September 2011
3 posts
“Oddly enough, scheduled distractions may be worse than unscheduled ones. If you...”
– Paul Graham
Ruby Programming: A good breakdown of Ruby Mixins →
June 2011
2 posts
Given full access to tools, some create, others...
JJ Abrams (Director & Producer - Super 8, Star Trek, Cloverfield) talks about the freedom and accessibility to high end tools that technology brings.
Canvas and brushes and paint have been available for a long time to a lot of people. Ultimately, some people create artwork that is of note, that has emotion and meaning, and that is full of ideas, while some people don’t. [Quora]
...
May 2011
13 posts
Human Behaviour: Social Cues and Anonymity
“Typically when social context cues are strong behaviour tends to be relatively other-focused, differentiated, and controlled. When social context cues are weak, people’s feelings of anonymity tend to produce relatively self-centered and unregulated behavior.”
Sproull and Kiesler (1986, p.1495)
My family's association to secretive groups
My mother just recently asked me a question in all seriousness, in the same tone a voice as if she was asking me what I had for breakfast or how my day was.
She asked me if I had affiliation to the freemasonry or something similar… Now here’s where my interesting family history begins.
My grandfather and grandmother was fairly well off in the Republic of the Philippines. They owned a...
““In fact history does not belong to us, but we belong to it.
Long...”
– Gadamer (1975)
Get Used To It: Technology Changes Social Norms
“It’s appalling,” said an elderly aunt, “to see how they use
telephones nowadays. Last night Mary, who was dressing,
answered the telephone in her room. And it was a man
calling her up. The two of them stood talking to one
another just as if they were entirely dressed and had
stopped for a little chat on the street! I tell you this
generation is too much for...
Probabilistic methods of revising for exams
First off I’m an academic failure (what I like to believe, was part by choice). I didn’t submit my final year dissertation for my Computer Science degree at Queen Mary, University. Nor did I sit my exams.
I later learn that obtaining a US visa for a Highly Skilled Worker is not contingent on your academic performance, but the fact that you obtained a certificate. Definitely the way in...
Guidelines on optimising SQL Quires
SQL Workload reduced by
Efficient structuring of the data (indexes, clusters, keys
Efficient structuring of queries
Providing more information to the DBMS query optimiser
Avoid the use of *, count(*) (the system needs to work out at run time what needs to be substituted for the *)
Avoid very long table names (they take longer to parse)
Do use brief table aliases in joins
Do specify...
Jeff Bezos (Amazon) on customer feedback
A lot of people often misunderstand how they should utilise customer feedback. People often cry ‘design by committee’ or the opposite.
Jeff Bazos has a good point on this.
Think Long Term - On feedback and being misunderstood: If we think we are right, then we continue. If we are criticized for something we think we’re wrong on, we change it, we fix it. It’s really...
When And Where To Use Database Indexes
Don’t setup indexes on small tables which can be loaded in memory. There is a certain cost benefit which won’t be achieved in smaller tables
Do Index Primary Keys The majority of the time
Do Index Secondary Keys The majority of the time. But the Database Administrator may complain about the space allocation if there are many secondary key indexes.
Do Index Attributes that often...
1 tag
Decaying Review Scores
A problem (or not) with product reviews and giving them a score is that they don’t often decay (get worst/lower as time goes on).
As a product, movie, restaurant, e.t.c that was popular before in the year 2000, may no longer be popular or up to the current standards. I’m not too sure what review websites (Amazon, Yelp..) implement a decaying algorithm on scoring. But it would be...
Is the public internet inhibiting exploration?
The public internet is inhibiting exploration… Which of course is utter rubbish, but there is some feared truth in that.
That fear is down to the sticky permanent memory of the internet dampening our freedom of exploration and development, especially with teenagers and young people.
I’ve been doing some on/off ethnographic studies in this area for the 3-4 years, which...
“Most people will not pull out their credit card to pay for your book or product...”
– Jared Tame, Author of Startups Open Sourced [quoted blog link]
April 2011
8 posts
“I live and die by data”
– Self
“Entrepreneurs Are Artists”
– Steve Blank
What the dog saw
Why is a two year old so terrible?
Because she is systematically testing the fascinating and, to her, utterly novel notion that something that gives her pleasure might not actually give someone else pleasure and the truth is that as adults we never lose that fascination.
