Updated gold silver watch
Tom updated the gold silver watch. <p> Volatility has increased, esp. in the FX and commodities. </p> <p> Check out the graphs .. dollar vs oil (expect the next bang here, but in the opposite direction). </p> <p> Gold still looks pretty good in EUR and GBP. </p> <p> <a href="http://gold.approximity.com/since1999/Gold_EUR.html">gold.approximity.com/since1999/Gold_EUR.html</a> </p> <p> <a href="http://gold.approximity.com/gold-silver_watch.html">gold.approximity.com/gold-silver_watch.html</a> </p>
Mysites reviews on mashable
tags: desktop, mashable, multimedia, mysites, review, web <p> <a href="http://mashable.com/2008/09/25/mysites/">mashable.com/2008/09/25/mysites/</a> </p>
Nice post by John Carter in the XP-ML.
One of my favourite authors at the moment is Nassim Nicholas Taleb. <p> So he mostly speaks about finance, because that&#8217;s what he knows, but underneath he is mostly talking about statistics and risk. And that is what we all deal with. </p> <p> His previous book &quot;The Black Swan&quot; in some senses wasn&#8217;t very useful&#8230; it can be abbreviated as &quot;We are really Bad at prediction, much worse than you believe.&quot; </p> <p> His latest essay is actually quite handy. It provides a map of where we are going to be startlingly Bad at predicting. </p> <p> <a href="http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb08/taleb08_index.html">www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb08/taleb08_index.html</a> </p> <p> Many Agilisto&#8217;s will say, &quot;Yip, he is right, thats why our practices work&quot;. </p> <p> Others may look at Taleb&#8217;s essay and get an &quot;Aha!&quot; moment and finally realize why some of the Agile practices work. </p> <p> He suggests you divide problems on the basis of moments of a random variable. </p> <p> If your decision is a &quot;yes/no&quot; choice, it is simple. Will the project be finished by the 5th of December 2008? </p> <p> 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? </p> <p> 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? </p> <p> Then look at the nature of the randomness&#8230; Is it fat tailed, or well behaved? </p> <p> 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). </p> <p> 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. </p> <p> Unfortunately most real world distributions are fat tailed. </p> <p> 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.) </p> <p> 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. </p> <p> ie. Things like food requirements for project workers are random variables from what Taleb calls &quot;mediocristan&quot;. </p> <p> Things like time to completion are from &quot;extremistan&quot;. </p> <p> So if divide your problems in to quadrants like this.&#8230; </p> <pre> Simple Payoffs | Complex (Higher Moment) payoffs Thin tail distribution Predictable | Less predictable Fat tail distribution Less predictable | You're utterly stuffed. </pre> <p> Exercise for the Reader&#8230; </p> <p> 1) Catalogue the random variables in your work situation and categorise them as from mediocristan or extremistan. </p> <p> eg. Time to complete an item of work - Extremistan </p> <p> Programmer Productivity - Very high variance, but probably Mediocristan. </p> <p> Security Risks - Extremistan. (No valid distribution on attack models, motivations etc.) </p> <p> Exchange Rate fluctuations - Extremistan </p> <p> Programmer Defect rates - Not sure. Maybe mediocristan for simple monothreaded programs. &#8230; </p>
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 <p> MySites is a finish company, but the team comes from all over Europe. </p> <p> Looking forward to hear from you, </p> <pre> -A </pre>
Wikipedia saturated
<a href="http://oc-co.org/?p=124">oc-co.org/?p=124</a>
Mysites postings
The original posting: <p> <a href="http://startupmeme.com/watch-out-mobile-me-and-mesh-mysites-has-it-all-getting-more/">startupmeme.com/watch-out-mobile-me-and-mesh-mysites-has-it-all-getting-more/</a> </p> <p> On digg: </p> <p> <a href="http://tinyurl.com/58gx7m">tinyurl.com/58gx7m</a> </p> <p> <a href="http://www.reddit.com/comments/6um7x/mysites_the_hottest_finnish_invention_since_sauna/">www.reddit.com/comments/6um7x/mysites_the_hottest_finnish_invention_since_sauna/</a> </p>
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. <p> We have several projects in New York and Munich. </p> <p> A small international team in an agile setting is waiting for you developing applications that scale to millions of users. </p> <p> As usual, we care about experience, communication skills and simply the desire to excel and not page-long CVs. </p> <p> 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. </p> <p> Next time we ask for some GNU Flex developers .. :-) </p> <p> <img src="http://www.approximity.com/~armin/BeerHelpsForRubyWorldDomination.jpg"> </p>
MySites versus the Facebook and Google App Engine
<a href="http://mysitesdevelopment.blogspot.com/2008/07/mysites-services-v-facebook-and-google.html">mysitesdevelopment.blogspot.com/2008/07/mysites-services-v-facebook-and-google.html</a>
new energy blog
<a href="http://good.myupdat.es/">good.myupdat.es/</a>
Development Blog
Some of the developers start posting goodies here :-). <p> <a href="http://mysitesdevelopment.blogspot.com/">mysitesdevelopment.blogspot.com/</a> </p>
Mysites -- launched!
<img src="http://www.mysites.com/images/my_tllogo.png"> <p> 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. </p> <p> Mysites is mostly rub (rack) and Javascript. Check it <a href="http://www.mysites.com/">out</a> </p> <p> 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. </p>
Vimperator - gain back your time
Thanks to Brenden for passing me this link. <p> <a href="http://vimperator.mozdev.org/">vimperator.mozdev.org/</a> </p> <p> First there was a Navigator, then there was an Explorer. Later it was time for a Konqueror. Now it&#8217;s time for an Imperator, the VIMperator :) </p> <p> 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. </p> <p> Now I need vim bindings for openoffice, so that I stop typing :w. </p>
Six Degrees of Wikipedia
Ever heard of the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? If you haven&#8217;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). <p> The same idea could apply to the articles Wikipedia. Instead of taking &quot;in the same film&quot; as the relation, you can take &quot;is linked to by&quot;. We&#8217;ll call the &quot;Kevin Bacon number&quot; from one article to another the &quot;distance&quot; between them. It&#8217;s then possible to work out the &quot;closeness&quot; 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). </p> <p> <a href="http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/wiki">www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/wiki</a> </p>
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. <p> Good wired article! </p> <p> <a href="http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/05/half-bus-half-t.html">blog.wired.com/cars/2008/05/half-bus-half-t.html</a> </p> <p> <img src="http://blog.wired.com/cars/images/2008/05/27/dmv_graphic.jpg"> </p>
Thin -- a fast and simple ruby webserver
I have not yet used it in production, but heard good things. <p> <a href="http://code.macournoyer.com/thin/">code.macournoyer.com/thin/</a> </p>
The pulse of uncertainty
Very nice graph, well done! <p> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/01/05/business/20080106_soapbox_graphic.html">www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/01/05/business/20080106_soapbox_graphic.html</a> </p>
Gold - towards the danger zone?
Tom updated his analysis <a href="http://gold.approximity.com/gold_analysis.html">gold.approximity.com/gold_analysis.html</a>
Vido of matz speaking at Google on ruby 1.9, Feb 20, 2008
<a href="http://www.rubyinside.com/matz-at-google-video-771.html">www.rubyinside.com/matz-at-google-video-771.html</a>
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. <p> I modeled this book on the nearly-completed Scheme Cookbook that I was fortunate enough to have been part of developing. </p> <p> 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. </p> <p> &#8212; BrentAFulgham - 20 Aug 2004 </p> <p> <a href="http://schemewiki.org/Erlang/TOC">schemewiki.org/Erlang/TOC</a> </p>


