Meetings, the cause and solution for all work-related problems, amirite? But seriously, arranging and then actually holding meetings with others, plus a dash of follow-ups, is how things get done in many professions, including software leadership. I have yet to find a single piece of software, or even a suite, that handles all the steps….
Category: aswemaythink
I’ve got a new book coming out. Check out some of the details in this short article. Overcoming Anxiety Join my mailing list for a free mini-course and be the first to hear about publication!
Check out this post at its new home on Writing Through The Fog.
I’ve mentioned Virgil Matheson in these pages a few times, but never made a full accounting. When I had my O’Reilly book published, I submitted a simple dedication in the manuscript: for Virgil But for whatever reason, it didn’t make it into the printed edition. This post is a small step toward letting the world…
I’ve seen lots of discussion for and against link shorteners, but not specifically this line of argument: Let me grab a random shortened link from Twitter. Don’t go away, I’ll be right back. http://bit.ly/b1fYi1 OK, that’s six characters in the domain, a slash, and six more characters. 50 years from now, if bit.ly is still…
I want to write a program that uses TurKit to pass the Turing Test. Cheating, sure, but should be doable (other than time lag issues), right? -m
Found this article interesting. Not too many hundreds of years ago, cutting-edge scientific research involved watching balls roll down ramps. Making fundamental discoveries seems to be slowing down, or at least getting harder. As a consequence, we should expect more big discoveries from the sciences where the relevant technology follows a Moore’s-Law-like exponential growth trajectory….
I wanted to say something snarky about Microsoft’s new slogan, but the comments on the linked article did a pretty good job already. Ahh snark, the unthinking-man’s eloquence. -m
Andrew Zolli argues in Newsweek that online content should never have been free. I’m probably not the first one to make this profound observation–but if it were not for the free online edition of Newsweek (and link aggregator sites like Digg) I wouldn’t have read a single word of Newsweek in years, nor would I…
This sentence describes a unique story by David Moser. This sentence reinforces the notion that the story previously alluded to is not only entertaining but also thought-provoking. This sentence is false. Some sentences can even refer to themselves without using the word “this”. This sentence concludes the post with a pithy and memorable flourish. This…
I spent 2 days at the Yahoo! campus at a VoCamp event, my first. Initially, I was dismayed at the schedule. Spend all the time the first day figuring out why everybody came? It seemed inefficient. But having gone through it, the process seems productive, exactly the way that completely decentralized groups need to get…
The remarkable (and prolific) Stephen Wolfram has an idea called Wolfram Alpha. People used to assume the “Star Trek” model of computers: that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer. Which has proved to be quite distant from reality. Instead But armed with Mathematica and…
Evernote now has import/export (in an XML format), meaning it now passes the generation test for data availability and lock-in-avoidance, as I wrote about some years ago. There’s a server API, as well as client-side scripting. I need to look into the details more, but as a start it looks like a home run. -m…
My quest for a backup brain is (almost) at an end. Evernote flat out rocks. It runs as a great Mac app (on that other OS too, in case through some disaster I ever need it). It has a nice web interface, including a web clipper. It’s on the iPhone. Anything I put in there…
Mur Lafferty’s new superhero novel is making the rounds. She’s encouraging everyone to buy a printed copy on August 25 (buy it here) to make a nice impression in the bestseller lists. I’m a sucker for these kinds of promotions. The full text also recently appeared on the Escape Pod feed, under a Creative Commons…
It’s been 0x40 years since the dedication of the Mark I. Wired has some great photos and background information. Less than a year later, Vannevar Bush would advance the state of the art with his article As We May Think. A year-and-a-half later, ENIAC unveiled, and with it Turing-completeness. And things have been speeding up…
Reminder: Thursday evening at Yahoo! Sunnyvale headquarters is the launch party for the developer-facing side of SearchMonkey. In case you haven’t been paying attention, SearchMonkey is a new platform that lets developers craft their own awesomized search results. If you’re interested in SEO or general lowercase semantic web tools, you’ll love it. Meet me there….
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them… The prescient Vannevar Bush, who foresaw (among other things) the importance of hyperlinks. -m
Thanks to chromatic for the link. Largely hidden, largest app clusters of this particular platform can: Control over a million computers and can deliver over a hundred billion advertisements per day. However, “don’t be evil” is not a part of this particular platform’s strategy… -m
Evernote looks like a cool application, and for at least a few more hours, you can get it for free via the Giveaway of the Day site. At first glance, this seems like the closest software I’ve seen to the original “Brain Attic” concept I’ve held for years. My most pressing questions are (big surprise)…