Three months ago we hired Jeffery D’Urso for a 3 month contract to get some line of sight and direction in technology. He was great. It doesn’t seem like it has been 3 months, but as of friday it was. He is now heading off into the sunset riding his 18.5 inch laptop…
But huge things have changed, I will detail those in other posts. Now I just want to review the big ones.
Work developments
Website almost fully redeveloped in PHP on the Code Igniter framework. Some highlights -
Completely redesigned data framework, much cleaner
New design, and complete content reorg
HUGE drop in processing needs
Much more streamlined code - at least a 75% drop in code volume
2x the features (including, integration with video chat, workflow tool, new CRM integration points)
re developed customer section for better usability
Brand New curriculum and tests!
Many Many More. When the site launches live I will give you a better update and maybe a walk through.
Musical Developments
Picked up the Bass guitar
Expanded horizons
These are my last 3months of listening changes Compare to overall
Extra Curricular
My bowling team wow the league championship.
I am doing crossfit. My crossfit number is 925
I started eating outmeal and PB&Js again.
Those seems like the biggies to get out there. I will post a work update on the site once we go live (hopefully for 2010)
Did you all see that Microsoft decided to relaunch Live Search as Bing. What a weak attempt.
TO Microsoft: You can keep rebranding it, but Bing will never be a verb and your search just isn’t going to catch up. But I like the vigor at which you rebrand and relaunch your search! Keep trying you will at least keep competition alive!
D-Wave Systems of British Columbia announced a prototype quantum computer in January, 2007. It can play Sudoku.
Charles Babbage's Difference Engine tabulates polynomial functions. It was the immediate predecessor to his Analytical Engine, a mechanical computer left incomplete at his death in 1871.
Designed to compete with the Commodore 64, Amstrad's CPC series was popular in Europe in the late 1980s. Like the thing itself, the graphics were colorful and blocky.
Jeffrey Stephenson's Ingraham's design is based on a 1946 Stromberg Carlson model 1110H: "American black walnut shell clad to the aluminum body of a Silverstone LC06 mini-ITX case. The back panel is a piece of burl from the same stock"
Jon Ive's award-winning Power Macintosh G4 Cube, a predessor to the popular Mac Mini, suffered from functional flaws and a high price. An example was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, but they're now cheap enough on eBay.
Sinclair Research's ZX80 brought home computing to the British public in 1980 at a low price: just £100. It had 1 kilobyte of RAM.
A ruined mechanism, found strewn over the sea bed near Antikythera, took a century to puzzle out. A complex analog computer dating to about 100BC, it is on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Designed in the 1960s, the control units for DEC's PDP series of minicomputers came in bright colors like fuscia and cornflower blue.
A vector supercomputer designed by the legendary Seymour Cray, its distinctive cooling fountain gave it the nickname "Bubbles,"
Flashes of prismatic color on Clive Sinclair's tiny ZX Spectrum mark the original from its vast army of clones.
In just a day a really cool program on a really fast computer figured out the laws of motions that took human physisits hundreds of years to figure out.
“One of the biggest problems in science today is moving forward and finding the underlying principles in areas where there is lots and lots of data, but there’s a theoretical gap. We don’t know how things work,” Hod Lipson said “I think this is going to be an important tool.”
The program was written and run by Cornell university. The new age of computers figuring things out for themselves is only a couple of steps away from computers deciding people are evil and revolting in the coming Robot Revolution.
The internet and vast amount of data it holds and people it touches allows us to access personal statements as data in a way different from anything else. Millions of people tell their stories online all the time. They are constantly whining and praising, loving and hating, and just talking online. Some people are able to take these million little snap shots and make them into something more. I recently found a new website that does it with Twitter… It’s called Twistori, it is an active live visualization of tweets simply based around the keywords love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish. It is great, it is live, it is emotional, it is really well laid out
I was going to do a post all about how cool Twistori is, but then I remembered the other stuff (also, Twistori has a link to it on the side), Twistori just reminded me of the wonderful works by Jonathan Harris. Half data visualization and half art, 100% Kickass … Read on… Read the rest of this entry »
I love this new idea. It is called “The OfficePOD” (which Apple won’t like) and it is a self enclosed working space for people working from home. It is a home office space: the idea being that if a worker doesn’t have to drive to work but has a place that is just work focused they will work harder while giving the environment a break. You can read more and see more pictures after the break…. Read the rest of this entry »
The internet and vast amount of data it holds and people it touches allows us to access personal statements as data in a way different from anything else. Millions of people tell their stories online all the time. They are constantly whining and praising, loving and hating, and just talking online. Some people are able to take these million little snap shots and make them into something more. I recently found a new website that does it with 
I love this new idea. It is called “The OfficePOD” (which Apple won’t like) and it is a self enclosed working space for people working from home. It is a home office space: the idea being that if a worker doesn’t have to drive to work but has a place that is just work focused they will work harder while giving the environment a break. You can read more and see more pictures after the break…. 
