Leon Atkinson's Blog, page 29

Half-Life 3 on Linux Only

Wow! Half-Life 3 will be a Linux exclusive? Uncertainty about desktop UI aside, this is a huge boost for Linux on the desktop. Hey, maybe Valve can convince Canonical fix or abandon Unity.

Play4Real » Valve Officially Passes On Windows 8, Confirms Half-Life 3 is Linux Exclusive

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit, Valve employee Drew Bliss said that Linux is a more viable platform for gaming than Windows 8. Gabe Newell, Valve director, has officially solidified Valve’s stance on Windows 8 by announcing that Half-Life 3 is exclusive to Linux.

Canonical and Microsoft are marching Desktop UI off a cliff

Doesn’t it seem like Apple has played a terrible trick on Microsoft and by extension parts of the Linux community?

Apple’s poisonous Touch silently kills the GNOMEs of Linux Forest • The Register

If a major Linux desktop falls in the forest and no one is around to use it, does it make a sound?

That’s a question the GNOME project would do well to contemplate. The once mighty Linux desktop has stumbled and looks like it might be poised to come crashing down after the release of GNOME 3.

Here’s the problem: the radical rewrite that is the GNOME 3 desktop seems to have pleased almost no one.

Strongly-Typed Thinking

Here’s a riff I did on the idea of “strongly-typed thinking” in programmers.

Strongly-Typed Thinking

For me, the joy of coding is considering the whole of the context. We have guidelines, design patterns and experience–all to help us solve problems. I also like to think about the programmers who might come later to read and update my code. I like to imagine those programmers of the future are smart, smarter than me. I don’t assume they are like children who need strict rules. I don’t even like treating children that way.

Whole9 surveys lies we tell ourselves

Are you addicted to stress? Does it drive you to push harder and harder while looking down at the wimps who can’t match your output?

I’ve definitely got health and work on my list of reasons to keep the stress juice flowing. The addiction viewpoint rings true because when I hit the weekend and intellectually I recognize the need to slow down and rest up, I feel the intense need to do something productive.

Lies We Tell Ourselves | Whole9 | Let us change your life.

People typically don’t brag about their dedication to cocaine, or their disciplined daily alcohol consumption. These behaviors (excessive drug use or drinking) can bring upon bona fide addictions, and literally destroy health, happiness, and quality of life.

But what about other addictions—unhealthy obsessions that masquerade as conscientiousness, dedication, devotion to something “healthy?” How often do you hear people proudly telling others about their obsession with the gym, their ever-progressively restrictive dietary protocols, or the fact that they’re tied to their Blackberries 24/7?

Opposable Planets Social Profiling – The New Terms of Employment » Opposable Planets

Maybe because it’s obvious, but the essential prerequisite is a profound sense of cynicism. Is this an ad for a social strategist, or a politician? Maybe it’s part of the upcoming DSM V, meant to help psychiatrists identify modern psychopaths.

We can only hope this is really a honeypot strategy to attract trolls for adding to our personal shun lists. Oh, Old Spice won’t be releasing the list of applicants? Damn!

Opposable Planets Social Profiling – The New Terms of Employment » Opposable Planets

I was amused by a recent job listing for Social Strategist at Wieden + Kennedy.  The successful candidate will need to prove themselves in a harrowing public competition.  Here is a sample of the challenges that will mark the “lucky” winner:

Challenge 1 – Create the best original Pinterest board dedicated to the sport of inline speed skating (NOT roller-hockey).

Challenge 2 – Create and post an original piece of content to Reddit that then receives the most upvotes in a single week.

Challenge 4 – Get the most people to friend your mother or your father (or a parent-like figure in your life) on Facebook in a single week.

Challenge 8 – Create the most reviewed recipe on allrecipes.com in a single week using cottage cheese as an ingredient. The reviews don’t have to be good.

Challenge 9 – Upload the most pictures of your armpit(s) to Instagram during the course of this challenge. The pictures must have your face in them to verify your identity and include the hashtag #mypits.

Reading through it one realizes that the veil between job assessment and fraternity hazing rituals are thin indeed.

Related articles

If You Want To Work For Old Spice, You Have To Pass These Crazy Internet Challenges First

Do you support the policy or the man?

The gag: find people who say they support Obama, offer up stuff he’s done in the past four years but claim it’s Romney’s plan, then ask if they agree. Finally, admit you lied and enjoy the cognitive dissonance.

This might be the best example I’ve seen of how most people hold beliefs for psychological reasons and then construct “logical” scaffolding to justify it after the fact.

Obama Supporters Pwned by Own Ignorance of Obama’s Policies « Political Pwnage

This is such a damning indictment of so many Obama supporters that it may be misconstrued as somehow being in support of Romney. It is not. (just look at our past posts Re: Romney. There’s no doubt one could find a similar video like this calling out the ignorance of Romney supporters, as well. If one such video exists, we would love to know. But, we digress.)

Vendor-independent comparison of NoSQL databases

So often, we return to using the right tool for the job, but it’s good to see that MySQL is still quite useful for the general case. The corollary is that it’s rare to find a magic bullet–so don’t expect a wholesale switch to NoSQL to solve your performance issues.

A vendor-independent comparison of NoSQL databases: Cassandra, HBase, MongoDB, Riak

In 2010, when the world became enchanted by the capabilities of cloud systems and new databases designed to serve them, a group of researchers from Yahoo decided to look into NoSQL. They developed the YCSB framework to assess the performance of new tools and find the best cases for their use. The results were published in the paper, “Benchmarking Cloud Serving Systems with YCSB.”

The Yahoo guys did a great job, but like any paper, it could not include everything:

The research did not provide all the information we needed for our own analysis.
Though Cassandra, HBase, Yahoo’s PNUTS, and a simple sharded MySQL implementation were analyzed, some of the databases we often work with were not covered.
Yahoo used high-performance hardware, while it would be more useful for most companies to see how these databases perform on average hardware.

Open Wireless Movement

Yes, open wireless everywhere would be beneficial from a practical sense. Let me call attention to something amazing: this is a call for voluntary participation rather than begging for a government edict enforced at the end of a gun. And Comcast immediately responded by temporarily opening their xfinity network.

Why We Have An Open Wireless Movement | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Communication is critical in time of crisis, and the Internet allows for the most effective way of getting information in and out. With readily available networks, government officials could use tools like Twitter to quickly spread information, citizen reports could help focus assistance where it is needed most, and social media updates could help reassure friends and loved ones—keeping mobile phone lines open for emergencies.

Why the paleo lifestyle is incompatible with religion

If god created people to eat berries and meat, it seems unlikely that he’d then tell people to eat bread. Of course, the bible has god telling his followers to eat shit.

Knowit

Here’s an interesting take on alternative education. The system mines your twitter stream to build some sort of matrix of what you know and what others know.

Update: my profile is knowitapp.com/leonatkinson

Knowit

Knowit figures out what people are interested and know about from what they share online.