Peter Renshaw › Comments

"... However, Twitter's programmable API now allows messages up to 247 characters to slip through. All messages are truncated at 136 characters; Twitter then uses the remaining four characters to display a space and ellipsis. ..." - Peter Renshaw

"... People 35 to 54 are now the biggest age group on the Web site, accounting for 28.2 percent of all U.S. users as of July, according to iStrategyLabs, an online marketing firm. Following close behind are 24- to 34-year-olds, who represent 25.2 percent of users. The findings reflect a major evolution at Facebook, which until January was dominated by young adults, some of whom famously festoon their profiles with photos of beer bashes and belly buttons. Although their numbers continue to grow on the service, younger users have been overtaken by their seniors, who are joining at a faster rate. ..." - Peter Renshaw

"... Chrome is shit. Just utter, utter shit. I mean they've got all these big brains at Google and you'd think they could make a decent fucking browser. Jesus, the freetards at Mozilla can do it. But not Google. Nope. They gave it their big best effort and what did they come up with? Chrome. It's a joke. I mean, literally, we laugh about it, except when Eric is around. But as soon as he leaves the room we all go "Chrome!" and just burst out laughing. Our guys on the Safari team even had special toilet paper made up with a Chrome logo on every sheet. That's how bad it is. ..." - Peter Renshaw

Funny, except that if a homeless guy went to a bunch of people's homes and offered to mow the lawn for $50, eventually one of them would call the cops. Second, many homeless folks are *mentally ill* and not really capable of working for a living. And a distressingly large chunk of those are vets. - Michael R. Bernstein

Here's another source of the anecdote: http://www.theresmytwocents.com/2009... - Michael R. Bernstein

"V.Good article by Po Bronson ~ http://www.pobronson.com who chronicled Silicon Valley through the 90's you might remember him from films like "Code Rush" ~ http://waxy.org/2008..." - Peter Renshaw

"But civilizations have thrived on diets of varying macronutrient proportions throughout history. The Inuit ate a diet of almost no carbs and mostly fat with no ill effects. The Masai drink cow blood and milk and eat meat like it’s going out of style. As the nutritionists gasp, I’ll mention that the Masai achieve prime health too. The diet on the island of Okinawa is heavily weighted towards vegetables and rice with some fish and little meat, high in carbs, low in fat. Again, very good health; Okinawans have excellent longevity. So it’s not so much about the macronutrients, as long as you’re getting enough protein and fat to allow the body to function properly. It’s about the types of food being consumed. Dr. Weston Price noted that traditional civilizations thrived until they were introduced to processed grains and sugars, at which point, health declined markedly. Have you ever known someone that dutifully follows a low-fat diet or low-carb diet by eating every processed product in... more... - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

Paul, please share your thoughts when done. - Daniel Dulitz

pretty good time "10kms in under 68minutes" knees getting sore yet? - Peter Renshaw

"... "For generation X, I think you've already got some of that stimulus package, first home buyers are getting the boosted grant; if you're still holding on to your job, and you're not paying full price for anything, then you're coming through this OK," Mr Sebastian said. In contrast, baby boomers' superannuation nest eggs have been hard hit. But the later cohort of generation Y and school leavers face the worst jobs outlook as they seek to enter the workforce. ..." - Peter Renshaw

... It's time to define the new era. Our faith has been shaken. We've lost confidence in our leaders and in our institutions. Our beliefs have been tested. We've discredited the notion that the Internet would change everything (and the stock market would buy us an exit strategy from the grind). Our expectations have been dashed. We've abandoned the idea that work should be a 24-hour-a-day rush and that careers should be a wild adventure. Yet we're still holding on. ..." - Peter Renshaw

"... * Simulated browser environment for Rhino * By John Resig <http://ejohn.org/> ... * Copyright 2007 John Resig, under the MIT License ..." - Peter Renshaw

"... Here's the exciting thing, though. Anyone can do this. Getting to general plus useful by starting with useful and cranking up the generality may be unsuitable for junior professors trying to get tenure, but it's better for everyone else, including professors who already have it. This side of the mountain is a nice gradual slope. You can start by writing things that are useful but very specific, and then gradually make them more general. Joe's has good burritos. What makes a good burrito? What makes good food? What makes anything good? You can take as long as you want. You don't have to get all the way to the top of the mountain. You don't have to tell anyone you're doing philosophy. ..." [Accessed Sunday 5th, July 2009] - Peter Renshaw