and experience has shown that it cannot respond rapidly enough to a changing environment. Thus the traditional structure must be replaced by project management, or other temporary structures that are highly organic and can respond very rapidly as situations develop inside and outside the company.

Project has long been discussed by corporate executives and academics as one of the several workable possibilities for organizational forms of the future that could integrate complex efforts and reduce bureaucracy. The acceptance of project has not been easy, however. Many executives are not willing to acept change and are inflexible when it comes to adapting to a different environment.

The project approach requires a departure from the traditional business organizational form, which is basically vertical and which emphasizes a strong superior- subordinate relationship.Project can mean different things to different people. Quite often, people misunderstand the concept because they have ongoing projects within their company and feel that they are using project to control these activities.

Project is really designed to make better use of existing resources by getting work to flow horizontally as well as vertically within the company. Almost everyone agree that the best way to reduce or minimize risks is for the organization to plan better. Since project is one of the best methodologies to foster better planning, it is little wonder that more organizations are accepting project as a way of life.

All organizational theories and philosophies have undergone a dramatic change in recent years with the emergence of the project approach to management. Because project is an outgrowth of system management, it is only fitting these underlying principles of general system that a theory can be described.

Simply stated, general systems theory can be classified as a approach that attempts to integrate and unify scientific information across many fields of knowledge. System theory attempts to solve problems by looking at the total picture, rather than through analysis of the individual components.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleJoe.com

Stefano Sandano is a project expert and if you want to know more about managing projects you can see his online resource at www.management-project.net

Here are some more management articles...