A couple of months ago I finished reading The Black Swan (TBS) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I suspect I’ll read it again sometime. In a nutshell, TBS is about (un)predictability, uncertainty and knowledge. Karen and the kids bought me the second edition of TBS for Fathers’ Day. It’s the one with a lengthy postscript essay, which I thought was arguably the best part of the book. I was happy to read in the postscript (p. 333) that the author appreciates … →
The Australian and the new Battle of Jericho
When the Israelites crossed the River Jordan into the land of Canaan, they came upon the city of Jericho. God spoke to the leader of the Israelites, Joshua, saying he and seven priests should walk around the city once a day with the Ark of the Covenant, until the seventh day, at which time they were to march around the city seven times and then sound their ram’s horns. This Joshua and the priests did. The walls of Jericho collapsed, … →
No startup culture in Australia
Occasionally I go back and read some of Paul Graham‘s past essays. I find them to be a source of enlightenment, mostly on issues surrounding startups. Some gems are consigned to the footnotes: There are two very different types of startup: one kind that evolves naturally, and one kind that’s called into being to “commercialize” a scientific discovery. Most computer/software startups are now the first type, and most pharmaceutical startups the second. When I talk about startups in this essay, … →
RSpec: verifying model instance creation
As a good little rspeccer, I try hard to write my specs to verify behaviour rather than any particular implementation of that behaviour, and, for the moment at least, I’m in the “isolate your controllers from the models” camp. If you’re not in that camp (i.e., you don’t mock and prefer to do functional testing alone), this post probably won’t interest you. One case I often had problems with was model instance creation. There are just so many darn ways … →
Installing nokogiri on Mac OS X
A quick search reveals that I’m not the only one who’s had difficulty installing the nokogiri Ruby gem on Mac OS X. The official docs recommend installing the fink or macports versions of libxml2, and so does this nokogiri tutorial over on the Engine Yard blog. I like macports. It’s a good way to stay up to date with the latest and greatest versions of everything, but I have this thing about trying to make things work with the libraries … →
Introducing Claire
Our daughter, Claire Elise, was born on October 29, 2009. Here’s a photo of her, and another with her proud family.
iCal/Exchange Integration in Snow Leopard – Booking Shared Resources
So I’ve been using Snow Leopard for a few weeks now. Not too many changes on the surface. The integration of Exposé into the Dock is probably one of the more visible changes. But being in an organisation where Microsoft Exchange is the chosen communication and, dare I say it, collaboration platform, the Exchange support in Mail, iCal and Address Book is really useful. However, there was one thing I couldn’t figure out how to do: booking a shared resource, … →
The Landing Pilot is the Non-Handling Pilot
The Landing Pilot is the Non-Handling Pilot until the “decision altitude” call, when the Handling Non-Landing Pilot hands the handling to the Non-Handling Landing Pilot, unless the latter calls “go-around”, in which case the Handling Non-Landing Pilot, continues Handling and the Non-Handling Landing Pilot continues non-handling until the next call of “land” or “go-around”, as appropriate. In view of the recent confusion over these rules, it was deemed necessary to restate them clearly. – British Airways memorandum, quoted in Pilot … →
Citemine: a new way to do peer review and publishing
As you probably know, I’m a ubicomp researcher by day. However, on the side, NICTA‘s allowed me to allocate some of my time to develop a new way for researchers to review and publish papers. We’ve deployed a very early proof-of-concept of our idea called Citemine. We think Citemine has several nice properties, including a potentially more meaningful measure of research quality than existing indicators such as h index and raw citation counts. You can read all about the underlying … →
The PACE framework for context-aware computing
A long time ago, in a Cooperative Research Centre far, far away (well, actually, it used to be just across the road from where I’m writing this post, but it sadly met its demise), a small group of researchers worked on a ubiquitous computing project that came to be known as PACE: Pervasive Autonomic Context-aware Environments. This group produced a framework for context-aware computing, which was the subject of many research papers at Pervasive, PerCom, JPMC and elsewhere. For various … →
