Capstone projects and time management - Joel on Software

It is amazing how easy it is to sail through a Computer Science degree from a top university without ever learning the basic tools of software developers, without ever working on a team, and without ever taking a course for which you don’t get an automatic F for collaborating. Many CS departments are trapped in the 1980s, teaching the same old curriculum that has by now become completely divorced from the reality of modern software development.

[From Capstone projects and time management - Joel on Software]

I have always told my new recruits over the years that:

• You have graduated, we are not doing term projects (ok, not exactly true, but that's what I need to say)
• Your program is here to stay, so keep it in a good shape
• If you don't know the answer, ask, or research, there is no credit to lose, but your job is tied to it
• You don't get to switch partners very often, so get to know them and work with them
• Let me know your schedule and keep them, yourself

One thing about time management is that I think it cannot really be trained at school, working on a long term project directed by the PM or group leader is more likely to cultivate the habit of doing short term check-pointing and long term goal checking.

Daring Fireball: Herd Mentality

Conformity is a powerful instinct. There’s safety in numbers. You have to be different to be better, but different is scary.

[From Daring Fireball: Herd Mentality]

Gruber nailed it again! But then the focus is only in the PC market. Who else in the workstation market does not have an OS of its own? Solaris, HP/UX, AIX. Name it and you get it. But I guess that the workstation/server market is never the 'PC Market' at all.

MailFollowUp (Mail Plugin for Mac OS X)

Adds "Follow Up" items to the Message and contextual menus (and optionally a toolbar button) of Apple's Mail application that allows you to compose (and then send) a quoted version of the original message to all of the original recipients, keeping the To, Cc and Bcc addresses exactly as they appeared in the original message. Specifically, in keeping with Mail's built-in Reply and Reply All functionality, the plugin adds "Follow Up" (original To: recipients only) and "Follow Up All" (all original recipients) functionality via both menus and toolbar items.

[From MailFollowup Home Page]

升級到 10.6 以後，我有個很常用的 Mail plugin 瞬間不能用了，在作者的努力之下，推出的新版本終於可以在 10.6 下使用了。作者的 homepage 裡面還提到，除了 Follow-up 的 mail title 文字可以自己改以外，還可以改 menu 和工具列裡面的 icon 文字標籤：

defaults write net.welchwold.mailfollowup FollowUpPrefix -string "Follow-up: "
defaults write net.welchwold.mailfollowup FollowUpMenuTitle -string "跟進"
defaults write net.welchwold.mailfollowup FollowUpAllMenuTitle -string "跟進所有人"
defaults write net.welchwold.mailfollowup FollowUpToolbarItemTitle -string "跟進"
defaults write net.welchwold.mailfollowup FollowUpAllToolbarItemTitle -string "跟進所有人"

這樣改完之後，畫面上的整合度看起來就很高了。

右派觀點 (1) : 為啥要「價廉物美」? - La Pensée Sauvage

為啥你的東西做得品質很好，卻要賣很便宜？？？？
為啥你爆肝爆腦研究出來的心血，該免費跟人分享？

最重要的，為啥你要讓你自己變成便宜貨？？？？？？？？？？

[From 右派觀點 (1) : 為啥要「價廉物美」? - La Pensée Sauvage - Yahoo!奇摩部落格]

哎呀～難怪我不想幫不熟的人修電腦....拎杯可是花了時間精力去研究的啊~

Mythbusting Personalized Genomics

It’s the year 2009, and I’m wondering: where is my flying car? After all, Hollywood reels from the 60’s and 70’s all predicted that flying cars are what I’d be using to get around town these days. Of course, automotive technology isn’t the only victim of Hollywood hype. The potential impact of personalized genomics has been greatly overstated in movies like GATTACA. This has lead to the pervasive myth that your genome is like a crystal ball, and somehow your fate is predestined by your genetic programming. Recently, my perlfriend co-authored a paper in Nature (“A Personalized Medicine Research Agenda”, Nature Vol 461, October 8 2009), comparing Navigenics’ and 23andMe’s “Direct to Consumer” (DTC) personal genomics offerings. She’s qualified to offer deep insight into personal genomics, since she designed the original Illumina bead chip used by leading companies to generate their DTC genetic data, and she is also the person who made sense of the first complete diploid human genome sequence (1 2). She’s sort of the biology equivalent of the reverse engineer who takes binary sequences and annotates meaning into the disassembled binary sequences. So, let the mythbusting begin.

[From Mythbusting Personalized Genomics « bunnie's blog]

This is pretty interesting. Having your genome read is more like doing 'diff -Nru' on only the kernel, instead of the userland.