Daniel Schmachtenberger and civilization

I recently came across this interview with Daniel Schmachtenberger which I really enjoyed, partly because it concerns something I find myself spending more time thinking about, partly because of the absolutely attractive view of human that he is show casing through his attitude.

There are things in our modern life which we should be proud of, things that have been developed over centuries by us and the people before us. The internet is one example. Another is our governance structures, the refinement of which has prevented much suffering.

But there are also things that are dark. The are things that cause people suffering in new ways. Loss of meaning of life itself, replaced with void or empty consumerism, and loss of even the meaning of work. Corruption of the information that feeds our governance structures. Appraisal of comfort over long-term planning. Self-centered competition over compassion.

Daniel Schmachtenberger has the interesting take that our culture makes a difference to who we are. And even if we find it difficult to control ourselves and our emotions, we can change our culture and our environment.

Some ways to get probabilities wrong

An interesting set of paradoxes in probability.

Some of them are somewhat mind-boggling.

It's too bad school doesn't generally teaches us enough to get the intuition right.

The unspoken truth about managing geeks

This opinion piece was funny.

Simulating statistics

This presentation was interesting - it explains how you can simulate your way through various statistical problems instead of trying to figure out the right analytical approach. For instance, to answer the question: is this a typical scenario? You just run the simulation many times in a loop and see what happens.

Confident idiots

This article about the problem that ignorance makes people more confident and how that affects society was really, really interesting - e.g. is it safer to educate people on how to drive on icy roads or not? It even has some advice on how to not fall into the ignorance trap.

Short-term thinking

Old post, but hilarious.

A take on good, reusable Java design

This is just too amusing not to pass on.

Stoicism

This is philosophy in practice. One of the most interesting posts I have read this year.

Emacs learning curve

Think this is old. But still funny.

On being the the right size

Long time, no write. And now I'm just going to link to an article about sizes, from 1928.

Consensus decision making

Is that crazy? Maybe not. Is a good manager the person who makes the decisions or the person who makes sure he doesn't?

Django-rendertext 0.2 and a new jquery plot plugin

A quick update. I've released django-rendertext 0.2. The most notable change is support for GIF output, mostly intended for the browser that didn't support PNGs properly until very recently.

I deliberately built rendertext with PNGs first because it's the format of the future. IE7 usage is picking up (see for instance here or here), within a year or two it's probably completely dominant among IE users. Now that I whipped up the GIF support, I'm glad I didn't start with it because it was a real PITA to do with PIL (Python Imaging Library). PIL doesn't have proper documentation of the corner cases that turn out to be the most important and only sketchy support for palettes.

I've also been working on a plotting plugin for jQuery. We've not been entirely satisfied with Plotr which otherwise appeared to be the prettiest and most advanced Javascript-only plotting library out there. It's for Prototype and not for jQuery but most importantly I've found it confusing to hack on. And it's completely missing the interactive aspects.

So I have started my own project. So far I think I've discovered that the hardest part of a library for plotting is not actually drawing the stuff, but layouting and auto-adjusting the axes. In any case, in two days I've gotten pretty far. Here's a screenshot (click to get the full version):



What's missing right now is support for plotting points and columns, options for controlling the plot, legends, support for time and the interactive stuff such as zooming, highlighting graphs, tooltips for points on mouse hover. Also, the auto-adjusting algorithm is still a bit rough but I think I managed to crack it on paper last night so I just need to implement and test it.

In other news, from Werner Vogels' blog here's how Amazon manages storage (warning! scientific paper ahead). Now that's as far as you can get from N=1 thinking. As an aside, I'm fond of that guy's name, Werner Vogels (note for English native speakers: in German the surname is pronounced like [fogels] not [wogels]). It's just like der Vogelfänger bin ich ja I guess, nice rhythm.

Groups and social software

From a link from Joel on Software is this essay on groups and social software. Lots of interesting points, e.g. that the group needs rules to prevent it from ruining itself, that social and technological issues are inseparable and that a core of members arise which should be nurtured.

No posts for long time, I have been on vacation, away from computers. I've gotten through a good deal of books, all fictional. Not having read much fiction for the last year or so, I find it surprising that a book can still keep me occupied in bed in the morning so that breakfast turns into lunch and I spend most of the day on the couch reading.

I've also been thinking. Mostly about life and what I like to spend my time on. Nothing major came out of it, though. :-)

How not to do management

Joel on why simple economics is not a good way to manage other people.

AJAX

I started looking into AJAX. We want to use AJAX for doing searches for client.

Turns out it is much simpler than I thought, at least if you have worked with asynchronous programming, callbacks and closures before. First thing to note is that it's a good idea to use a library to do most of the Javascript stuff because of browser incompatibilities. I digged up jQuery which seems sensible. I suggest starting with this tutorial from the documentation page.

There's really not much more in it than a few lines of simple Javascript code (because of the library) on the client side. You register a callback and can inject things into the page when you get data. On the server-side is a standard PHP/Django/ASP/whatever script that parses GET or POST parameters and returns an XML string. It's even simpler than normal form processing because you just return the data you need on the client side instead of a whole page.

There are also a couple of links to tutorials on the Wikipedia page on AJAX to understand what jQuery is doing under the hood.

How to dress

Some tips for dressing, if you're in the trade.

I already knew most of them, of course. Janne told me.

Reminds of thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com, probably the longest domain name ever registered.

The secret of success in business

This illustration is just hilarious.

While I'm at it, I stumbled upon a webshop with orchids. It's short, pretty and to the point. Great example of how to construct a webshop.

And here's how to choose a colour scheme.

Frustrated users

Spent some time with a link I got from the blog of Federico Mena-Quintero. Apparently, people get frustrated often with the programs they use most (word processing comes out top) and waste on average about 40% of their time.

Some of the suggestions in the paper are simply to rephrase unclear wording and work on the error messages.

Another paper suggests an adaptable file browser. Their concept is pretty simple - replace seldomly used folders with an ellipsis. Easily generalised.

Open source community building

A guy describes his experiences with building an open source project. The most interesting part is the check list to the right.

Starving

Some guy tried living on $30 for a month. Incidentally, he appears to have found an effective means of losing weight.