RSS 1.1?

From the "who ordered that?" file, Rogers Cadenhead reports that RSS 1.0 (which is completely different from RSS 0.92 and RSS 2.0) is being developed as RSS 1.1. I sort of involuntarily shudder to think of yet another syndication format but part of me wants to see what happens when RSS 1.x has to make the jump to RSS 2.0...

Open Source Titan Image Processing

20/20 Hindsight has pretty good analysis of the Huygens Mission to land on Titan. Here is a post about people taking the raw NASA image data and doing their own image processing. NASA has been doing a fairly good job recently with the Mars Missions of making the data freely available and operating in a transparent fashion so it's great to see someone doing something with it. The "official" NASA images are here.

Blink vs The Wisdom of Crowds

 
Slate has a weeklong dialogue between my two favourite non-fiction authors - Malcolm Gladwell (author Blink) and James Surowiecki (author of The Wisdom of Crowds). They debate the themes of each others books - that crowd behaviour is a more acurate predictor than individuals and "thin-slicing": the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and people based on very narrow 'slices' of experience.

Yet another reason to take I-280...

Biz Stone loves blogging so much, he blogs while driving on highway 101. Man, that guy loves blogging!

MSN Search results in RSS

MSN Search has joined Yahoo! in providing search results in RSS. It doesn't seem to be as well advertised as Yahoo so I made a query box:

Boiling the frog

The CEO of ReturnPath (a startup company) blogs about some recent instances in which they "boiled the frog". This phrase comes about from the following observation:

If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will leap right back out.  But if you put a frog in a pot of water on the stove and then heat it up to boiling, you'll boil the frog because it never quite realized that it's being cooked until its muscles and brain are slightly too cooked to jump out.

When people say that they "boiled the frog" they mean that failed to react to some change because it happened over a long period of time. It's considerably easier to react to very dynamic changes than it is to recognize and react to something that happens very slowly and you see people doing this all the time. Even if you do recognize a trend, it can be very difficult to convince anyone else this is true due to the dismal knowledge of statistics in the population at large. There's only one problem with this analogy. The frog boiling story isn't true:

The legend is entirely incorrect! The 'critical thermal maxima' of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.

Los Gatos Auto Explosion

A local car dealership in Los Gatos blew up while some plumbers were working on the gas water heater. The plumbers are in the hospital and two of the people who work at the dealership are unaccounted for. I was in Los Gatos this morning and stopped to see what had happened - a lot of people were milling around. It was obviously a significant explosion - insulation from the roof was still in a tree.
Photos here.

UPDATE: I drove past again a week later. The building still looks pretty much the same but there is a portable office building set up next to it. More importantly, the parking lot is full of cars again and they are selling them. Moral of the story: never underestimate the determination of a car salesman. I imagine the sales people will have to adjust their pitch to handle questions such as "So where exactly was this car when that building exploded?" but it's good to see that they are picking up the pieces.

Running in Northern California

Educated Guesswork has an informitive post about what to wear when running in Northern California during winter. Yes, Northern California has winter - it's called rain and it's extra rainy this year since 2005 is an El Nino year (expect lots of rain, mudslides and big waves at Mavericks). My wife and I both run outdoors and making sure you're not too hot or too cold when running is important because it's too easy to say "Oooo, i'm too cold. I'm going home!".

How to be creative

How to be creative -- I wouldn't think you could explain this but this comes pretty close.

Desktop Search Roundup

Paul Boutin has written a roundup of the various desktop seach options. Personally I've tried the Google and Microsoft (MSN) Desktop Search applications. I only lasted about a week with Google Desktop Search because it 1) doesn't index file formats like PDF, 2) uses a browser based UI (like the web search) that isn't that usable for desktop results (where you typically do care about all of the results) and 3) keeps a bazillion cached text copies of files that change frequently. So far I am reasonably happy with MSN Desktop search - it seems to be better out of the gate since Microsoft reused the infrastructure for writing indexing plugins (iFilter) and there were existing ones available (for example, PDF, amongst others). I'll probably try the Yahoo! desktop search when it comes out. It seems like the desktop search market will be stickier than online search due to the effort/cost associated with switching - I often use different search engines but I expect I will stick with only one desktop search client.

Symbolic links in Windows

Microsoft Windows has long supported shortcuts - a next to useless version of symbolic links since they are only recognized by the shell. Windows 2000 (aka NT 5.0) added reparse points as a way of truly supporting symbolic links. The reparse point allows a path to be evaluated at each '/' so that you could change the current directory. For reasons I never understood (but can certainly guess about), this was never turned on in the UI although you can make them programatically though an API call. From Raymond Chen's blog is an article on the dangers of not taking reparse points into account when traversing directories. From the comments, I discovered the Junction command link tool which allows you to make symlinks (similar to the ln command in unix). As usual, it is from Sysinternals - if you do windows development this site is a life saver.

Silicon Valley Faultline?

From Scott Knaster, there is apparently a new faultline that runs straight through West Santa Clara valley. So far it appears to be a minor fault but then again, you really don't know until there is an eartquake...