Here are some inspirational words from an x-gamer. I certainly do not spend as much time with games as I used to. The last console game I bought was for the Sony PS2. These days I’m more likely to pick up bejeweled for my phone than I am to think about buying a new game from EB Games. But that said… I know and understand how life distractions can take you away from your ambitions or goals. I like it when he says;
“Do things that create Value
Not consume time“
I honestly feel very sorry for any Olympic protesters today. Downtown Vancouver is swarming with people and the atmosphere is very electric. Art exhibits line the rained soaked streets and businesses are flying flags and Olympic symbology in blatant disregard of the IOC IP police. People are lined up to zip-line across Robson street to the Art gallery. But the coolest thing downtown is the restored Robson Center outdoor ice rink.
To put it into words I’d describe the atmosphere here today as euphoric patriotism. Right now I’m sitting in the lobby of Hotel Vancouver and its a people watchers paradise. I even just assisted two nice ladies with impaired vision find the washrooms. Clearly lost they asked me “Is this a mall?”.
“No this is the Hotel Vancouver and yes those are shops.” Actually LV, Omega and Guchi give the lobby a cruise ship kind of feel. Speaking of atmosphere, I wonder how long the hovering security guards and under cover secret service will let me sit here.
Well back to the show. P
Well it looks like Google is going to phase out their support for Internet Explorer 6. If you are still using IE6 then you should know you are using a browser with many well documented security flaws. What you probably didn’t know is that a lot of web sites are phasing out their support for IE6 including Google. Google says that as of March 1, 2010, you will not be able to access Google apps with IE6.
Here is what Google sent me today:
Dear Google Apps admin,
In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers…
It is very important that you consider upgrading your Internet Explorer browser to IE8 (via windows update) or moving to another browser like Mozilla Firefox , Google Chrome or Apple Safari . If you are working at a corporate office I suggest you consider a portable version of Firefox or Chrome from Portable apps which runs without the need to install anything to your PC. You can install it directly to your USB drive or to a folder on your desktop.
I use a portable version of Google Chrome at my office for several reasons:
So I don’t know if my solution is the one for you, I only know that everyone needs to let go of IE6.
Cheers, Paul
I’ve been into consolidating my life recently and I have found that Social Networks are not helping. I find that despite the propaganda to the contrary, Social networks decentralize me since they don’t share any common repository of information. What I mean is; I have a Facebook profile, that can automatically post my recent Diggs, which I can tweet about. Even though it appears to be connected, these attempts at centralizing a inherently decentralized setup has only giving me too many places to spread myself and police content about myself.
Granted the nature of my profession requires that I have a strong on-line presences so I am keeping a few core on-line accounts with sites like Linkedin and Elance. I have benefited from those two sites in a measurable way and therefore, since they are a positive influence, I see no reason to delete them.
Anyways I got this idea from an episode from CBC Spark and it seemed a good way to trim off some excess Web2.0 Fat. 
Another piece of old research. It’s so interesting, though, I can’t help putting a note up about it. In a piece of research released in 2000, Lutz Prechelt compared C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl. (It’s gotten a fair bit of attention before, so it’s not new material)
What’s so good is the fairly rigorous and natural approach – instead of leaning exclusively on local students or one company’s employees performing some unnatural task, the researchers solicited for solutions online for the scripting languages (Perl, Python, Rexx and Tcl) and got 80 different implementations of a simple dictionary task. With these tasks they ran a lot of metrics and generated solid, comparable empirical data. Read it for the details (there is also a prettified version available).
I liked this observation, however:
For all program aspects investigated, the performance variability due to different programmers (as described by the bad/good ratios) is on average about as large or even larger than the variability due to different languages.
It’s quite profound – and even if the study itself is a bit dated and has some minor flaws – this observation probably still holds regardless!
Also, for Perl programmers, this statistic is quite neat:
The variability in execution speed for Perl programs were far lower than for the other languages except Tcl. It might be over-interpreting, but it indicates Perl is a bit more predictable – or Perl programmers are – than most of the other languages. Also, speed-wise is holding up quite good, and even the higher end of the range of execution speed is better than the higher end for all other languages.
The curious thing is that this indicates that the variability between programmers matters less with Perl (and Tcl) than the other languages. Or at least speed-wise, but the low variability also seems to be a tendency in the other metrics in the paper.
What’s so interesting, though, is how this demonstrates in hard numbers the importance of human variables in programming. It’s almost like framework matters less than the people using it.. funny, eh?
Sean Conway needed to raise funds for his start-up, Notehall.com, an online marketplace for college students to buy and sell class notes. But a year into the venture he was broke and investors weren’t willing to infuse the company with a capital boost.
Mr. Conway’s grandfather contributed $17,000 for marketing and operations, which allowed the company to hit nearly 8,000 users at Mr. Conway’s alma mater, the University of Arizona, by January 2009. But the angels and venture capitalists remained skeptical.
“I had invested my life savings and I knew there was no turning back,” says Mr. Conway, a 2007 graduate.
So last March he submitted his idea to DreamIt Ventures, a sort of entrepreneurial boot camp in Philadelphia—funded by four economic development organizations—that provides office space and mentoring to fledgling business owners, and helps set them up with potential investors. Notehall.com, one of 10 ventures chosen to participate in the three-month summer program, walked away with about $500,000 in investments.
By EMILY MALTBY of the Wall Street Journal
, October 15, 2009
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