…

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What's wrong with ICT Managers?

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:48:00 +0200

What’s wrong with ICT Managers?
I read this post and immediately agreed with its assessment on the state of ICT, and ICT management. Not that ICT managers are suspect, just that the fruits of their labour often does not stand up under scrutiny. This can be where Agile, SCRUM or XP methodologies fill the gaps. And it’s not what they were made for, they are not a stopgap for bad ICT management.

#agile #scrum #xp A great post by my friend Adrianus Warmenhoven

What is wrong with ICT?

A day ago I read PHP: A fractal of bad design, and it made me sit down and think about writing this entry, of which the kernel has been gestating for quite a long time. I see this a lot; pro’s ra…

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Nice article! #estimation #psychology

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:47:59 +0200

Nice article!

muonlab » Why you suck at estimating – a lesson in psychology

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What is wrong with ICT?

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:47:58 +0200

A day ago I read PHP: A fractal of bad design, and it made me sit down and think about writing this entry, of which the kernel has been gestating for quite a long time.

I see this a lot; pro’s ranting about an aspect of our ‘craft’ that has gone totally pear-shaped; programmers complaining about the languages or the quality of code they are asked to fix and/or maintain, systems administrators that just can not believe the insanity that is brought down on them because of either laziness of the in-house personnel or management-made bylaws.

Cryptographic specialists (even mildly spoken ones like Bruce Schneier), hackers nee security specialists, software designers… the whole palette of people that actually are proficient in their work gripe and complain.

The outages in service, security issues, privacy issues, performance issues, safety hazards with SCADA… we are accepting third-world standards here.

I could blame the hardware (‘it is all off-the shelf commodity stuff they are using nowadays’), but that would not be correct; the stock hardware now is more reliable than a lot of specialized iron from 20 years ago.

I could blame the programming languages (‘if you use tools as an analogy, then Perl is like a pair of pliers designed by H.R. Giger’), but, even though the languages make up for a goodly chunk of problems, it is not correct; whilst not elegant or correct or proper, most issues arising from the use of a specific programming language can be fixed by taking a bit of time and duct-taping on other software that takes care of these specific problems (heck, that is actually what is going on all the time).

I could blame the emerging economies’ developers (‘Indian and Chinese developers make such bad quality software’), but that would not be proper and it would actually be very incorrect; nobody pays them to take time and study to learn the correct ways. They do not have the luxury of our educational and social security, so they need to earn money right off the bat. And on top of that they get paid ridiculously low wages. If you want to work with Asian devs, make part of the assignment that they study and finish courses. Or teach them yourself.

I could blame the consumers or end-users (‘software has become a commodity product; a disposable item’), and while that may have some merit, analogous to the consumer buying Fairtrade goods or ecologically friendly items, it is not the main cause of the problems. The consumer does just that: consume.

So… who can we blame?

Well, how about the guys making the decisions, for one?

In my opinion, it is the management that needs to scratch behind it’s collective ear about the current state of IT.

First, they know something about theoretically nicely crafted project management schemes (like SCRUM, Agile, Six Sigma), and think that if you just follow all that nicely, you eventually get somewhere. The reason these project management methods are popular is because it allows everyone to just shout ‘hut hut’ and be off and ‘do something’.
Planning for the current crop of managers means ‘resource planning’, ‘deadlines’ and ‘deliverables’. The latter being no more than ‘Functional Specifications’ ‘Technical Design’ and ‘Data Model’.

Let me take these things apart:

An FS nowadays is a least-effort product because neither the ‘customer’ (sometimes an internal department), nor the ‘supplier’ wants to do a lot of work on it; it is not ‘something you can see being worked on’ (oh yeah, I get back to this one later), it becomes a totally obsolete and forgotten document the moment it is ‘delivered’, unless legal actions ensue at a later stage.

The TD is writing down what the customer says it must be (‘we support framework X on O.S. Y using hardware Z’). That is in no way a technical design. A technical design should always start out with full freedom of choice and be made to really solve all issues arising from the FS. Then, and only then, you can add restraints one by one and carefully take care of all artefacts of these restraints.

The DM is something that keeps amazing me; for some reason it is almost always like a mapping of a relational database. Why? I guess it is because companies like Oracle or the ubiquitous MySQL screwed the minds of people into thinking that ‘Entity Relation Diagrams’ are the only way to look at data. This also makes for one of the most common performance problems; all that following relations and extra tables.
I have seen queries that completely kill all possible caching just because the design was hellbent on using relations in a database. Here is a newsflash for those developers/software designers: sometimes it is computationally cheaper to do the bookkeeping yourself and let the data-model be nothing more than a key-value store.
But the managers can read ERD’s and they look more interesting than: id->Blob

Second, they need to see that something is worked on (told you I would get back to it). This makes for really weird constructions. A good software design starts at the O.S. level, builds up from that and since most of the work is (hopefully) done ‘underwater’ it would stand to reason that you would build solid foundations, then add the plumbing and finally do the decorating and window-dressing.
Not so with the current ICT managers… they want you to hang up some curtains quite soon, so you need to add a scaffolding for a window and then kind of build the house around the curtains (after all, as soon as the curtains hang, you need to spend an inordinate amount of time hanging them ‘just right’, because the ‘customer’ can not wait until you are done with the rest of the house).
This is because they do not understand ICT, but still want to act as if they are ‘managing IT’. The only thing they actually manage is to ‘not being fired’.