What is the first thing that we want to know when we meet someone who is a doctor at a social occasion? It isn’t...
March 2011
7 posts
“Rule No. 1 - of a cognitive psychology ‘hacker’: Never exploit...”
– .self
NoSQL Databases: What, Why And When – Lorenzo... →
Going to watch later.
WatchJason Cohen at Business of Software Conference. Ways to work out whether advice is helpful to you.
WatchDigital installation projecting living room texture designs
June 2010
2 posts
Notes on "Design for Developers" →
A look into video sites
Video on the web is everywhere. But if you are listing a bunch of videos on your website, just using text doesn’t do it. This is personal research that I’ve turned into a blog post.
If you are building a website with video you might find this useful.
What are we working with?
Videos often contain:
Title
Description
Audio
Moving Images (video)
Thumbnail
How do we select what...
May 2010
1 post
Re-made my personal website about me! - ... →
March 2010
1 post
Plans for company culture →
A working document and early plans on what I would base my own company’s culture around. Culture is very important to get right and to build it when you start to expand past founders.
January 2010
1 post
7 tags
Ben Reyes's ways to saving money in the UK →
December 2009
1 post
Where I go to be inspired..
Startup Information:
Eric Ries (startuplessonslearned.com)
Venture Hacks (venturehacks.com)
Steve Blank (steveblank.com)
Paul Graham (paulgraham.com)
Magazines:
Fast Company (fastcompany.com)
Wired (wired.com)
Video:
TED (ted.com)
Fora TV (fora.tv)
Vator TV (vator.tv)
This Week In Startups (thisweekinstartups.com)
This Happened (thishappened.org)
Research Papers
ACM Digital Library...
November 2009
1 post
May 2009
1 post
What is your favorite website? It’s so 1999.
I just was recently asked this by DAVE the branding agency which is involved with a company I am working with. They had asked everyone to come prepared with our favorite website.
Doing a bit of thinking about this. And my response to it is f*** the question. I don’t have a favorite website. I may have websites I use and visit, some more than others. Websites are just another way to consume,...
March 2009
6 posts
Currently Working On: Helping people be creative
What I am working on
A platform/website for creative people. At the moment I’m calling it Log20. My vision is to do what myspace and lastfm has done for bands but for artists/photographers/designers and creative people in general. I’ve been planning this for a long while and it is an incarnation of a project that stalled in 2005 around Internet video (CreateIPTV) due to commitments at high...
3 tags
Kevin Rose Broadcasts on USTREAM from Virgin...
Kevin Rose on a Virgin American plane broadcasts live on UStream.TV and Twitter this to all of he’s followers instantly getting 700+ viewers. [Update now 800+]
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/kevin-rose
I guess it shows the power of live life streaming and the current nature of the delay on the internet.
Even Virgin America instantly responded to Kevin Rose via twitter saying
This is pretty...
6 tags
Reid Hoffman (Linkedin CEO) says "Every Individual...
Reid Hoffman who invested in sites like facebook and digg, was on Charlie Rose. Techcrunch has the full embbeded video. I do believe in what he mentioned that every individual is now an entrepreneur. To add to that, every individual is now a brand. We now have a large amount of information in the public. With our facebook profiles, linkedin and even goggling our own name brings up...
Photos: MobileCampBrighton 2009
- Flickr Album: Photos: MobileCampBrighton 2009 - http://barcamp.org/MobileCampBrighton
Photography: Fuzzy Logic - 31st Jan 2009
7 tags
Sketch: Image cut outs makes interesting visuals
On the way back home from Brighton (MobileCampBrighton). I was thinking about image cut outs and how they make interesting leading visuals. So I thought I’d share my random thoughts.
I know a few sites that displays cutout before going into an article. Flickr also displays cutout images of photos in a album format. The sketches probably won’t make any sense. But I thought I post it....
February 2009
1 post
7 tags
Agile Business & Bootstrapping
Agile is a well-known development methodology that is used in software and web development. It gets things going and allows for not everything to be planned. The question is can it work for businesses? Its more commonly used in start-ups and web companies where bootstrapping is found. The guys at 37Signals (BaseCamp) use an agile way of thinking in their business. Reading the notes that Robbie...