martin english

"This articulates and consolidates some stuff I've been thinking about wrt to the current stories I'm hearing about SAP implementations / upgrades in Australia. It needs to be pointed out though that this isn't restricted to SAP implementations. We still see many SAP implementations run by SIs using the body shop / cookie cutter method - mailbomb prospects with resumes of the good people, then give the paying customer ordinary developers and analysts, following the SIs methodology (based as you say on T&M rather than results and innovation). That is assuming that the people being offered actually exist - A standard part of my working week is being approached by head hunters saying, in effect, "Bloggs and Co have just won the contract to do <something> at XYZ. Do you know anyone who can fill these roles ?". The SI's internal processes do not encourage (even actively discourage) the developers and architechts who want to implement innovative processes or technologies, so very often the..." - martin english

"Jazz is THE American music. Regardless of the label's history, it is passing strange for ANY U.S. based Jazz label to not have Black U.S. musicians on it's roster." - martin english

"Forbes magazine are involved in a program called Advoice (I think) which positions articles written by or for major corporations as independent editorial. Some of them are obviously branded as 'advertorial', but in most cases this is well hidden." - martin english

"In MY world view, your God (whether you're aetheist, christian, muslim, etc) is a magic voice that tells you what to do, rather than making you think for yourself. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad idea; you have a framework for resolving many of the challenges and problems you face in life. However, this 'fairy tale framework' was developed (and, yes, worked) many years ago in a different culture and where change was much slower, so it needs to be adapted to survive. Otherwise, your culture will not outlive you. A lot like current management theory, really :)" - martin english

"Whether this turns to be a useful (i.e. money making) device for the broadcaster is one thing. From a personal perspective, don't you worry that you didn't know how offensive something was, so you used twitter to tell you exactly how offended to be ?. In other words, without any other discussion at all, you decided exactly how offended to be based on the immediate feedback of an array of 140 characters analysis. Which, btw, all came from your own tribe, the social media equivalent of yes men and women. Outsource your brain much ?" - martin english

"I don't care how much money you make available, whether by subsidies, welfare cheques or negative interest rates. If there is no demand, then there is no spending, no need to produce, no need to hire, and so on." - martin english

"There's something about how artists from the UK do such a wonderful job of interpreting what are, essentially, US based genres. This guy is going straight on to my spotify :)" - martin english

"A point that gets lost in all the tech hype is that these use cases work because both the owner of the business and the service employee give a damn (If the barista is too busy playing angry birds to look at their Square register app, that place won't get my money !!) I remember returning to my local (the Paekakariki Hotel) after 18 months absence overseas, sometime back in the 80's. My beer was on the counter, open, before I got to the bar. Debbo didn't need a computer for that." - martin english

"So what are we doing in 3 years time ?" - martin english

"FYA: I haven't done performance tests on it, but the same functionality is available on the rebranded Sierra Wireless hotspot device that Telstra sell." - martin english

"AAAARRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! I can't believe I live in a world where this needs to be said." - martin english

"My personal issue with the Muslim reaction to this movie (and to many other provocations) is the extremity of the reactions, and the damage done to people and institutions that had nothing to do with the original provocation. When the Iranian President declares that Israel should be destroyed, when various Mullahs burn national flags of western countries, when artists create works entitled "Piss Christ", people in the west are insulted and aggrieved. Do they care less about their religion or culture ? Are they less insulted than Muslims ? do they have more self-control ? and BTW, it's worth pointing out this quote form the chief editor of Charlie Hebdo, publishers of the images published on Wednesday ... "We've had 1,000 issues and only three problems, all after front pages about radical Islam." (via http://www.catholic.org/intern..." - martin english

"Call that minimalism ? Get rid of the fairing and then we can talk." - martin english

"Rather than implement yet another management technique, I would suggest that the more diversity there is in your team / organisation, the lower the overlap in features that each team member selects; i.e. each team member still picks up on about a third of an object's features, but members with different cultural etc backgrounds would be more likely to pick a different range of features. Given enough diversity and enough team members, the TEAM would select all features.  The hard work is convincing management to let you build your team based on diversity, and working out a rough enough combination of numbers and diversity (without creating a United Nations sized team). hth" - martin english

