CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-04-22 21:20:15 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Reinventing Regulation

I'm doing a Google+ Hangout next week (April 23, 11 am PT) on a subject that I've been thinking about for a while: how should government regulation be updated for the 21st century?  Regulation has a bad name, largely because it is so easy to think of so many examples where it's done badly. When regulatory systems work, we take them for granted.

For example, without the "regulation" imposed by anti-spam efforts on the net, email would be unusable, search results would be useless, and reasonable discussions on blogs and other online forums impossible. Without the regulatory efforts of credit card fraud detection, e-commerce would be impossible. Without the regulatory efforts of the fuel injection system in your car, the traffic control system on a subway system, or the autopilot in an aircraft, transportation would be reduced to a... more »

2013-03-29 01:09:49 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Trying to come up with a pattern for a heavy nymph.

Somethink like +Graham Owen 's cracker ( http://www.grahamowengallery.com/fishing/fly_tying.html) but I couldn't find good white yarn to make the body cover...

What yarn did you use for your original pattern?

2013-03-23 11:52:32 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

Using Python to code by voice. "Two years ago I developed a case of Emacs Pinkie (RSI) so severe my hands went numb and I could no longer type or work. Desperate, I tried voice recognition. At first programming with it was painfully slow but, as I couldn't type, I persevered. After several months of vocab tweaking and duct-tape coding in Python and Emacs Lisp, I had a system that enabled me to code faster and more efficiently by voice than I ever had by hand."

2013-03-20 22:06:58 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

Dizzying but invisible depth

You just went to the Google home page.

Simple, isn't it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know a bit of about how browsers work, it's not quite that simple. You've just put into play HTTP, HTML, CSS, ECMAscript, and more. Those are actually such incredibly complex technologies that they'll make any engineer dizzy if they think about them too much, and such that no single company can deal with that entire complexity.

Let's simplify.

You just connected your computer to www.google.com.

Simple, isn't it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know a bit about how networks work, it's not quite that simple. You've just put into play DNS, TCP, UDP, IP, Wifi, Ethernet, DOCSIS, OC, SONET, and more. Those are actually such incredibly... more »

2013-03-15 02:25:03 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

http://funcall.blogspot.sg/2009/03/not-lisp-again.html

2013-03-02 05:49:35 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

2013-02-17 04:27:32 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Playing +Ingress on a Saturday night in Montreal...

2013-02-15 05:12:21 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

http://pyfound.blogspot.ca/2013/02/python-trademark-at-risk-in-europe-we.html

2013-01-07 16:31:41 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

ETAOIN SRHLDCU

When Research@Google was young, we memorized the top English letter frequencies (ETAOINSHRDLU) and put them to good use, spending countless hours solving cryptograms.

Those frequencies date from 1965, when Mark Mayzner painstakingly tabulated 20,000 words from newspapers, magazines, and books.  

Google has now scanned over two trillion words—eight orders of magnitude more. Recently, Mark contacted Googler Peter Norvig to suggest that he use the Google Books Ngram corpus (http://books.google.com/ngrams) to perform an updated analysis for English.  The results are at http://norvig.com/mayzner.html.

Some highlights:
- R, L, and C are more common than originally thought.
- The average English word is 4.79 letters long.
- The most common 4-gram is "tion".
- The most common 7-gram is "present".
-The ... more »

2012-10-29 23:31:32 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

2012-09-25 02:36:58 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

顕微鏡下の世界

Meet the superbugs... The Donnie Darko lookalike, the velvet mite than can grow up to 2cm long and the indestructible 'bear' that can even survive in space

2012-09-14 20:14:40 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

2012-09-12 21:36:01 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

This is the tissue holder that sits at my desk at work.  I made it back when I worked at Apple, where I kept it on my desk. It got a lot of laughs and fun comments from people who would visit.

One day, however, a Very Senior Person in sales walked by my desk, saw it, and just about lost their shit, so it went into storage for a while.  Some people take themselves too seriously :-)

#MacCube #awesomeness   #retro   #tissue  

2012-09-10 21:38:53 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Some patterns for fast Python. Know any others?

- Avoid overengineering datastructures. Tuples are better than objects (try namedtuple too though). Prefer simple fields over getter/setter functions.

