Final Push

I haven't posted for awhile, and I probably won't post again for a week or two. Why? The coming week is the last week of the semester, and after that I have final exams. I've got three major projects and two exams in the next 10 days, so I'll see you on the other side.

Goatse Case Mod

OK, this is really unnecessary, but also very funny. Boing Boing has an entry about a Goatse case mod . (If you don't know what Goatse is, then Google for it at your peril.)

MT-Blacklist

I installed MT-Blacklist because I've been getting a lot of comment spam recently. Let me know if you have any problems posting comments/trackbacks.

NPR Sex Appeal

According to this guy , listening to NPR will get you laid! In that case, I should be getting some any time now...

For both the male and the female, listening to NPR sends a signal to a prospective mate: "Despite my current income, in a few years I will have a house in a neighborhood with good public schools, and I will drive a Volvo stationwagon."

(Via Gawker )

Baker's Square

Before the movie last night, Jason and I ate at Baker's Square . I had never been there before, but Jason had gone last week and liked it. The food is pretty good, with a selection similar to Denny's or Big Boy, but the primary attraction is the pie . You can add soup and a slice of pie to any meal for $1.19. Jason and I both had the strawberry rhubarb pie, which was excellent.

Master and Commander Review

Jason and I went to see Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World last night. I really enjoyed it. It was a thinking man's action movie. The film paid close attention to historical detail, and you can see the effort required to attain that level of detail by watching the featurettes posted on the film's website. I liked the messiness of the plot. It wasn't simply "good guys vs. bad guys". It was more about the experience of living on a sailing ship in the early 19th century. If you're a fan of intelligent action movies, or at all interested in history, then I highly recommend Master and Commander.

Eclipse Rich Client Platform

Eclipse 3.0 M5 is scheduled for release next Friday. This milestone will include RCP - the Rich Client Platform . This is something that I (any many others) have been anticipating for quite a while. Essentially, RCP will move Eclipse from being a framework for building IDEs only, to a framework for general Java applications. Ed Burnette, who I heard speak at TriJUG while I was on co-op, has posted a draft of his RCP tutorial . The start of a web browser written using RCP has also been posted.

Master and Commander

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is getting very good reviews . I immediately had high hopes for this movie when I saw the trailer. I mean, last time we saw Russell Crowe in a historical epic, we got Gladiator. It looks like Master and Commander is living up to its promise, so I'm going to try to see it this weekend.

Lego Manufacturing

Somebody has created a Flash animation that takes you through the production process for LEGO bricks.

Everyone knows where LEGO bricks come from. They're scraped off the inside of magic trees by tiny Danish elves, right? Wrong!

Pretty cool.

(Via Boing Boing )

The Onion: Mom Finds Out About Blog

In a turn of events the 30-year-old characterized as "horrifying," Kevin Widmar announced Tuesday that his mother Lillian has discovered his weblog. ... "With the raw materials in my blog, she could actually construct an accurate picture of who I am. This is fucking serious."

Link

Behaviorism and My Dorm Room

Today in psychology we were talking about behaviorism , which proposes that much of behavior is determined by the environment. If you want to change behavior, you can do it by simply putting the subject in a different environment. While behaviorism might be somewhat reductionistic, I do agree that the environment is very important for determining behavior, and I started thinking about the relationship between my environment and my behavior.

One case where I change my environment to improve behavior is going to the library. When I have lots of studying to do, I always try to go to the library to eliminate distractions and provide a setting where productive studying is more likely to happen. What exactly is it about my dorm room that makes it not conducive to studying? One major distraction is my computer. I know I should try to have more self control, but it seems that when my computer is sitting right next to me, I can always think of something that I absolutely need to use it for right now. So, according to behaviorism, I should change my environment (room with computer) to change my behavior (getting distracted). Ideally, I would have another room for my computer, so I could have one room for computing and one room for studying. If I had my own apartment, then perhaps I could do this, but with an 8' by 10' dorm room, there's nowhere I could put my computer so that it would be out of sight while studying. Despite my good intentions, I am hamstrung by the constraints of my dorm room.

In any case, I should really pay more attention to my environment. Sometimes I'm productive, and other times I spend hours without getting anything done. Instead of simply accepting this, I should figure out why I'm not productive, and see if there's a way I can change the environment to improve my behavior.

Fleshbot

From the man who brought you Gizmodo comes Fleshbot . It "showcases all the porn that digital technology and distribution has made possible." Oh boy!

(Via Boing Boing )

History of Iterative Software Development

Martin Fowler links to an interesting article in IEEE Software on the history of iterative software development. It sounds like test driven development and XP-like practices have been around for much longer than most people believe. In particular, the article mentions their use during the Mercury space program!

Innovation Futures

Technology Review has set up a market where you can trade "innovation futures". It's just a game, and it doesn't use real money, but you can win prizes. One sample future is, "When will there be a commercially available electronic device using ultrawideband technology?" I think this is a really cool idea, just like the Department of Defense's maligned terrorism futures market .

(Via Slashdot )

Ballmer + iPod

Steve Ballmer meets the iPod . Hahaha.

NSController Revisited

Aaron Hillegass has softened and revised his criticism of NSController, after spending a week at O'Reilly's Mac OS X Conference .

That Switcher Thing

At WWDC, Apple solicited name suggestions for "that switcher thing", which is used for switching between icon, list, and column view in the Finder. It appears to have been named NSSegmentedControl . The name seems a little bit too generic to me.

The Psychology of Learning

Josh writes about an essay called "The Psychology of Learning" that he found via a link from Bruce Eckel .

The categorization of people as perfection-oriented or performance-oriented seems accurate based on my experience (although reasoning based on "common sense" is often dangerous). I am definitely a perfection-oriented person when it comes to programming and software development. I like to play with all the latest tools and explore all the features of my development environment. However, unlike the author of the essay, I don't necessarily agree that we should be striving to make everyone perfection-oriented. I think I sometimes waste time by trying to find the absolute best way of accomplishing a task, rather than just getting the task done with my current skill set. Perfection-orientation is good under many circumstances, but you have to understand when you are getting diminishing returns from your perfection-striving.

Dr. Mario

My suite has been on a huge Dr. Mario kick lately. We have a PC running a Nintendo emulator hooked up to the TV in our lounge. We've been playing quite a bit of Dr. Mario over the past week, but the last two days have really been insane. Right now, people have been playing head-to-head Dr. Mario for six hours straight, and it was played for a few hours earlier today.

We recently found out that there is a version of Dr. Mario for the Nintendo 64 with four player support. We saw it at GameStop tonight, but they wanted $25 for it. I have a hard time believing that Dr. Mario 64 is really that rare/popular. Still, we are so addicted to Dr. Mario right now that I can see a few of us going together to buy it.