Richard Dawkins interview @ Salon
Now, suppose science does have limits. What is the value in giving the label "religion" to those limits? If you simply want to define religion as the bits outside of what science can explain, then we're not really arguing.
6412 or 3412 remote codes or reset remote? - Digital Forum: "I talked to shaw, they sent me this useful email and I just manualy programed the buttons 207 Fast Forward 243 Parental Lock 046 Record 237 B 115 G 177 M 242 Reserved 1 240 Browse 111 H 173 N 211 Reserved 2 114 C 048 Help (*) 034 O 238 Reserved 3 236 Cancel 113 I 211 Out Channel 208 Reserved 4 110 D 044 Info 210 P/F 204 Reserved 5 174 Day Minus 109 J 172 Page Down 209 Reverse 178 Day Plus 179 K 176 Page Up 241 A / Theme 112 E 175 L 205 Pause 108 F 239 List 081 PPV CABLE CONVERTER. 018 0...............0 014 1...............1 016 2...............2 012 3...............3 019 4...............4 015 5...............5 017 6...............6 013 7...............7 146 8...............8 142 9...............9 147 CHANNEL DOWN....Channel Down 140 CHANNEL UP......Channel Up 047 DOWN............Down 080 CLEAR...........Exit 079 SURROUND........Fav Ch 050 PROGRAM.........Guide 076 RECALL..........Last Channel 049 LEFT............Left 206 MENU............Menu 082 ENTER...........Music 141 MUTE............Mute 144 POWER...........Power(CATV) 045 RIGHT...........Right 078 SELECT..........Select 083 TV/VCR..........Switch A/B 051 UP..............Up 145 VOLUME DOWN.....Volume Down 143 VOLUME UP.......Volume Up DVR 178 Play 205 Pause 209 Rewind 207 Fast Forward 174 Stop 046 Record 173 Skip 179 Replay 175 DVR 210 PPV 208 OND 083 A/B 177 Live (DVR) 236 Swap (dual tuner DVR) Simply substitute the code for the feature you would like to map with the code in the instructions for 30 second skip. 1) Press the 'Cable' button at the top of the remote to put it into Cable Box control mode. 2) Press and hold the 'Setup' button until the 'Cable' button blinks twice. 3) Type in the code 994. The 'Cable' button will blink twice 4) Press (do not hold) the 'Setup' button 5) Type in the code 00XXX (Where XXX is the code for the feature you want to map). 6) Press whatever button you want to map the skip function to. __________________ Sony KDF55WF655 Motorola HD PVR 6412 bup bup bup im loving it"
Salon.com Books | The joys of life without God: "I believe in the indomitable human spirit and the amazing capacity we have for understanding the world; for love, joy and happiness. Science not only does not take away any of those things, it adds to the sum of human knowledge. When I look through my little telescope in my backyard at the planets, moon or Andromeda galaxy that is 2.9 million light-years away, I can enjoy the beauty of the night sky and appreciate it on an emotional level. Then I can think that the photons of light that are landing on my retina left 2.9 million years ago, when we were just barely bipedal hominids in Africa, and are just now arriving tonight. Boy, that's just awe-inspiring. To me, that's what it means to be spiritual -- what makes your spine tingle. It's what gives you a sense of awe and wonder and transcendence. It doesn't matter to me if you call it God or the cosmos. We're all talking about the same thing, whether it's religious people or New Age spiritual people or Buddhists or scientists. We're all talking about having a sense of awe and wonder at something grander than ourselves. "
This guy looks like a nut, but I've always thought this approach should be viable...
Scientific American: The Expert Mind: "The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert--in chess, music and a host of other subjects--sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study that will improve their reading and math skills? Roland G. Fryer, Jr., an economist at Harvard University, has experimented with offering monetary rewards to motivate students in underperforming schools in New York City and Dallas. In one ongoing program in New York, for example, teachers test the students every three weeks and award small amounts--on the order of $10 or $20--to those who score well. The early results have been promising. Instead of perpetually pondering the question, 'Why can't Johnny read?' perhaps educators should ask, 'Why should there be anything in the world he can't learn to do?'"
Upside-Down-Ternet: "My neighbours are stealing my wireless internet access. I could encrypt it or alternately I could have fun"
Finally found a great DB2 JDBC driver cheat-sheet here: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/dm-0401chong/index.html
Prehistoric ecosystem found in Israeli cave - Yahoo! News. Tough to see how creationism leads to a cave full of blind animals! "The cave was completely sealed off from the world, including from water and nutrients seeping through rock crevices above. Scientists who discovered the cave believe it has been intact for millions of years. 'Every species we examined had no eyes which means they lost their sight due to evolution,' said Dimantman."
