Daniel R.

Complexity

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:38:06 -0500

I have a random note on my desk that I think came from a discussion at the Museum of Science Book Club for the Curious. I unfortunately didn't write down who said it but still find the thought intriguing enough to capture it here.

Is our ability to create complexity increasing faster than our ability to understand complexity?

How We Decide

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:00:01 -0500

"How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer is an exploration of all the nuances that go into the decision-making process. It is an approachable blend of cutting edge science an anecdotes about how decisions people made influenced their lives (both in life-and-death situations and the ordinary). He explores the decision making process through various facets, among them: dopamine, feelings, thinking, morals, internal argumentative dialog, and thinking about thinking. I suspect a second reading is in order as I usually find reading on airplanes to be a distracting.

The True History of Tea

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:54:23 -0500

Victor H. Mair & Erling Hoh explore one of favorite beverages in their book "The True History of Tea." I read this book during my visit to China which allowed me to better connect with the material as I was able to visit a tea planation and see statues of Lu Yu, who is a central figure in the book. While the general outline of tea's history was covered in A History of the World in 6 Glasses, this book more richly follows its path through China, Japan, and the rest of the world. An approachable and rewarding read for any tea lover.

China

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:03:34 -0500

At the end of May I took a two week trip with my Mother to China. As I've been trying to do with most of my recent trips, I took a few pictures. My initial reaction to the trip was that it was good. The cultural sites in China are amazing. What disturbed me though was the visible environmental impact of China's growth. In particular visiting the Turtle-Head Peninsula it was hard to make out the islands only a few hundred yards away due to the smog in the area. I never got a good view of Shanghai's sky-line and the only nice day we had around Beijing was due to 30 MPH winds blowing all day.

Be wary of micro-benchmarks baring speed improvements

Tue, 12 May 2009 23:15:15 -0500

I've seen some links recently to the Round up of ActionScript 3.0 and Flex optimization techniques and practices and I'm afraid. I'm afraid that entries on that list are going to become gospel and code that doesn't use the tricks listed will be labeled bad. Knuth said it best, "We should forget about small efficiencies say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." While the author frames the discussion correctly stating "You have to learn when to use some techniques and when to leave some out." I don't think he does enough to call out the type of optimization each entry is, or more importantly, how these techniques were derived.

Rapt

Mon, 11 May 2009 22:46:49 -0500

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher is an exploration of attention. It drifts between reasoned discussion about what is going on in your brain backed by various sciences to anecdotal evidence presented in self-help new age manner. Thankfully the book sticks more to the former than the latter. Overall the text is very approachable and offers insight into how we experience the world.

The Book of Merlyn

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:48:02 -0500

A couple of people I know convinced me that I should join Goodreads, so I did. I haven't decided how I'm going to handle capturing book information here versus there. I suspect that I'll continue to write my more verbose reviews and notes here and just have the summary review (i.e. star rating) on Goodreads.

Last Class & Last Course

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:43:53 -0500

After many a late night and busy weekend I'm elated to have finished tonight the last class in the last course of my Master of Science in Computer Science from Northeastern. I'll be graduating the 1st of May! It hasn't completely sunk in yet that I'm done. I started this journey 4 years ago in the cold winter of January of 2005 while I was at Towers Perrin and they had a sweet reimbursement deal. I had originally planned to complete the end of last year but ended taking a semester off when I learned I was being laid off from Ruckus and didn't want to be looking for a new job in the middle of my next course.

HP SWF Decompiling and Security Analysis Tool

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:39:59 -0500

HP has released a tool called SWF Scan for decompiling and looking at SWFs for security issues. Available from http://www.hp.com/go/swfscan.

SimpleDateFormat is not thread safe

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:30:34 -0500

It has always felt counter intuitive that there are classes which are not thread safe in the Sun JDK, but that is the case. One that I frequently see people trip up on is SimpleDateFormat. From the documentation:

Date formats are not synchronized. It is recommended to create separate format instances for each thread. If multiple threads access a format concurrently, it must be synchronized externally.

Velocity and Spring Web MVC

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:00:07 -0500

The combination of Spring Web MVC with Velocity makes for easy view handling. One of the things that I'm confused about though is getting the configuration up an running. I've been very happy with this configuration so I thought I'd share it.

JUnit, Jetty, HtmlUnit, and Automated Testing

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:06:32 -0500

I'm a firm believer in automated testing. The more testing you can automate the less work you need to do to be sure you didn't break stuff each time you make a change. While most people think of unit testing when talking about automated testing, the higher up the interaction chain you can go while not making your tests brittle the better off you will be. On my current project unit test coverage is great, but given that ultimately all of the services get exposed as a web application, being able to automate testing at that level would be beneficial. Below is the approach I took to automate testing our web application.

Building Muscular Graphical Editors in Flex (BFUG March 2009)

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:24:00 -0500

Joe Berkovitz is speaking about Building Muscular Graphical Editors in Flex.

Focus on how people build and edit visual documents. Amazed at the problems that come up building visual editors like that.

Ender Series

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:10:40 -0500

Last night I finished my obsessive tear through Orson Scott Card's Ender Series. I had read Ender's Game a number of years ago and throughly enjoyed it. Towards the end of January the lunchtime conversation at work turned to the most recent book in the series and that it was a good read. Since I wasn't really into my other reading options at the time, I thought I'd start reading the series. Rereading Ender's Game, which is one of only about half a dozen books I've ever reread, I became enamored with the characters and the idea of reading the rest of the series. If you haven't read the series I've probably let drop some spoilers below so be warned.

Principle versus Taste

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:01:46 -0500

Today for lunch we went to Legal Sea Foods in Kendall to wish a co-worker farewell as it was her last day. I ordered a gimlet and after asking what gins they had, asked for it with Bombay Sapphire. When my drink came it was very limey which was what I wanted. After a couple of sips, the waiter asked me about the drink to which I replied it was okay. He then informed me that he substituted Tanqueray for the gin (that being the cocktail menu stated drink) since it blended with their lime cordial better.