Things are different now. That’s certain. Or at least that’s what one of the marketing sites for my new employer has to say. Back in March I started at Red Hat’s Brisbane office working in release engineering (or the “Release Configuration Management” team). Short summary: it’s been pretty fun so far. Googling just now for […]
Reading through some of the comments from last year’s Linux Australia Survey, a couple struck me as interesting. One’s on Java: linux.conf.au seems to have a bias against Java. Since Java is an open source language and has a massive open source infrastructure, this has not made a lot of sense to me. It seems […]
Martin Pool linked to an old post by Evan Miller on how writing tests could be more pleasant if you could just do the setup and teardown parts once, and (essentially) rely on backtracking to make sure it happens for every test. He uses a functional language for his example, and it’s pretty interesting. But […]
One thing that keeps me procrastinating about writing programs I have is doing up a user interface for them. It just seems like so much hassle writing GUI code or HTML, and if I just write for the command line, no one else will use it. Of course, most of the reason I don’t mind […]
“We will be releasing a 50-page document that summarises the NBN Co business case,” Ms Gillard said. So the 50 page NBN Co business case summary came out yesterday. It runs to 36 pages, including the table of contents. According to the document, they’re going to be wholesale providers to retail ISPs/telcos, and be offering […]
While I was still procrastinating doing the altosui and Google Earth mashup I mentioned last post, Keith pointed out that Google Maps has a static API, which means it’s theoretically possible to have altosui download maps of the launch site before you leave, then draw on top of them to show where your rocket’s been. […]
…except when it is: Anyhoo, somehow or other I’m now a Tripoli certified rocket scientist, with some launches and data to show for it: Bunches of fun — and the data collection gives you an excuse to relive the flight over and over again while you’re analysing it. Who couldn’t love that? Anyway, as well […]
I saw a couple of things over the last couple of days about progressive taxation — one was a Malcolm Gladwell video on youtube about how a top tax rate of 91% is awesome and Manhattan Democrats are way smarter than Floridian Republicans; the other an article by Greg Mankiw in the New York Times […]
It appears the first draft of the linux.conf.au 2011 schedule (described by some as a thing of great beauty) is up as of this morning. Looks promising to me. Of note: There’s lots of electronics-related talks (Arduino miniconf, Rocketry miniconf, Lunar Numbat, Freeing Production, “Use the Force, Linus”, All Chips No Salsa, e4Meter, Growing Food […]
I’ve been playing with some graphing tools lately, in particular Dan Vanderkam’s dygraphs JavaScript Visualization Library. So far I’ve translated the RC bug list (the “official” one, not the other one) into the appropriate format, generated some numbers for an LD50 equivalent for bugs, and on Wouter’s suggestion the buildd stats. One of the nice […]
At the end of my previous post I mentioned some thoughts on dealing with more interesting initial states (\(q^0\)). We’ll define our initial state by choosing the amount of funds we’re willing to lose \(F\), and a set of initial prices \(0 < p_i(q^0) < 1\). Unless \(p_i(q^0) = \frac{1}{n}\) for all \(i\), we will […]
Some additional notes on implementing Hanson’s Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule, based on David Pennock’s post from 2006. Usage is to is to pick \(n\) distinct outcomes, such that exactly one will be true, and then to trade contracts that correspond with each outcome, so that if the outcome occurs the corresponding contract has a unit […]
MathJax is pretty cool — it’s essentially a client-side JavaScript implementation of LaTeX, so you can write maths in ASCII, like “x^n + y^n = z^n”, surround it with dollar signs, and have it look like: $$ x^n + y^n = z^n $$ And, of course, you can be more complicated if you like: $$ […]
Quite a long time ago I read a fascinating article on semiotics and user-interface design. My recollection is that it made the argument that computer user interfaces could be broken up into roughly three branches: “menus”, where you have a few options to choose between, and that’s it; “WIMP paradigm” where you’ve got windows, icons, […]
My previous post apparently didn’t do the economics for the resource rent analysis quite right — it seems that the idea is a cleverer company would be able to use the resource rent tax to find cheaper sources of funding, which changes things… The idea then would be that you start your mining project seeking […]