smart stuff

Updated gold silver watch

Tom updated the gold silver watch.

Volatility has increased, esp. in the FX and commodities.

Check out the graphs .. dollar vs oil (expect the next bang here, but in the opposite direction).

Gold still looks pretty good in EUR and GBP.

gold.approximity.com/since1999/Gold_EUR.html

gold.approximity.com/gold-silver_watch.html

Mysites reviews on mashable

tags: desktop, mashable, multimedia, mysites, review, web

mashable.com/2008/09/25/mysites/

Nice post by John Carter in the XP-ML.

One of my favourite authors at the moment is Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

So he mostly speaks about finance, because that’s what he knows, but underneath he is mostly talking about statistics and risk. And that is what we all deal with.

His previous book "The Black Swan" in some senses wasn’t very useful… it can be abbreviated as "We are really Bad at prediction, much worse than you believe."

His latest essay is actually quite handy. It provides a map of where we are going to be startlingly Bad at predicting.

www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb08/taleb08_index.html

Many Agilisto’s will say, "Yip, he is right, thats why our practices work".

Others may look at Taleb’s essay and get an "Aha!" moment and finally realize why some of the Agile practices work.

He suggests you divide problems on the basis of moments of a random variable.

If your decision is a "yes/no" choice, it is simple. Will the project be finished by the 5th of December 2008?

If your question is based on the value of a random variable, it is more complex. What will be the completion date of the project?

If your question is based on a higher moment of a random variable, it is very complex. What will be the ROI of a project?

Then look at the nature of the randomness… Is it fat tailed, or well behaved?

For non-statistical types a probability distribution can be fat or thin tailed. The one you learned about in the stats course you have mostly forgotten was a thin tailed one. (Gauss / Normal distribution).

Odds on if you did any stats course they went on for hours about thin tailed distributions, because they can do the mathematics for them.

Unfortunately most real world distributions are fat tailed.

If you have a 1000 guys in the company, the average weight of employees is simply not going to shift by much if you employ the fattest guy in the world. (Fat guys come from a thin tail probability distribution.)

If you look at a 1000 random project case studies, the average project overrun is going to massively shift if you add the worlds largest project overrun.

ie. Things like food requirements for project workers are random variables from what Taleb calls "mediocristan".

Things like time to completion are from "extremistan".

So if divide your problems in to quadrants like this.…

 Simple Payoffs    |  Complex (Higher Moment) payoffs
 Thin tail distribution  Predictable      | Less predictable
 Fat  tail distribution  Less predictable | You're utterly stuffed.

Exercise for the Reader…

1) Catalogue the random variables in your work situation and categorise them as from mediocristan or extremistan.

eg. Time to complete an item of work - Extremistan

Programmer Productivity - Very high variance, but probably Mediocristan.

Security Risks - Extremistan. (No valid distribution on attack models, motivations etc.)

Exchange Rate fluctuations - Extremistan

Programmer Defect rates - Not sure. Maybe mediocristan for simple monothreaded programs. …

Welcome in service hell!

Imagine this .. I buy a mac mini online .. all goes well .. I get a confirmation code and wait and wait an no parcel arrives .. then I login and see the order is cancelled. Do you think they would bother to email or call me to tell me that they cancelled the order? Thank you Apple.

Javascript, Flash and Facebook-API developers wanted

MySites is growing its team. If you are interested as a freelancer or pemanent, remote or onsite, drop Ramine an email ramine at mysit.es

MySites is a finish company, but the team comes from all over Europe.

Looking forward to hear from you,

-A

Wikipedia saturated

oc-co.org/?p=124

Mysites postings

The original posting:

startupmeme.com/watch-out-mobile-me-and-mesh-mysites-has-it-all-getting-more/

On digg:

tinyurl.com/58gx7m

www.reddit.com/comments/6um7x/mysites_the_hottest_finnish_invention_since_sauna/

Adobe Flex developer wanted - remote or onsite

Either as free lancer or permanently employed we need a Flex guru or an advanced Flex developer that likes challenges.

We have several projects in New York and Munich.

A small international team in an agile setting is waiting for you developing applications that scale to millions of users.

As usual, we care about experience, communication skills and simply the desire to excel and not page-long CVs.

If interested, please email me at armin at personifi dot com. Please no Word docs, only .txt or pdf or put it all in a simple email.

Next time we ask for some GNU Flex developers .. :-)

MySites versus the Facebook and Google App Engine

mysitesdevelopment.blogspot.com/2008/07/mysites-services-v-facebook-and-google.html

new energy blog

good.myupdat.es/

Development Blog

Some of the developers start posting goodies here :-).

mysitesdevelopment.blogspot.com/

Mysites -- launched!

MySites is a single place for all your online needs. You can create and customize a website, save and share any media, decide who can view it, embed anywhere, and use any device.

Mysites is mostly rub (rack) and Javascript. Check it out

I will try to get an interview with the developers in the next few days to see what they learnt in the last two years of hard work.

Vimperator - gain back your time

Thanks to Brenden for passing me this link.

vimperator.mozdev.org/

First there was a Navigator, then there was an Explorer. Later it was time for a Konqueror. Now it’s time for an Imperator, the VIMperator :)

Vimperator is a free browser add-on for Firefox, which makes it look and behave like the Vim text editor. It has similar key bindings, and you could call it a modal web browser, as key bindings differ according to which mode you are in.

Now I need vim bindings for openoffice, so that I stop typing :w.

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

Ever heard of the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? If you haven’t, it works like this: Every actor gets a Kevin Bacon number. Kevin Bacon has a Kevin Bacon number of 0, actors who were in a movie with Kevin Bacon get a Kevin Bacon number of 1, actors who were in a movie with someone who has a Kevin Bacon number 1 get a 2, and so on (Everybody always gets the smallest number possible, so if you were in a film with two people, one with a 4 and one with a 6, your Kevin Bacon number would be 5).

The same idea could apply to the articles Wikipedia. Instead of taking "in the same film" as the relation, you can take "is linked to by". We’ll call the "Kevin Bacon number" from one article to another the "distance" between them. It’s then possible to work out the "closeness" of an article in Wikipedia as its average distance to any other article. I wanted to find the centre of wikipedia, that is, the article that is closest to all other articles (has minimum closeness).

www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/wiki

Dual mode bus

What do you get when you cross a bus with a train? A dual-mode vehicle that has the versatility of a bus, the speed of light rail and fuel economy vastly better than either.

Good wired article!

blog.wired.com/cars/2008/05/half-bus-half-t.html

Thin -- a fast and simple ruby webserver

I have not yet used it in production, but heard good things.

code.macournoyer.com/thin/

The pulse of uncertainty

Very nice graph, well done!

www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/01/05/business/20080106_soapbox_graphic.html

Gold - towards the danger zone?

Tom updated his analysis gold.approximity.com/gold_analysis.html

Vido of matz speaking at Google on ruby 1.9, Feb 20, 2008

www.rubyinside.com/matz-at-google-video-771.html

Erlang Cookbook

The Erlang Cookbook is designed to be a good starting point for learning about the language, the OTP platform, and fault tolerant programming. This book was started as a way for me to document what I learned about the Erlang programming language, best practices gleaned from reading the newsgroups and mailing lists, and tips and tricks from the helpful developers and scientists using Erlang.

I modeled this book on the nearly-completed Scheme Cookbook that I was fortunate enough to have been part of developing.

This book (and the Scheme Cookbook itself) could not have been created without the excellent templating system Anton van Straaten developed for the Scheme Cookbook.

— BrentAFulgham - 20 Aug 2004

schemewiki.org/Erlang/TOC