Home on the Digital Range
Bill Thompson has posted a thoughtful article over at the BBC about the changes that social networking is making to our standards of social interaction. He discusses his own tweeting and live-blogging at conferences, and then talks about the news updates that were tweeted by Tearah Moore during the Fort Hood incident.
Continue reading “Citizen Journalism, social networking and reputation”
I saw this thread on Reddit and thought I'd make a list of my favourite Paraprosdokian expressions.
We are keen to buy a flat in London. It's amazing how expensive the places over here are though! It's quite depressing the compromises that we are forced to make. The cheapest place in Covent Garden we could buy is listed at £300,000 for a 24 square meter studio.
I've been doing a lot of research into running a start-up recently, and a name that always pops up is Paul Graham. He runs the Y Combinator, an early-stage venture funding company, and has written an extremely informative article on funding your start-up. I love the analogy he gives about how the different stages of financing your company works like gears on a bike; you should get just enough funding that enables you to drive your company to the next stage. This makes a lot of sense to me. Inc magazine also had an interview with him which I enjoyed.
For some reason, when I get onto a client's network and run /sbin/dhclient on my hacked-together-linux notebook, dhclient gets an IP address via DHCP, but doesn't update my /etc/resolv.conf with the local name servers, so names don't get resolved using DNS.
I haven't figured out a fix for this yet, but a temporary work-around is to have a look at the lease in the /var/state/dhcp/dhclient.leases file. You should see a line like "option domain-name-servers 192.168.94.49;". Just put that IP address in the /etc/resolv.conf file (ie "nameserver 192.168.94.49").
The New York Times has a great interactive graphic on How the Giants of Finance Shrunk, then Grew, Under the Financial Crisis. It's really interesting seeing how, if the Market Capitalization of each firm is represented as an area, the each firm shrinks massively during the financial crisis, and now how the firms are rebounding.
A post over at the New York Times is arguing that one of the main causes of the financial crisis was inadequate quantitative models - models that tended to understate risk because they failed to provide a realistic model of the way the world works - neither incorporating risks such as a failure of liquidity, nor the complexities of human behaviour.
I certainly agree that the current stable of models which are in widespread use are inadequate given that the competitive market has made the spreads on trades so tight that there is no longer any buffer to cover the many short-falls in the models. Back when vanilla options were an exotic trade, the trader would incorporate plenty of fat in their options trades. Intense competition, a market that has steadily grown over the past 20 years (notwithstanding small glitches), and increased familiarity with the trades has served to camouflage the risks the traders were running in their options books.
I recently needed to convert a bunch of WMA files to MP3 on my macbook. The easiest way to do it was to open up a terminal window, change directory to the directory with the files, and then use mplayer to convert each file to a WAV, and then sox to convert the file to an MP3. The command line I used is described below:
I just read this awesome thread over at RPG.net about character creation in the new RPG Eclipse Phase. Man, this RPG sounds awesome! As ExNihilo mentions in the thread:
The fact that a question like "Can my character upload his living consciousness into a distributed network-swarm of microscopic robots?" results in actual debate is enough to convince me that I'll like this game regardless of what the answer itself turns out to be.
Alecco Locco has summarized the SQLite presentation entitled A Lesson In Low-Defect Software at this URL: SQLite: A Lesson In Low-Defect Software. Now, I'm a big fan of SQLite, and this summary has pointed out a few things that I need to improve in my own development process - namely, more comments (apparently SQLite has a comment:code ratio of 2:1), and automated full coverage testing.