The Curve of Binding Energy
McPhee, John A.
One of McPhee’s earlier books. I think I picked it up from a blog recommendation somewhere. While McPhee makes a good argument for why we should be worried about the risks of nuclear weapons made from stolen materials, the world has gone 30 years without that event occurring. It’s probably worth thinking about why that should be. No obvious answer occurs to me.
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
Lessig, Lawrence
This got lots of coverage when it came out, including AKMA’s interesting efforts to create a distributed audiobook version of the text. I enjoy Lessig on many levels. One in particular is the chance to watch how he assembles an argument. The one particular takeaway from this book is that Lessig finally helped me understand why there is an important role for public policy (mainly by showing how badly it’s breaking down in the current instance).
The Sheep Look Up
Brunner, John
As a long-time fan of Brunner, I’m not quite sure how it is I had never read The Sheep Look Up until now. It’s a very dark and disturbing tale in the “if this goes on…” school of science fiction. Dave Pollard in his excellent weblog, How to Save the World, makes compelling and persuasive arguments for why each of us should strive to reduce his or her footprint on the planet. Brunner skips past the rational arguments and goes straight for the emotional hooks. What I found especially disturbing about The Sheep Look Up is how closely aligned it feels with today’s news and headlines. Written in the 1970s, some credit it with encouraging the more radical wing of the environmental movement. Reading it now, I wonder how much the inevitable may have only been postponed for a short while. Disturbing.
A nice example of getting your tools to do more of your work for you. And Michael Hyatt’s Working Smart blog looks to be another good resource. There is also an RSS feed.
Automating the GTD Weekly Review.
Michael Hyatt, whose blog is a must-read if you practice Getting Things Done, has provided a great Outlook macro script that automates the process of setting up a weekly review task list. I am a Visual Basic novice and it took me about three minutes to set this up (including creating a custom icon).
I figure I ll save ten times that amount of time every month because now I can click a single button and my Weekly Review is all set up.
Great stuff.
If you haven’t already started reading Beyond Bullets, you should. Perhaps, more importantly, you should encourage the folks in marketing who set up your templates to read it as well. That will do double duty; getting them to improve their templates and getting them hooked on weblogs.
Thinking outside the grid in PowerPoint.
Cliff Atkinson s Beyond Bullets discusses one of the most frequent design mistakes made in presentations today. I ve really come to value Cliff s insights. Although he focuses on PowerPoint in his blog, a lot of the advice he presents can be easily adapted to other publishing and presenting activities.
Clearly, putting your logo on every slide increases the risk that you will communicate the wrong message, and presents an unnecessary obstacle in the way of your corporate goals. If you say your presentation should be all about your audience, your logo on your PowerPoint template shows the opposite, because there you are on every single slide.
Truly awesome pics. Maximize your browser to get them to fit.
Best SpaceShipOne Pix. Awesome job.
Thanks to Sandy [Due Diligence]
For those of you using FeedDemon. I’m in the middle of switching over to it for my feed reading.
ANN: FeedDemon 1.11 – Security Update.
I’ve been watching the recent slew of Internet Explorer exploits with some concern since these vulnerabilities could affect FeedDemon users while browsing with IE. Even though Microsoft has attempted to address these problems by explaining how to increase your browser safety, I decided I needed to resolve them directly in FeedDemon to make sure my customers are protected.
To make a long story short, earlier today I uploaded FeedDemon 1.11. Starting with this release, FeedDemon no longer allows browsing URLs that use the ms-its, ms-itss, its, mk or mhtml protocols (here’s why this is necessary). In addition, I’ve improved the security of FeedDemon’s newspapers by removing all potentially unsafe HTML elements and attributes before displaying the contents of any feed.
Just install this release directly on top of version 1.0 or version 1.10 and your settings will be retained. Note that because this is a security-related update which I want all FeedDemon customers to use, I decided to reset the expiration date for users of the trial version – so if your trial version is set to expire soon, you get to start over with 20 more days of usage.
PS: If you want to stop using IE altogether, see this blog entry about using Mozilla inside FeedDemon.
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR THOSE USING SOFTWARE FIREWALLS: If after upgrading to version 1.11 you discover that FeedDemon no longer updates any feeds, it is almost certainly because your firewall is blocking the new version. If you experience this problem, you need to configure your firewall to allow the newer version of FeedDemon to access the Internet.
By Nick Bradbury. [Nick Bradbury]
Life is good. I’ll be downloading this shortly. This is the sort of useful tool I never would have found without weblogs and aggregators.
If ever there was a goodness…the iTunes Album Art Importer for Windows, written in .NET 1.1.
Thank you YVG Software Services as you have saved me time. The way to a programmer’s heart is by saving him/her time. You wrote the iTunes Art Importer, and it was your FIRST VB.NET Application. It uses the Amazon.com Web Service to find Album Covers for my iTunes collection – and it just works. Kudos to you, and God bless you. 🙂 And thank you iTunes for having a COM Automation interface. Ain’t that something, a little .NET, a little Web Services, a little OLE Automation and a hard problem is solved n times.
(See their importer, there below iTunes itself? Shiny, eh? I’ve set it off to find art for 4700+ songs. A few hundred in, and I’ve got a 90% hit rate.)
I’m now mostly back. A week without any net or cellphone access at all was a very interesting experience. My spam filters caught 99% of the 1300 spam launched in my directions. I no longer look at my junk mail filters. I just delete the stuff.
I had also accumulated 4,500+ entries in my aggregator. No way I was ever going to make it through that all of that, so I did a bit of triage by date to get down to under a hundred recent items I want to look at.
Just for fun
Kieran Healy provides a pointer to how to understand different programming languages, and warns against upgrading:
Crooked Timber: Don’t Upgrade : APL is a pithy language…. A full explanation is available, but not from me. I recommend this page which contains opinions about APL and better-known languages like C ( A language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language ), C++ ( an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog ) and FORTRAN ( Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice ).
