Posts

Wow. From flickr user clesanne . Need ocean now.

Interesting and article in Fast Company about making your own luck .

Wanna Get Lucky ? 4 Things You Should Do…

Maximize Chance Opportunities

Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing, and acting upon chance opportunities. They do this in various ways, which include building and maintaining a strong network, adopting a relaxed attitude to life, and being open to new experiences.

Listen to Your Lucky Hunches

Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings. They also take steps to actively boost their intuitive abilities – for example, by meditating and clearing their mind of other thoughts.

Great intro and springboard article from the Register if you don’t know much about Sphinx on the smarter, scalable way to do full text search these days. All the cool kids are using it (and with good reason).

Sphinx and Rails goes together pretty much like chocolate and peanut butter these days and we’re using it on at least two production projects at AI, as well as it being a favourite of mine for personal use.

Great article on the anthroplogy inspired design and implementation of the Joel Spolsky ’s free social question and answer site Stack Overflow< which allows highly technical questions to be asked by its users and answered by its community.

Some great anthropological insights for all social software in the video but read the article as well. Love their nine building blocks of social engineering.

Kind of surprised this one I missed entirely on launch. Augmented reality (ie. virtual layers over views of the real world) application where what a virtual bear gets bumped around your surrounding environment for WWF China’s Biodiversity Protection Programme (dead link). A bit gimmicky, but a very interesting experiment (much like augmented reality games and near-future social network games scenarios).

Developed by Bartle Bogle Hegarty China and Qdero.

I love these kind of announcements . Makes me feel like there is so much left to discover in a world that makes you think there’s few unexplored places left.

Written sources from the era—including the Old Testament of the Bible, Greek Homeric epics, and texts from Egyptian pharaoh Ramses III—record the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age as a turbulent period of cultural collapse, famine, and violence.

Interesting presentation from MySQL Conf 09 on open source adoption and the use of open source Business Intelligence tools.

BI is about getting stuff out. Everything else is about getting stuff in. Transaction processing is a commodity, analysis is not. And really, the problem with most organizations (including my own current one) is being able to use their information, not capture it.

The problem is that DW and BI tools, at least commercially, are really expensive. My last company spent about $250k just getting their reporting and OLAP suite sorted (pricey BOBJE in case you were wondering). So, the business case upside for open source BI is huge.

Devs hate dealing with infrastructure. They’d much rather code solutions than worry about whether the servers have been updated, a piece of software is there or the environment differs from what they have on their development boxes.

Amazon EC2 started it (though really you still need to manage the hardware), Google app engine (if you like python) followed, and Heroku made it seemingly effortless to deploy and run Rails apps. It’s now following with pricing plans, both Shared and Dedicated that can handle production deployments (I love the pricing tier names : Blossom, Koi, Crane, Ronin, Fugu and Zilla… ;-) ). IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is now becoming the increasingly accepted standard for devs in both startup staging and business production.

Loved this post from Seth Godin on “pick anything” moments .

In that moment, “do nothing” was not an option.

Do nothing is the choice of people who are afraid. Do nothing is what you do if too many people have to agree. Do nothing is what happens if one person with no upside has to accept downside responsibility for a change. What’s in it for them to do anything? So they do nothing.

The boat voices have been whispering to me again. Perhaps because I was too close to the sea the entire time I was in Turkey, or they sense I’m on the cusp of making some big decisions, but the fact is they’re reminding me of how happy I was when I lived aboard the Neilali.

Suspiciously, this weekend’s edition of the Instructables Weekend Builder , caught my attention with an entire mini-feature on How to Get a Free Yacht (and its maiden voyage).