Those who know me will back me up on this; I evaluate things fairly. You will never hear me say $FOO is clearly superior than anything else, and there’s no reason for anyone to use anything else. That includes Linux and Linux distros. I calls them as I sees them, and I do not feel that Linux is always better in every situation for every user, nor is one distribution/brand of Linux clearly the best for all situations. And I’ve been using Linux since Red Hat 4.2 in 1997 (I still have the disks).
I recently installed Ubuntu Karmic (9.10), waiting a few months after release as I usually do so the major bugs are already fixed, and ran into many more problems than I expected. I find this unfortunate, because one of the main reasons I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu is no longer valid. Some of this post is about this release, and some is about the state of Linux in general.
Read on…
First, a little fun. I found this survey asking just that question, but in a humorous way. Here are the results, which were presented at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto. I also found (through LinkedIn) a post on Peter DeYoe’s blog with a humorous job posting for a Scrum Master.
Now for a real live case study. In my job hunting, I discovered this article by Damon Pool on Litle & Co. The reason I like this story so much is that not only did the push for Agile come from the top, but they started out that way. They didn’t adopt Agile, they were born with it. That eliminates a lot of problems that come along with trying to adopt Agile later on:
Read on…
But first, a rant about silver bullets. CEOs love them. Shareholders love them. Politicians love them. It’s too bad they are hardly ever real. The world has a way of keeping itself in balance by using opposing forces and feedback loops (you know, like our government used to). Sure, we find disruptive advancements in technology, math, and even anthropology, but even these usually have some sort of cost or downside. While you keep trying to make alchemy work, we’ll just keep on finding significant, but incremental, improvements, and we’ll see who wins.
Read on…
No, alcohol isn’t involved this time. These are military robots. Lots of ‘em. All different kinds. According to this article on Network World, the Marines are looking for, among other things, robots that weigh 10 pounds or less and can be litterally tossed into battle for reconnaissance or other support operations. They’re looking to other types of robots (some of which already exist as prototypes) to carry gear, assist with communications, and actually fight.
Read on…
I am now the proud owner of geekwith.me!
I have a huge collection of links to geek cuture, communities, blogs, and quick reference material (and some of my own material) on my private wiki. I was going to move it over to thekramers.net, but now I must put it on geekwith.me.
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I found a link the other day to an interesting visual resume. This is a really interesting concept! I don’t think it’s appropriate for me, but it’s way cool.
Much cooler than the story I heard on NPR this weekend about the ad exec who got laid off, and decided to advertise himself by putting a picture on his website of his generously-proportioned middle-aged body spread out naked on a bear skin rug.
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Click on the image for a full-sized version. |
Check out this YouTube video showing the Barbecook grill. This is ridiculous. I get poked fun at because I grill with gas (then again, I often grill three times a week, and in the dead of winter). But here you have a grill that uses coal, but the food’s never directly over the coals. I’m sorry, if the drippings aren’t hitting the heat source, and that flavor ending up back on the food, it ain’t grilling.
Microreview: Most Excellent!
I bought this book because I was working on some gnarly multithreading problems. I was hoping to get up to speed on the wonderful new concurrency classes added in Java 1.5 to replace the boring old Thread class. What I got was so much more. It goes into great depth in:
- Preventing thread data escaping (what happens in thread, stays in thread)
- How to divide work among threads
- Exactly why the New Hotness is better than the Old Stuff
- The difference between the various implementations of the New Hotness
Read on…
Steven Colbert got a huge number of his audience to vote for his name in the NASA contest to come up with a name for the space station module. While his name was by far the winning vote, NASA has chosen to not only go with the highest-voted name, but to go with the eighth most popular name, Tranquility. The new name was announced on Colbert’s show last night.
But Colbert didn’t go home empty-handed. As a consolation prize, they named a new treadmill after him. It’s the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (COLBERT). I don’t think that’s good enough. Whether you’re a Colbert fan or not, popular vote is the American way. I’m kinda disappointed. I guess there’s a fine line between “Popular Vote” and “Mob Rule”, but to select the eighth most popular vote seems like a sham to me.
This article has all the details.
It takes a special kind of company to hold layoffs on April Fools Day. I know of two such companies.
Yuck.