"... Free software is not, by itself, enough to overcome the aforementioned economy of scale advantages enjoyed by the Amazon’s, Google’s, and Microsoft’s of the world, let alone the larger, enterprise focused systems players like HP, IBM, and Oracle (why not you too, Cisco?). But that, to me, is not the interesting question.Q: What is the interesting question, then? A: What we should be asking is not whether free software can replace Amazon et al, but whether or not it can power a viable cloud alternative. An alternative sufficiently viable to keep the big guys honest and prevent lockin. On the answer to that question, to me, hinges nothing less than the future of the cloud market ..." [Accessed Saturday, 4th July 2009] - Peter Renshaw

"... When a person lies, they have broken a bond – an unspoken agreement to treat others as we would like to be treated. Serious deception often makes it impossible for us to trust another person again. Because the issue of trust is on the line, coming clean about the lie as soon as possible is the best way to mend fences. If the truth only comes out once it is forced, repair of trust is far less likely ..." [Accessed Saturday, July 4th, 2009] - Peter Renshaw

"... Growing up without any noticeable athletic skills, the nerd-jock duality was a pretty important part of my childhood. Nerds were the kids who carried calculators, wore glasses, dressed poorly, read books for fun, liked to be right in class, and had few friends. Jocks were athletic, well dressed, and popular, but probably stupid as well. Every person in my class could have listed, by name, the “nerds” and the “jocks” among our classmates, and if we’d transferred to a different school, we could have identified them on sight. It was, for me, and I suspect for many other kids like me, the primary sorting system for my peers (I guess there was also “goth” and “punk,” but we only had one of each at the entire school, so they didn’t count) ... Of course as you get older you find that the labels that dominated your childhood don’t make any sense - but early childhood perspectives sometimes linger, lensing your experiences in ways you don’t notice ..." - Peter Renshaw

"... Envious of Melbourne's intimate laneway bars, both Sydney and Perth have brought in reforms aimed at fostering a more vibrant nightlife. But advocates of the Melbourne model in both cities say legislative red tape and entrenched attitudes are blocking moves to diversify the bar scene. ... In fact, only four small, 'Melbourne-style' bars have opened up in Sydney in the past 12 months. Councillor John McInerney from City of Sydney admits the plan to rejuvenate Sydney's drinking culture has been slow. "We always knew it was going to take some time. Melbourne had a bit of a front running because many of the parts of the city into which the small bars went were not adjacent to residential developments or buildings ..." - Peter Renshaw

"... Why do people choose an objectively worse option? Because we view our experiences through the subjective lens of memory. The noise may be objectively worse, but it’s subjectively better. To understand why that’s the case, we have to look at how memory works. ..." [Accessed Friday, 3rd June 2009] - Peter Renshaw

"... In the less-than-week since launch, we’ve seen more than 25,000 downloads of Jetpack and nearly 100,000 watches of the tutorial movie. There seems to be a particularly interested in Jetpack from the Web developer world. In the few days since launch, we’ve had over 20 Jetpacks written by people who previously had only written web sites. ..." [Accessed Friday, 3rd June 2009] - Peter Renshaw

"... The inaugural get-together of the burgeoning NoSQL community crammed 150 attendees into a meeting room at CBS Interactive. Like the Patriots, who rebelled against Britain's heavy taxes, NoSQLers came to share how they had overthrown the tyranny of slow, expensive relational databases in favor of more efficient and cheaper ways of managing data. ..." [Accessed Friday, 3rd June 2009] - Peter Renshaw

"... *This is a ubiquity play. Intel and Nokia banding together? And they’re not saying why? They’re not gonna build a sexier iPhone. They’re gonna spew wireless chips all over the place. *As they like to say in Teheran, “the city is there for you to riot in.” ..." [Accessed Friday, 3rd June 2009] - Peter Renshaw

"... NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter sent its first images back to Earth after activating its cameras June 30. ... The LRO has both a low-resolution wide-angle camera and a high-resolution camera. These shots were taken at the boundary between night and day, capturing shadows that exaggerate the terrain. Though the surface appears very rough, it is actually similar to the highland area where Apollo 16 landed and explored with a rover. ..." [Accessed Friday, 3rd June 2009] - Peter Renshaw

