Code as Art + More
Sunday 27 January 2008 at 2:49 pm. Used tags: art, code, five, fuppes, mapreduce, whys Cool - Code as Art. This is probably my favourite - requires Java.My Nokia 770 is back from its WSOD and I've been using it off and on for the last few months. What is a little frustrating is that it doesn't do Bonjour. It does do UPnP though so I've been hunting around for a decent Mac OS X implementation - the best I've found is the commercial NiceCast server which is lightweight and simple to use. Not wanting to spend $$$ on something I'd only use occassionally I looked for open-source alternatives and came across Fuppes - there is no Fink or DarwinPorts package so I had to compile from scratch which was straightforward once you meet the pre-requisites (which thankfully do exist in Fink/DarwinPorts). Once its up and running it'll happily dish up audio, video and pictures to any UPnP device.
Interesting - How to recognise a good programmer.
Awesome - Fantastic metal sculptures.
Typing tutors used to be super popular 10-15 years ago (Mavis Beacon anyone?) - now you can improve your typing speed on the web.
If I had a spare room I'd fill it with thousands of coloured bouncy balls too.
Handy - Rules of Thumb. Some are a little hokey but some are useful.
Amusing - Books that make you dumb. Relates SAT scores to books people read - information culled from Facebook.
Google engineer discusses SQL, DBA's and MapReduce - Databases are hammers. MapReduce sounds pretty cool.
Interesting insight into real world DR/BCP/Incident Management - Five whys
Nassim Taleb, who invented the term, defines it thus: "A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations." Almost all internet outages are unexpected unexpecteds: extremely low-probability outlying surprises. They're the kind of things that happen so rarely it doesn't even make sense to use normal statistical methods like "mean time between failure." What's the "mean time between catastrophic floods in New Orleans?"
On a related note it turns out the Five Whys is an analysis technique for getting to the bottom of a problem.
