mom I’m drawing a map
we go to around that twister
its on that map
all finished
oh wow wow wow
first we go round
over the bridge
road get bumpy
then you go thru
theres a little nut
its mikey’s party
its a twisty
i call it the planet
i draw a gate and a rock
the rock is inside the gate
im almost finished dad
i need more colors
im all finished
dad move your computer out of the way
round and around and around
lets play the orange cat
Monthly Archives: May 2009
Comcast Interactive Media developer stories for Sunday May 17th, 2009
Tom Baker, writing for O’Reilly’s Inside RIA: Getting Involved in Higher Education – some great thoughts on why developers should consider teaching.
Jon Moore on RSA Public Key Cryptography in Java
Arpit Mathur: My experience with Git and why I think Open Source projects should be released on Git
Aaron Held: Peeling back the onion of stupidity
Mat Schaffer: What I Learned About Cookies This Week
And a shout out to Roz Duffy for encouraging me (and others) to read “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko” – a fantastic career (and life) improvement guide – written manga style!
Parenting, Education and Inspiration for Sunday May 17, 2009
Inquirer: Bari Pepe, 46, Years of trauma behind her, now she wants to aid others – ex-addict acheives master’s in social work. Very inspiring story. Read it.
The Boston Globe: Inside the baby mind: It’s unfocused, random, and extremely good at what it does. How we can learn from a baby’s brain. – “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” – Metafilter thread.
New Yorker: The secret of self-control. – let your toddler’s imagination be free, encourage creativity, to try and try again, and understand that we have the power of choice.
Hacking Education – A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing
NYTimes: Marc C. Taylor: End the University as We Know It – straight up inspiration about tearing down the status quo to meet the needs of today and tomorrow.
CSMonitor: In tough times, graduates (and parents) assess the worth of a liberal arts education – just an opinion – I think liberal arts majors are well positioned for the economy of today and tomorrow.
Deseret News: Universities will be ‘irrelevant’ by 2020, Y. professor says
Tom Baker: Getting Involved in Higher Education – software engineers should seriously consider teaching, here’s why.
Slashdot.org: With a Computer Science Degree, an Old Man At 35?
Inquirer: Daniel Rubin: Grads, please note: It’s not about you
xkcd: 1000 Times – its all about context isn’t it?
Smart aggregation and API use in NPRbackstory
NPRbackstory is an automated Twitter feed that attempts to add context to the news stories trending popular today according to Google’s Hot Trends. It leverages NPR’s archives (very smart, as Joshua Benton notes archives are underused assets), and Yahoo! Pipes to produce a RSS feed that is fed into the NPRbackstory account. It was developed by Keith Hopper of NPR’s Public Interactive group.
Read Joshua Benton’s piece at Nieman Journalism Lab
Read more about it at Keith Hopper’s blog.
Check out his other Twitter related project – Twitterstars – a tool to find local Twitter power tweeters.
Hope you had a great Mother’s Day
We just got back from a terrific weekend down the shore to celebrate Mother’s Day. I hope all the moms out there had a terrific one.
Richelle – I hope you had a great one sweetheart. We love you.
Refresh Philly Followups
Following Refresh Philly May have been some great discussions in its related Google Group.
Technically Philly posted two followups: City CIO’s $100 million Digital Philadelphia vision and Editorial: City government calls for tech support
Jonny Goldstein, on his blog, envizualize, had literally, visualized the discussion with some art live at the discussion that is just terrific, you got to take a look: Visual Notes From Philly CIO Allan Frank at Refresh Philly
Two efforts to collect what people want from Philly governments online efforts and the data it makes available have been launched by participants in the discussion:
Wikispaces: phillydata
Google Moderator: Philadelphia – What can we do for you?
Special guest Alllan Frank at tomorrow night’s Refresh Philly
Kellie Carter and Dave Cooksey will lead a discussion on user-centered design and ways in which to improve Philadelphia.
For details on Monday’s get together check out refreshphilly.org.
Its an important discussion and I believe some positive efforts for the city are bound to spring from it.
Netbeans Beta 6.7 setup
For whatever reason, the latest release of Netbeans was giving me some issues. Over at “Java How To…” was an excellent short piece on avoiding common Java heap space configuration errors in all sorts of containers, environments, and IDEs. It’s one for your bookmarks.
Another tip – close the Tasks pane – it triggers excessive scanning on large projects. Open it when you have the opportunity to. But the last thing you want is to shut down with it open – it will simply make start up intolerable if you have a very large project opened.
There is an open ticket working on the worst offender keeping me from adopting Netbeans enthusiastically – excessive “Project scanning”.