In surprise, mice get trait without gene - Yahoo! News: "a gene's effect can be inherited without the gene itself. That phenomenon, called paramutation, was shown 50 years ago in corn and later in other plants. Similar findings have also been made in animals, but the new work is notable because it presents evidence for how it happens"
Five surprising facts about starvation that could change the international agenda | Science Blog: "Millions of children need immediate, life-saving attention coupled with coordinated longer-term investments that will help prevent repetitions of nutrition and health insults as they grow into adulthood. The world cannot afford to waste another decade talking about global targets, waiting for the macro-effects of economic and political development to reach children ignored by the development process"
Wired News: The Eternal Value of Privacy: "Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, 'If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.' Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time."
RSDevs.com - RS Development Group: "PSGw - Personal Skype to SIP and H.323 gateway technology is available for licensing for VoIP and SoftPhone vendors. PSGw can be integrated in already existing VoIP application (SoftPhone for example) and allows to place and accept Skype calls within VoIP application. PSGw can be customized and integrated as additional option or external plugin."
Which style of WSDL should I use?: "These are the basic characteristics of the document/literal wrapped pattern: * The input message has a single part. * The part is an element. * The element has the same name as the operation. * The element's complex type has no attributes."
Which style of WSDL should I use?: "These are the basic characteristics of the document/literal wrapped pattern: * The input message has a single part. * The part is an element. * The element has the same name as the operation. * The element's complex type has no attributes."
A few random thoughts on Scrum that I sent to an old friend:
My 2 cents based on what I've seen here, and what the process was like there when I left:
<soapbox>
Adding more pomp and circumstance to the monthly sprint meetings is important for everyone. I know some of the Scrum people talk about limiting prep time to 20 minutes for sprint reviews, but I think that allowing a 2-3 day transition period to complete a sprint, hold the review meeting and the retrospective, and then move into sprint planning is really important for sanity and productivity.
Make the success or failure of a sprint dependent on meeting the Goals, not completing Backlog Items (or work tasks!). It's all about using the right level of abstraction in each meeting (are we talking about goals, backlog items, or tasks right now?) The goals have to be discrete and clearly define their 'done' criteria (Goal: Complete the port to Postgres 8.1. Done when then installer can successfully perform an update to 8.1, and JBoss can successfully instantiate a connection in the connection pool.) I start the sprint review by reading the goals aloud, then everybody shows what they worked on, then I ask the project manager one by one if he thinks we've met each of the goals. If you're focused on the big picture in the sprint review, and not on individual backlog items that could have slipped, you're setting yourself up for success.
Make Rob (big boss) attend the sprint reviews, but don't allow Rob (big boss) OR Kris (dev. manager) to attend the retrospectives. Here, I've usually been able to consistently preach 'sustainable pace' and leaving at the same time every day. Just the pressure of having the other developers and the big boss present at the sprint review has almost always been enough to make people personally invested in meeting deadlines. Holding a formal retrospective, but only inviting Pigs was important here in creating a safe environment for people to be self-critical.
Have real sprint planning sessions. Everyone (Kris, Jon, developers AND qa) needs to sit around a table together and stay until it's done; individual estimates really have turned out to be less accurate than group estimates, even when the person to do the coding is known ahead of time. Ideally the ScrumMaster needs to show up with a prioritized list of backlog items, and the main focus of the meeting can be providing high level estimates and negotiating on which items will be put into the sprint. Definitely don't leave the room without story point assignments to every item in the new sprint, and have a good solid line between the last-priority item for the current sprint and the top-priority item for the next sprint. Developers can brake down story point estimates into hour estimates over the following hours or next couple days (preferably all together, definitely not all alone).
Have daily standups with a printout or poster or big monitor showing the current sprint where everyone can see it. The meetings are much more productive when centered around the TASK in the sprint backlog that someone was working on rather than just reiterating their own description of the backlog item every day. It isn't valuable to hear: Yesterday I was working on the Unicode conversion. More of the same today. More valuable is: Yesterday I spent 6 hours on the 'Get variable reporting to use unicode strings' task, and it's done now. I spent 2 hours on 'Convert variable reporting xml data in postgres from ASCII to Unicode; that's going fine, and the new estimate is 3 hours. This morning I'll finish that up, then move on to 'Write the JUnit test to validate the Unicode conversion' task. My impediment from yesterday is cleared because Jared is back in the office and showed me how to set up the new JUnit framework'
Here at xyz, just seeing that the scrum process get kick started and having 2 back to back sprint reviews where we exceeded expectations did more to change the heavy handed management than anything we could have negotiated ahead of time.
</soapbox>