- Built-in datatypes are your friends. Use more numbers, strings, tuples, lists, sets, dicts. Also check out the collections library, esp. deque.

- Be suspicious of function/method calls; creating a stack frame is expensive.

- Don't write Java (or C++, or Javascript, ...) in Python.

- Are you sure it's too slow? Profile before optimizing!

- The universal speed-up is rewriting small bits of code in C. Do this only when all else fails.

2012-09-09 01:24:38 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Impressive, reminds me of the (not as old) color pictures from the great depression: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsac/

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html

2012-08-18 21:05:30 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

#HarleyDavidson

What bike is this?

2012-07-29 03:06:24 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

Brilliant.  Brilliant!

Please let me remember this when my kids are old enough to use the internet.

And please don't let this post give +Mark Giddens any funny ideas.

2012-07-27 20:42:44 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

I'm a bit puzzled by this one...

Anyone else has seen this on the front page of Google news or is it pushing it to me based on my preferences?

2012-07-26 16:18:30 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

2012-07-23 21:51:19 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

It's pouring!

2012-07-21 15:38:22 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

Incredible street art in old Montreal

2012-07-21 00:18:14 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Debian testing net install completed.

2012-07-08 14:01:31 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

"Even the terminator was programmed in 6502 assembly", cute

2012-07-07 01:26:02 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Insightful paper on secure signal handling by Michael Zalewski, from 2001 but still ...!

2012-07-05 02:13:11 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

2012-07-05 01:59:10 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Awesome! +Andre Tezikov maybe you use that next time you have to develop some JavaScript?

Wonder how hard it really is to get up and running ;-)

2012-07-04 03:08:31 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Dragon eggs. Nest was made in Tadoussac, QC and is much bigger than it looks on picture. #gameofthrones

2012-07-01 17:00:11 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Very cool fiction

2012-06-28 23:24:03 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

http://marakana.com/s/breaking_open_the_cyanogenmod_project_chris_soyars,1207/index.html

2012-06-26 00:19:55 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Looks as-if this guy dressed up with turkey quills! #flyfishing

2012-06-26 00:15:48 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

It's raining caddis flies

2012-06-19 03:00:27 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-still-needs-a-router.html

2012-05-30 22:07:42 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

2012-05-14 02:47:29 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Transcript
16 March 1971

Dear Boys and Girls,

Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you---and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.

(Signed, 'Isaac Asimov')

Isaac Asimov

2012-05-14 02:31:04 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Hours of fun.

http://wtpl.heroku.com/

2012-05-02 16:19:01 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

http://www.zenmoments.org/the-cab-ride-ill-never-forget/

2012-04-22 13:56:15 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

2012-04-20 04:12:42 (0 comments, 7 reshares, 3 +1s)

I like to think this is a glitch of nature

Cool Sound and Water Experiment!

2012-03-11 14:23:11 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I posted a Paul Graham essay (http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html) yesterday, here's the video of his presentation:

Keynote: Paul Graham, YCombinator

2012-03-10 23:08:09 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

It's really more than startup ideas, very interesting stuff overall ;-)

http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

2012-02-28 23:09:29 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

Computer Virus TV News Report 1988

2012-02-22 02:31:22 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Nuclear Energy - A nearly unlimited future (Carl Sagan)

2012-02-01 16:28:42 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

"the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough" -esr

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html

2012-01-24 12:31:10 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2012/01/lets-make-tcp-faster.html?m=1

2012-01-23 13:52:59 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

RMS at his best, freesoftware talk, not all related to facebook.

https://rt.com/news/richard-stallman-free-software-875/

2012-01-16 04:25:14 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Dr. Michio Kaku America Has A Secret Weapon

2012-01-09 17:47:09 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I've just imported an old project from berlios to github, PyStocks: https://github.com/ncouture/PyStocks

Unmaintained since 2006.

2012-01-07 22:27:21 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/nyregion/brooklyns-joseph-herscher-and-his-rube-goldberg-machines.html?_r=2&ref=technology

2011-11-22 18:35:05 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

bash feature of the day:

C-x C-e

Edit current command line in $EDITOR and execute it on exit

2011-11-22 17:21:19 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

http://www.slideshare.net/rbranson/how-do-i-cassandra