"There's an explanation somewhere on teh Amazon site, that explains what happens, but basically, the book was at $0.00 when the RSS entry was written. Depending on how long it takes you (or any other tool, such as Zero Dollar Books) to read that particular RSS entry, the discount period may have ended. A typical example is where I catch up on my feeds on a Monday -- I tend to miss the Satruday and Sunday freebies, because the price has gone back up by the time I see the feed." - martin english

"Are you gunna buy my chick peas, or what ?" - martin english

"Is it not measured because no one cares or Does no one care because it's not measured ? See http://onefte.com/2012/02/06/i..." - martin english

"there's something very tantalising about those tights :)" - martin english

"It doesn't have to be 'big data', it just has to be the RIGHT data; After all, the numbers were there all along :) I did notice that http://hoopsanalyst.com/blog/?... didn't give us stats on the rest of the 2010 draft field (even though it appears that Lin was the best by the numbers).  Apart from that, there are some interesting analogies with Moneyball (and business) - ** the important numbers are not measured (or are ignored) ** the wrong numbers are measured anyway, ** 'gut instinct' is based on irrelevancies (like race and experience) ** Once you optimise for the first three conditions, the numbers don't lie. thanks" - martin english

"love it !! takes me back to my 1970's COBOL (coding on punched cards) days !!" - martin english

"if you type in just one of the numbers in a function as a floating point, you can get different results depending on which one is the floating point. For example, you can test via python that the following two lines produce different results print 25 + 30 / 7.0 print 25.0 + 30 / 7 This is because the order of execution (in this case, division before addition) controls when the Decimal Arithmetic gets converted to Floating Point - In one case python uses Floating Point Arithmetic for 30.0 / 7, which results in 4.28571428571, but in the other, it uses Decimal Arithmetic for 30 / 7, which results in 4. 25 + 4.28571428571 ==> 29.2857142857 25.0 + 4 ===> 29.0 Bear in mind that this is not a python problem, it is a Decimal v Floating Point problem and is common to a lot of computer languages (although some deal with it better than others)" - martin english

"A lot of people are having problems with the order in which the arithmetic will occur (i.e. the order of the operators). When using other languages, I almost always use parenthesis to demonstrate to people reading the code (and to the interpreter / compiler) the order in which I want the arithmetic to occur... i.e. print "Hens", 25 + 30 / 6 print "Hens", 25 + (30 / 6) print "Roosters", 100 - 25 * 3 % 4 print "Roosters", 100 - ((25 * 3) % 4) PS Thanks to Fernando for PEDMAS - I've been programming (and occasionally teaching programming) since last century and never came across that before. PPS and thanks to Zedshaw, for an excellent resource" - martin english

"Australia here. We call the # 'hash' and the £ 'pound' (not that we have much call for the later nowadays, since we use $ and cents)" - martin english

"Hi Dave, Just a quick thanks for this page; I worked through it back when you first posted it. In fact, I'm doing a small presentation on cloud computing and I will be using this page as a starter. I think it will be very useful in showing up some of the B/S that has grown around the topic. Having said that, one minor fix that may be worth adding - I don't know which region is the default for 'first timers', so it may be worthwhile adding a line about making sure that the region is set to US East (virginia) when looking for the ec2ForPoets images Once again, thanks for curating this" - martin english

"Looking good - I have a couple of clients I can use this for right away :)" - martin english

"Just a quick note to thank you for your work on this list, and to thank everyone who contributed" - martin english

"I don't think these have been mentioned yet .... Audacity Portable - Sound Editor GIMP Portable Eraser Portable - Overwrites files as they're deleted, can overwrite empty space Sumatra PDF Portable Unlocker Portable - allows you to delete locked files VLC Portable" - martin english

"I am extremely relieved, as I thought this was referring to the original at Universal Studios Hollywood." - martin english