Potato I have

Okay, I’ve been bitten by the podcast bug. Listening, not creating. Now I’m trawling through old stuff I missed because I was still reading blogs. IT Conversations is proving valuable.

Here’s one I heard this weekend from Kent Beck on developer testing (recorded November 2004!). TDD and refactoring are the two big software development epiphanies for me in the last 4-5 years, and Beck literally wrote the book on TDD.

In this podcast Beck highlights the accountability aspect of TDD, and it resonated big time for me. I was also encouraged by his comments on his own difficulties writing tests being due to “not being a good enough designer. Yet.” I think that stance/insight would help more developers move into TDD.

This is reflections on, not an introduction to, TDD — for that, I don’t know a better treatment than his short, participatory text. I think it’s hard to really get it until you intentionally write that stupid little hardcoded implementation that you’re going to change in a minute … just after you write the next test.

From a short profile of an actor I like a lot, Forest Whitaker, who’s just finished playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland:

On the whole, though, I think we’re dictated by our structure, our past, our environment, our culture. So once you understand the patterns that shape a person, how can you not find sympathy?

Ghost Dog is one of my favorite movies, and while it is solidly Jarmuschian, I can’t imagine the film without Whitaker. This year he’s taking his first-ever ongoing TV role, in The Shield; maybe I’ll dig around to see if French cable has picked it up.

(via rw)

Jorn Barger coined the term weblog, sees its original sense being usurped, and so would like to take the term back.

the unit-measure for blogging
is the blogger

I just read this NYT article from a few months ago; buyers in the bubble today are more than ever dependent on further appreciation:

For new home buyers, prices in New York would need to rise roughly another 13 percent over the next five years for the average buyer to do better than the average renter over that span. In Northern California, where the gap between house prices and rents is largest, home values would need to go up about 19 percent by 2010.

Over the next decade, the break-even increase is about 25 percent in New York and 40 percent in California.

From the article we see price/annual rent ratios of 33 in the bay area, and 25 in the next tier including NY, LA, Boston. And while the equation is different here in France (no mortgage writeoff, for example), our current apartment has a ratio of >30.

But to many people, the psychological benefits of buying are almost impossible to overcome. Owning makes them feel that they have achieved the American dream, or it gives them the secure sense that, if nothing else, they have a tangible asset where they can sleep at night.

Those are nice feelings, indeed. The question is how much they are worth to you.

Our case is a little different. While we hate missing the price runups (first in San Francisco, now in Paris), renting has been a conscious decision to keep life simpler and more flexible, and to live in buildings or locations where we wouldn’t or couldn’t purchase. It’s been the difference between doing and not doing a number of things that we’ve appreciated. And now, current housing purchase prices are helping to make this a logical decision as well.

(via Rebecca’s Pocket)

I’d seen mention of the $100 laptop project but never thought much past the lowered economic barrier part; reading this Wired interview with Negroponte, it’s much more interesting than that.

From this BB post, I found this Clive Thompson entry; the pencil and the mathland analogies are important ones.

The open-source aspect is very interesting too: OSS is already a pretty low-barrier world, what happens when you remove the hardware part? Not only will OSS be used (assuming this takes off) by millions of kids, any of them with any technical inclination will be carrying around their own OSS “mathland” with them. Among other things, Negroponte suggests this will push OSS desktop mainstream.

(via boingboing)

Here’s a great post from Cory about open standards and Windows media player, including an exchange with a Microsoft apologist, for those (like me) who only have a passing knowledge of the issues. Norway’s public service broadcaster has launched a video service that is Windows media specific; now there is a debate about open alternatives.

Cory posts about “Set: [a] geeky card-game that rewires your brain”

the fiendish intensity of the players was a gigantic warning-sign — this was a game with an event-horizon, something that would suck me in and never let me out again

Where to find it in Paris? I’d like to have it for a trip this weekend.

Finally bumped to firefox 1.5 beta and predictably lost a lot of extensions. I knew this was just a conservative compatibility mechanism, and not real breakage, but wasn’t immediately sure how to work around it. This post is a particularly clear presentation of what’s going on and how to fix it. The comment stream mentions another extension that simply does a workaround (for all extensions) without showing any details.

Here’s an amazing feat of the hands and brain: this guy transformed the Paris métro ticket into an X-wing fighter. (via BoingBoing)

BoingBoing has frequent posts on papercraft. After seeing Le Chateau Ambulant, I was wanting a related activity to do with my daughter … and saw this castle papercraft project (free! well, uh, … ink). We started together, she would cut out some of the simple parts, but now she “really likes to watch.” We’re about halfway through, page 14 I think. It’s amazingly time-consuming. All the instructions are in Japanese, but no problems so far.

I don’t think I ever heard about papercraft before the BB posts. It’s strangely attractive, it’s concrete and physical, it forces me to slow down and it doesn’t involve a keyboard.

The latest Economist Technology Quarterly (free access for the moment) has a brief status on video search. Searching the image itself is very difficult, but there is a lot of activity in searching associated text: the closed captions, the audio portion (via speech recognition), and human or machine produced video metadata.

IBM has a test version of a more sophisticated analysis/retrieval engine called Marvel; after manually tagging 1-5% of a set of video content, the system learns to recognize the rest — this is a huge reduction of the expensive, error-prone human tagging effort. IBM’s web has good detail on the project. From those pages I learned about MPEG-7, which is a video metadata (rather than encoding) standard.

The ETQ acknowledges that business models are lacking, but singles out Critical Mention as one that is working; they offer web-based search and alert (”reputation management”) services for TV news. I see in the news last week that they now have a licensing agreement with AP (Associated Press) Digital.

Since it looks like metadata is playing a big role in video search, it should be interesting to see which producers/consumers are doing the tagging, and where the analysis and search logic resides. The big search engines are an obvious home, fancy services like CM are another, but why shouldn’t I also have something to find stuff on my computer or LAN?