A good software design, whether it is a website, SCADA or communications, has the interface (the curtains, the GUI, the Look ’n Feel) separated from the engine; the thing that makes it work.

That is a requirement managers really should add to every requirement document: if you remove the interface, will it still work. If the answer is along the lines of ‘but the AJAX call…’ or ‘the widget does…’, go start forming a lynch-mob, because the person giving that answer is just trying to cover up his murder.

Finally (I could add lots more, but this is enough to get the idea across), an ICT manager needs to be proficient in ICT. That is kind of obvious, you might say.
Well, it is obvious that this should be so, but it seldom is.
A lot of ICT policy is rather because some of the engineers, admins, coders take an interest in matters above and beyond the call of duty, rather than an ICT manager becoming interested and making a point out of doing something.

Take for instance my previous entry on SPF, DKIM and DMARC; you will see that mostly the admins understand why this is a good thing and maybe they will implement it. Or an ICT manager read that blog, but then, because he is out of his depth, asks an overworked admin who tells him that is a load of bullcrap, so they won’t implement it. But very seldom will you see an ICT manager understanding the issue at hand, take time to see what the impact is in his company and then start taking appropriate actions.

In my 15+ years that I managed IT-departments, both small and quite large, I have made it a point to always manage at least one (usually not too important) server and contribute to the companies codebase once in a while.

Not because I wanted to show off my 1337 m@d skillz, but because I needed to know what the health of my department was, how external items influenced workflow and also to be able to understand my techs (and not to be hoodwinked by nonsense) and make them understand that my decisions came from real knowledge and experience, and not a 2-week management technique course with a shiny certificate at the end.

Concluding

My take on what is wrong with ICT is that management has lost the skills to manage ICT, obviously with the exception of you, who are reading this article (the fact that you even made it to this disclaimer qualifies you more than you might think).

To remedy that, I would say that ICT managers need to write at least one useful program every 6 months and administrate at least one system (it can be a workstation for all I care, as long as the thinking process involves planning and encountering the issues).

There is even an underlying scientifically proven principle to my method; people need to ‘internalize’ experiences to really incorporate them into thought-processes. Otherwise they build up analogies and models inside their head that are nothing but ‘cargo cult management’.

It is time to kick out the phlogiston in ICT management and get some real fire going on again.

This article is a guest written article, and was originally posted here.

Image source: Some rights reserved by Sebastian Fritzon

Filed under: business, programming, risk, technology Tagged: ict, management
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Playing with Photo Booth

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:47:56 +0200

Playing with Photo Booth

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Courtesy of Financial Times #bony #barclays

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:47:55 +0200

Courtesy of Financial Times

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Cross Site Request Forgery error message in Google+

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:47:54 +0200

Posting just now with my Google multiple account uid set incorrectly gave me a hidden xrsf error. ;)

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Thank you #xkcd

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:47:53 +0200

Thank you #xkcd

xkcd: Never

A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

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Playing with the Google Docs script engine...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:47:53 +0200

Playing with the Google Docs script engine, discovered that the Google+ notification mails aren’t valid XML, they contain unclosed img and br tags. Do Google+ Developers have any advice for me?

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I have proof from the site below #beer #calories

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:47:52 +0200

I have proof from the site below Heineken will make you fat quicker than drinking Grolsch

Grolsch Premium Lager 5% 147 kcal 29.4
Heineken 5% 150 kcal 30

Get Drunk Not Fat - Find The Lowest Calorie Beer, Lowest Calorie Alcohol

Tip: Search by category using: beer, wine, hard, malt, liqueur, or energy drink. The chart shows alcoholic beverages sorted by calorie to alcohol ratio. The idea is to get drunk with the fewest calori…

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Learned a lot from this article...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:47:49 +0200

Learned a lot from this article, firstly that Dave McClure obviously has too much money. And secondly that diets can be fun. Now if only I can get ripped…

TechCrunch | How I Got Ripped At 500 Startups

Little sleep, lots of stress, free food at all hours, and Paul Singh constantly try to booze you under the table. Sounds like the old college days when you tried to rush for Sigma Chi, doesn’t it? …

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The Cloud Will Kill The Resume (via @TechCrunch)

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:47:48 +0200

Andy Pattinson

TechCrunch | The Cloud Will Kill The Resume, And That’s a Good Thing

I was recently going through an old banker’s box that I packed up years ago while I was cleaning out my office. There was a Palm Pilot, a mini cassette recorder, and even a stack of floppy disks. It w…

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