the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Study lauds open-source code quality | CNET News.com
The Linux defect rate was 0.1 defects per 1,000 lines of code, Reasoning found. The rate for the general-purpose operating systems–two of them versions of Unix–was between 0.6 and 0.7 per 1,000 lines of code. The rates for the two embedded operating systems were 0.1 and 0.3 per 1,000 lines of code.
I am very interested in speech and the Web. Nicholas Negroponte head of MIT’s Media Lab made the case for this very well a few years ago when he pointed out that as computers shrink they become to small for keyboards or screens. Speech recognition and synthesis become the only practical means to interact with them. I am now involved with work on ways to exploit robust speech recognition and high quality speech synthesis that is actually bearable to listen to. I expect W3C to play an important role in helping to make the Web accessible from a broad range of devices: cellular phones, car based systems, handheld and palmtop computers, Web TVs and regular unmodified phones.
I’m told neither the old FizzyLab technology nor the new stuff that drives Waypath was/is based on LSI. mea culpa. It just sounds so familiar, with its matrices and calculations.
Usage Statistics for blue.paulbeard.org – February 2003
3418 hits from a robot coming from 218.43.21.223 called, helpfully “Robot.”
Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids all locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.
What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren’t told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they’re called misfits.
Thanks to Josh for this one. A long read but worth it. Not sure it mirrors my experience but food for thought.
Today, off to the UW Medical Center with a gallon jug of bodily fluids, carefully collected over the past 24 hours, in hopes of gaining some insight into how kidney stones are formed.
I hope it helps.
I don’t have buyer’s remorse after coming home with a new bike, which is unusual for me. I almost always regret purchases shortly after making them, but perhaps the last two years of not being to make any purchases but the absolute necessities has changed that for me.
I remounted my cyclometer, after calibrating for the new wheel size. There was some fiddling and diddling as I worked out how to make it work again, given the shoddy magnets Sigma ships with this unit.
I would have liked to get out and ride today, but with the young’uns out of school, we went out and did other stuff. Playground first, then off to REI to buy a rain jacket: found one in an iridescent/nausea-inducing yellow-green. Lunch there, a couple of bargains for K and home. I saw a pack of riders at Gasworks park this morning, getting ready to head out along the Burke-Gilman trail.
I may start bike commuting some days, just to get some miles in. The U supplies discounted light kits, so I’ll take ’em up on that this week.
Matt Webb hits it on the head. Scroll down to point 5. Google are building the Memex.
Other Google-related news has crossed my path lately. What’s it all add up to?
Gallup Publications – Now, Discover Your Strengths
At the heart of the book (Now, Discover Your Strengths) is the Internet-based StrengthsFinder Profile, the product of a 25-year, multi-million dollar effort to identify the most prevalent human strengths. The program introduces 34 dominant “themes” with thousands of possible combinations, and reveals how they can best be translated into personal and career success.
This is really tempting for me: it may be futile, given my current situation where it makes more sense for me to change my stripes than expect to have my talents accomodated.
But I may have to get it anyway, if only for the online assessment. I envy people who can accurately assess their strengths and talents, rare as those folks may be.
I decided to make a new category of entries, “two wheels good.” some will recognize it as a play on “two legs bad” from Animal Farm, while others may recognize it as the bowdlerized title of Prefab Sprout’s “Steve McQueen.”
Anyway, this is where I will collect my entries about cycling and training for the Seattle to Portland Classic.