Story Points
2011-09-28 | Filed Under Programming
If you have complete and accurate requirements for your project which won’t change, and your development team is spot-on in estimating and highly consistent in their development pace. and there are no surprises, then you can produce highly accurate project timeline estimates up front. Such accurate estimates are (or, more accurately, would be) quite useful and well worth the effort it takes to produce them because of how nicely you can schedule everything. But how about the rest of us, for which none of this is true? [More...]
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Faster than the Speed of Falsification
2011-09-26 | Filed Under Science
Lots of science writers are getting very excited about the news that an experiment measured neutrinos going faster than light. But as we all know, they are overreacting. [More...]
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How Even Immutables are Hard with Threads
2011-08-23 | Filed Under Programming
Armen Rigo has a blog posting (worthy of an article of its own) proposing using STM (Software Transactional Memory) in PyPy. In a discussion on reddit someone suggested that you could have weaker threading guarantees and just use locks manually. [More...]
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When to Wrap a Library
2011-07-03 | Filed Under Programming
I find that this comes up fairly frequently. You find some useful library: perhaps it does logging, or enforces design-by-contract, or it provides an API for calling web services. But someone on the team suggests that instead of using the library directly, we should create a wrapper: “that way, if we ever decide to switch to a different library instead it will be easy to switch”. Is this a good idea? [More...]
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Setting Low Prices
2011-06-27 | Filed Under Uncategorized
I am in no way an expert on the tricky art of pricing, but I do have an interesting thought about the pricing of very cheap things. [More...]
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Election Guide – May 2011
2011-05-17 | Filed Under Politics
Here is my election guide for the primary elections in May of 2011. [More...]
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Wrong SAAJ Version – a Spring bug
2011-05-08 | Filed Under Programming
A few notes on a bug I had so next time I won’t make the same mistake. [More...]
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How Wierd Is That!
2011-05-03 | Filed Under Math
On reddit, I recently answered a question which I thought was rather interesting. [More...]
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Set Default Address Book in Outlook 2010
2011-03-25 | Filed Under Uncategorized
So, I got a new PC at work, and I moved to Outlook 2010. A great annoyance was that whenever I tried sending email, the entire global corporate address book popped up. After some time searching, I figured out how to change this setting, and thought I should record my steps. [More...]
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An Important Victory for the US Military
2010-12-18 | Filed Under Politics
Today I would like to celebrate a victory. A small victory, and one which was decades overdue, but an important victory nevertheless. A few hours ago, the Senate voted for closure (time to stop debating) on the repeal of 10 U.S.C §654, the law that prohibits gays from serving in the US military. This law was unfair to those who wished to serve and it harmed the US armed forces, both by depriving them of the services of some highly-skilled servicemembers and by encouraging servicemembers to lie and keep secrets. President Clinton’s policy of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” only slightly mitigated these ills. This kind of policy made us a laughingstock throughout the world.
I am delighted to be able to say that we have taken this small but important step forward toward rights for everyone in my country. I hope it is only the first of many.
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