Understatement of the morning.

Understatement of the morning for me. Emphasis mine.

One issue that I ran into was leveraging Expeditor’s Accounts API. I wanted to use that API, but I kept getting NullPointerExceptions when processing an account update. I think the documentation could be improved a bit in this area.

via Socialize Me: Lotus Connections Notifications Plugin for Sametime.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-22

  • note to street card: egg and cheese w/ salt, pepper, ketchup is not nearly as good without salt, pepper or ketchup #
  • "Super Sad True Love Story" is truly sad. #
  • trying out @zemanta plugin for wordpress. Wish there was one for #LC – enterprise market could certainly use something like that. #
  • RT @nickgiglia: Love this quote: "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."- T. Edison. #
  • argh. with no amazon prime I must now wait until I need *2* books before shipping them. Oh the humanity! #
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Study shows pay discrimination makes sense

Just kidding. But what a great headline, eh?

Men in relationships with women who made about 75 percent of the men’s income were the least likely to cheat, said the study, which was released at the American Sociological Association’s 105th annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.

via Men more likely to cheat on women with bigger paychecks, study says – CNN.com.

Seems to me that this is a pretty flimsy finding. Men are more likely to cheat if they make a lot more or a lot less money, and only “less likely” to cheat otherwise. So overall – pretty much cheating all the way.

On the other hand, these are results of examining,

married and cohabitating people between the ages of 18 and 28, who were in the relationship for more than a year. The study uses data from the 2002 through 2007 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

So how much can we trust findings about children in a particular generation to hold across 28-34 and other age bands?


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Room Planning with Autodesk Homestyle

Longer post to follow, but initial playing with Autodesk Homestyle beta led to this picture:

that acts as a validation of my inept measurement — stuff mostly fits. Of course, it fits even better since we only have the TV and the couch right now. Art, vases – are a nice touch in the software that takes modeling a step (or 10) beyond what you can buy in Staples. Its catalog of “real” items provided in 3D by manufacturers is the real draw. It is high time these were available – ideally not just for proprietary software solutions. The 3D model is accessible here

Prior to Autodesk I was using Google Sketchup which is great – if you have a LOT of time to get good at it. I got the link and idea of using Homestyler from the DYI Stackexchange site.

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Job Description – Wish I was qualified

This came my way, and I just like the scale of it. Scale of computer systems has truly changed over the last decade, and I imagine this is one of the job that brings SkyNet a little closer to being… :)

Database Architect will be responsible for evaluating the architecture of the Air Force Weather Weapon System with respect to minimizing data access times, expanding data storage from the Terabyte range to the Petabyte range, ensuring high availability (>99%) while minimizing overall cost.

Optimum database design is required to enable operational forecasters in functional and regional forecast centers worldwide to acquire and process both sensed and gridded forecast information from deterministic and ensemble prediction systems and create a forecaster modified layer for specific weather parameters in near real time.

New database architecture must also enable rapid and high-volume web-based hosting, collection, and dissemination of data subsets and post-processed files that include gridded data, text, and common visualization formats as well as KML (Google Earth)-compatible files. Database architect must be experienced with standard data sharing practices such as Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and SOAP based approaches.

I like the bit about keeping the costs down too – it is high time architects took business and finance objectives as requirements – not bureaucratic obstacles.

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Posters, passions, and honing your skills

Experimenting on customers on customer projects is rarely fun and almost never good. Experimenting for a good cause, and then using these skills for your customers – perfect.

It sounds great, sort of. First, push the customer to adopt the latest and greatest, and figure out exactly how to operate that sharp, spinning, cut-to-the-bone blade of innovation without gloves and safety glasses during implementation. Second, learn your lessons on their dollars, deliver a half-broken system that sparked a thousand promises, and work hard to get a second contract to fix the problems from the first round. [If this situation sounds familiar – maybe you need to find a different partner for services]

Of course, there are other ways. Like doing good and fun things to learn and become better at something (it helps if you are passionate about your work). This is where the ‘Poster’ comes in.

A couple of good friends run a pretty awesome [IMHO] design studio in Brooklyn called Hyperakt. One of the things I really like about them is that in addition to their paid work they also do pro-bono work for various causes, and some just plain fun stuff. A radial bracket World Cup Poster is one such project.

The poster is nifty. I like how it is dynamic – taking its final shape over the weeks of the World Cup tournament. I also like that this is a project hosted on KickStarter , gets socialized on twitter, and helps Hyperakt to better understand how to do such things for their customers, without experimenting using other people’s time and money.

What can I say? Let’s watch some futbol!

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Good riddance daily twitter updates

I have been going back and forth on pushing twitter updates to this site. I removed them for a while, but recently added them back in – right before stopping them again. While I liked having daily updates to this blog, they were clearly not useful to anyone.

I was flattered, of course, that my daily updates actually became an example of what not to do in a couple of blogs. All the more reason not to do them.

//TODO: Find a twitter archival service

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Lotus Mashups – Working and Learning

I have had discussions with the [awesome] Lotus Mashups team for a long time. It seems like a product that has lots of uses, and one whose architecture I really like. Recently, I needed to build some demos for a customer, and while that is not going to be published for a while, if ever, this simple demo was kind of fun to try.

This one is very simple, a google doc spreadsheet parsed in using a DataViewer widget sending data to a NavTeq widget.

IBM’s Lotus Greenhouse is really great for trying these things, BTW, and the team’s YouTube channel ItsMashtastic is great for an idea or an example.

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Twitter Updates for 2010-06-26

  • youtube channels for products are always great, when they have good content. Lotus Mashups do. #

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Twitter Updates for 2010-06-25

  • seriously Penn. I cannot remember my PennKey, and this should somehow disqualify me from donating money over the web? #upenn #

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