"... A new communication from the European Commission to the other European bodies on the RFID (radio-frequency identification) titled "Internet of Things - An action plan for Europe" was made public on 18 June 2009. The communication builds on the work of the Recommendation on the use of RFID published on 12 May 2009 after a fifteen-month period of consultations. The communication includes a 14-point action plan to address the main issues raised from the RFID usage as discussed in the working group and in the consultation period. One of the most important action point is the launch of "a debate on the technical and legal aspects of the 'right to silence of the chips', which has been referred to under different names by different authors and expresses the idea that individuals should be able to disconnect from their networked environment at any time." ..." [Accessed Friday, 3rd June 2009] - Peter Renshaw

"... Harvard University psychologist Daniel Wegner has become one of the world’s foremost experts on what are now known as ironic processes: when our conscious minds are stressed and preoccupied — by, for example, a desire not to screw up — a subconscious process devoted to guarding against the mistake slips through. Unwanted thoughts pop into the forefront of your mind. ..." - Peter Renshaw

"... A presenter for a NSW community radio station that specialises in multicultural programming has been reprimanded after she was revealed to be an administrator of several racist, anti-immigration groups on Facebook ..." - Peter Renshaw

""... Hacker News is a great service. If you are involved in tech startups and you don't read it regularly ..." But not if you want to get something done. Sometimes it gets a bit too addictive so I just watch the tweets & very occasionally read the articles & maybe the comments." - Peter Renshaw

"... A senior CFA firefighter, who witnessed the vast spread of spot fires from the Kilmore East blaze on Black Saturday, tried to issue an urgent radio warning to residents in the area around Kinglake hours before fire swept across the ranges, the royal commission investigating the February fires has heard. CFA deputy group officer Ken Williamson — who is also the captain of the Whittlesea brigade — told the commission that at 3.57pm he contacted Vic Fire, a central relay point for brigade radio messages, after smoke was seen near Humevale. At this point, he already knew of at least three spot fires that had sparked in the area. ... The commission has previously heard that fire swept through Kinglake around 6.30pm and that the first urgent threat warning mentioning Kinglake appeared on the CFA website at 5.55pm. ...." - Peter Renshaw

"... AUSTRALIA'S former Federation Cup captain, John Alexander, is appalled by the decision of the All England Club to take the physical appearance of women into consideration when planning their schedule for Centre Court matches at Wimbledon. "That is an extraordinary thing to do," Alexander said last night in response to a reported admission by the club that attractiveness was helping determine which players received the privilege of playing on the most famous court in the world. "It is absolutely and totally inappropriate. We are talking about Wimbledon, the holiest place there is in tennis. It is absolutely absurd and I cannot believe it is the case," he said. A spokesman from the All England Club, Johnny Perkins, was quoted in the Daily Mail newspaper in London: "Good looks are a factor. 'It's not a coincidence that those [on Centre Court] are attractive." ... "sexiness" was pretty much all the women's game had going for it with the competition overshadowed by the men. (Pat Cash)" - Peter Renshaw

"... Sure, Silicon Valley is “a heartless amnesiac.” There is no nostalgia for the old days, because we are always looking to rip the old stuff up and throw it away for something better. ..." [Accessed Monday 29th, June 2009] - Peter Renshaw

"... The group decided to build Orbitz Flight Search Engine with the help of distributed object computing. This technique divides client/server applications into components that can function across different networks and operating systems—nearly the opposite of a mainframe. The benefit is a more flexible, scalable IT infrastructure. For instance, Orbitz has 600 PCs, each running a different part of the system software. If the company finds a problem in one part of the engine, administrators can swap in new PCs and software without having to overhaul everything. ..." from ITA lisp example ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/icad... [Accessed Monday 29th, June 2009] - Peter Renshaw

"... Alan, I am sorry for the way you were treated. I am sorry that Britain treated a man of your genius, a hero of the Second World War, so despicably. You laid the foundations of computer science, you helped break the Nazi Enigma code, and you were cut down in your prime because of prejudice. In your death we lost a great man who no doubt had much more to offer the world. In 1950 you published a paper in which you proposed a way to determine if a machine was intelligent or not. This has become known as the Turing Test, and it has wider implications that just machine intelligence. Your test involved asking a person to distinguish between a human intelligence and a machine intelligence by removing prejudice. You limit the judge to communicating with the human and machine via an intermediary (you proposed a teleprinter) so that the judge is unable to see or hear who they are communicating with ..." - Peter Renshaw

"... Introverts typically don’t like to talk about themselves - we prefer to talk about ideas. Force yourself to discuss some of the things you’ve done. Don’t brag, make sure they are relevant to the conversation. Then the extroverts can talk about you and pass your achievements along. ..." reading this kind of advice is as much use as someone explaining how to do a tennis serve. - Peter Renshaw