Writings

Really interesting post about Google Wave from the inside. My favorite passage is this:

And this is the essential broader point--as a programmer you must have a series of wins, every single day. It is the Deus Ex Machina of hacker success. It is what makes you eager for the next feature, and the next after that. And a large team is poison to small wins. The nature of large teams is such that even when you do have wins, they come after long, tiresome and disproportionately many hurdles. And this takes all the wind out of them.

That matches up quite well with my experience. A series of small wins keeps the team momentum running strong. Nothing breeds success like success.

In the future, you will take a picture of a wedding announcement with your phone, which will automatically scan and transcribe the text, which you can click on to search for the location of the event, and then automatically be prompted to get directions from your current location to said location (including estimated drive time).

And by you, I mean me. And by the future, I mean this morning.

The Ig Nobel award ceremony was last night, and is fully recorded on line if you want to see it. The Ig Nobel's are given from the Journal of Improbably Research, whose moto is "First it makes you laugh, then it makes you think."

A couple of my favorites from this year are:

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami of JAPAN, for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm. ... MATHEMATICS PRIZE: Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations. ... PEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.

More details, and complete video, can be found on their website.

From Today's XKCD.

Anyone interested in the news story, should read Phil Plait's blog post that puts it in perspective.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.   -Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

When it comes to software and the word impossible, I do not think it means what you think it means.

I was not prepared for the vastness that was World Maker Faire, this weekend in NYC. I took a few pictures, but I realized afterwards I shouldn't have bothered, and just done video instead. So much of what was going on captures very poorly in still images.

There were so many forces at play. The giant kinetic art groups, like the people sized version of the board game Mouse Trap, were largely at one of the big fields when you came in. You then made your way through the crafter cluster, about 50 craft / vendors, mostly making clothing / jewelry. While some was normal craft faire bits, you also had things like laser cut felt necklaces, and scrabble tile coasters.

I then wandered over to tent city, which was a series of tents that sometimes had speakers, sometimes clusters of related things. Sustanability had a tent (think Urban Gardenning), as did Health 2.0, Arduino, Hacker Spaces. And those were just the ones with themes. Maker Bots were everywhere, as were things based on arduino. I finally got to see a Laser cutter in action, damn that's impressive.

The actual NY Hall of Science had makers and vendors scattered throughout the exhibits. The Light, LED, and Sound room had some pretty impressive bits, including bike led spoke lights that could display full motion video via persistence of vision. There was also this incredible MFA project combining light, shape, and sound.

I have enough software and wood projects that I need to do before Christmas that I managed not to pick up another hobby... yet. But next year I'll be more prepared, both with some video, as well as being ready to pick up a new project from the faire.

Warning: If you haven't seen up through "A Good Man Goes to War", here be spoilers.

If the gif isn't animated, click through.

I'm not sure how to quite even setup this video, just watch it.

Irene. from Liam McKinley on Vimeo.

This is a preview. Much more work to be done on a final product as Rochester continues to rebuild after Irene. Leave me some feedback.

After the Storm by Mumford and Sons.

Some context: The woman speaking at the end is Mary Sue Crowley, the principal of the high school. Their house sits on a flood plain/corn field and gets surrounded by water every spring in the floods. This time around they were trapped on the 2nd floor until the water receeded. The idea that that house survived the '27 flood is amazing, and inspiring.

Slightly over a month away, I'm starting to gear up on one of the biggest MHAA events of the year. Last year we had about 100 guests come to our Observe the Moon event at Vassar Farms, so I'm hoping we'll top that this year.

More details on the MHAA website. Also, if you are in the area, please consider printing out a couple of fliers and sticking them up where they'll be seen.

While we lucked out with Irene where I am in the Mid-Hudson Valley, Central Vermont took it hard. If we hadn't gotten out in advance of the storm, we'd probably only be getting out of the state now. Facebook became a makeshift disaster recovery system in a really fascinating way (someone should really study the emergence of that, it's pretty damn impressive).

There are lots of pictures of this event, but these Helicopter Survey images are some of the most striking, as you can see the damage at scale.