Few good links I've received from friends:
- Interesting satelite images of Earth;
- New way how to discover / browse music - http://www.musicovery.com/
- All Web 2.0 sites directory, implemented Web 2.0 way
- On-line media conversion tool. Great for converting MP3 to ringtones :-)
- If you fly often, the SeatGuru will help you choose good seats and avoid bad ones
- interesting slow motion videos - http://www.redlake.com/gallery/videos/RDT.aspx
- animated knots
- nicely done Web2 (laszlo based) tool for selection of matching colors
On my way home from the office (yes, I know, technically it was Sunday) I stopped at my favorite Chapters store just to check what is new. First stop is always magazines, partially because it is right next to the entrance, partially because it is on the shortest path to Starbucks counter inside Chapters. For many years, there used to be two shelves with computer magazines. Now there is only one. And half of the magazines are about Photoshop, iPods and digital gadgets. Not that there was anything wrong with Photoshop and iPods - I love my iPod and have deep respects for Photoshop capabilities (albeit I can hardly use the Elements). What I miss are good old fashioned developers mazines which have dimisnished almost completely.
Thought of the day:
... Too much to learn. Too much bandwidth crowding the channels of communication. We can’t listen fast enough. We’re left standing on our tiptoes all the time
Greg Bear, The Darwin's Radio
This does not sound very optimistic, which is quite representative. I am down with bad headache, cannot really think straight, spending time sleeping, reading a book (above) and surfing the Web.
I found out that I made it to Ottawa Blogger's list and learned a new word: splogger
Yes, I know, the title sounds like oxymoron and to certain degree, it is. What it should maybe say is Person who should have been celebrity ...
I am not going anywere close to movies or entertainment industry with this. There are more than enough sites, blogs and gossip channels out there that look at life of movie stars or singers. I will stay within the world of computers and technology, which has its own heros and celebrities, albeit known in smaller groups. In "real world", pretty much everybody knows Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Steve Wozniak. They have made the headlines many times. Fewer people know names like James Gosling, Anders Hejlsberg, Bill Joy, Dennis Ritchie, Guido van Rossum, Guy L. Steele, Richard Stallman....
After listening for over week to Security Now! podcast (thanks, Steve, thanks Leo and happy birthday), I've decided to actually do something about the security on computers around. I started to scanning my home network using "Shields Up" and was happy to found that the only open port was SSH, exactly as I thought I configured it.
As next step, I followed the advice from this podcast and used my hosts file to block out ads servers and other internet vermins. You may also want to look at the podcast notes, read full transcript or listen to it.
This is for Gabo, Derek, Steve and others who talked to me about podcasts and about which podcasts are worth listening to.
Since I bought Nano2, I spend lot's of time listening to podcasts. Pretty much all driving time, walking time and time in the gym is spend listening to wide selection of topics and to people producing them.
Here is my current list plus some additional recommendations:
1) TWIT and all around Leo Laporte.
Technically, it was Sunday so rather than working or reading some serious stuff, I have decided to take a long walk (to catch up with lot's of new podcasts downloaded yesterday) and to surf the net just for fun. Here is some of the interesting discoveries:
There was a rumor on the net that some Indian student in Kerala discovered a way how to store over 450 GB of data on a sheet of paper. They say
Thanks to 6 hours difference, I usually read tomorrow edition of Slovak and Czech newspapers on the Net one day ahead. Most of them switches to new edition at midnight, which is 6PM our time. I am doing this for several years already. What is different between now and 2-3 years ago is what I read. While before it were mostly articles written by journalists and news industry professionals, now I read mostly blogs. On SME blog, there are few hundreds, maybe few thousands bloggers, and content they produce is usually much more interesting and readable that the content of official newspaper.
Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don't improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often.
What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to lose weight, don't buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve your software, don't test more; develop better.