When we discuss politics, do we make sure there’s always a person in the debate that represents the viewpoint that there’s a secret one world government ruled by aliens? ... But low rent denialism – its cheap fiction.It’s time we all told it to fuck off.
- Scot Mcphee
When, in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock asked Bernard Herrmann what he thought the music for "Psycho" should be, Herrmann came up with a unique all-strings ensemble ("a black-and-white sound," he said, to complement the black-and-white cinematography), a wildly original approach that helped to define the film and make it a success. "That's about artistic choices," Kraft says. Today, he adds, "Psycho" would be "temped" (prescored with temporary music consisting of pre-existing cues that the editor likes), thus setting the style, direction and amount of music even before the composer is hired.
- Scot Mcphee
The jihadists are engaged in a self-defeating strategy when they spread out and act locally. The one goal they must have, and the one outcome the United States fears, is the creation of stable jihadist regimes. The strategy of locally focused terrorism has proved ineffective. It not only fails to mobilize the Islamic masses, it creates substantial coalitions seeking to suppress the jihadists. The jihadist attack on the United States has failed. The presence of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has reshaped the behavior of regional governments. Fear of instability generated by the war has generated counteractions by regional governments. Contrary to what the jihadists expected or hoped for, there was no mass uprising and therefore no counter to anti-jihadist actions by regimes seeking to placate the United States.
- Scot Mcphee
Whichever way you head, whether using virtualization in the cloud or using cloud applications and storage like Google Docs and Zoho, cloud detractors need to wake up and smell the Internet. They ask why I would trust my data to the likes of Google or IBM; I ask why I’d entrust sensitive data to a user with a laptop.
- Scot Mcphee
"Birmingham University staff and students fight to save Sociology from closure - Department to close - Some degrees to be shut down, others transferred. - Academic staff to be reduced from 17 to 3. - Administrative staff to be reduced from 3 to 1. - COUNTDOWN: COUNCIL will be asked to sign off on these recommendations on November 26th."
- Scot Mcphee
from Bookmarklet
"I decided to take Mr Griffin at his word, and rang Professor Oppenheimer to see what he made of his comments. He also thought the BNP leader was relying on his work -- and he was less than impressed."
- Scot Mcphee
from Bookmarklet
Darwinius masillae, the primitive primate that was unveiled to the world with huge fanfare and a Sir David Attenborough documentary in May, seems now to have been less of a missing link than an evolutionary dead end. Far from being an ancestor to humans, the lemur-like creature from 47 million years ago belongs to an entirely different branch of the primate family tree that has left no known descendants, research has indicated.
- Scot Mcphee
from Bookmarklet
ooc is a modern, object-oriented, functional-ish, high-level, low-level, sexy programming language. it's translated to pure C with a source-to-source compiler. it strives to be powerful, modular, extensible, portable, yet simple and fast.
- Scot Mcphee
"The analysis of starlight data by cosmologist Rachel Bean of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has generated quite a stir. Shortly after the paper was published on the pre-print physics archive, prominent physicist Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena praised Bean's research. "This is serious work by a respected cosmologist," he wrote on his blog Cosmic Variance. "Either the result is wrong, and we should be working hard to find out why, or it's right, and we're on the cusp of a revolution.""
- Scot Mcphee
from Bookmarklet
Keating’s conception of life orbits that romantic notion, in politics as as much as art (a la the Placido Domingo speech), in a manner characterstic of a certain type of autodidact. It lead him into strange territory in both. Those of us who soldiered through the trenches of the humanities had one big thought dunned into us, and one that is indisputable – Romanticism died in the death camps. “No lyric poetry after Auschwitz” Adorno noted (he is often misquoted) — meaning, no celebration of humanity, or nature that does not see also the shadow that it throws. The shadow of genius, excellence, High Culture is a notion of purity that allows for a separation of one’s acts from one’s intentions or self-conceptions. In 1943 both Dachau and Treblinka had better orchestras than any Australian capital city, and if that does not make you understand that there is a problem with the uncritical celebration of High Culture, go back and start again.
- Scot Mcphee
The tool supports the textual definition of class, activity, sequence and (new) component diagrams (see the language reference guide for details on the syntax. The attractiveness of the generated diagrams could be improved (e.g. those generated by yUML much fancier) but, to me, the strong point of this tool is the variety of scenarios in which can be used
- Scot Mcphee
The key problem in this case is that when you “buy SOA” the success criteria shift. It seems that success is defined based on whether something that can be labelled “SOA” is in place, and not whether actual business value is delivered. What is often completely forgotten is an evaluation of the suitability of the architecture, but that’s a topic for another post.
- Scot Mcphee
Oracle isn't eating its own dog food to prove to the other dogs that the dog food is tasty; rather, it became so dependent on the dog food that it bought the dog food factory. The next logical step, of course, is to make the dog food taste the way Oracle wants it to taste. And what does that mean for the other dogs?
- Scot Mcphee
Coding the architecture: I regularly use the same approaches from SOA in "non-SOA" projects and find they are a very good way to come up with a well organised service-centric architecture that is easy to build, deploy and test. At the end of the day, everything seems to be one giant cycle. SOA may be going out of fashion now while everybody talks about cloud computing, but its principles will live on and I'm sure it'll be back in another guise before we know it.
- Scot Mcphee
Investments in deep knowledge are similar to investments in infrastructure. Both add significant overhead to the organization. Both constrain it, too, focusing its energies into known, predictable, highly scalable ways of doing business. Comparing the two, knowledge has one advantage. It’s more versatile.
- Scot Mcphee
“These figures are, as always, only the tip of the iceberg. In summary it can be said that there has been no improvement in respect of illegal killing of birds on Malta. As soon as migration begins or resumes, protected species are shot at all over the island, and the government looks the other way”, CABS president Heinz Schwarze claimed.
- Scot Mcphee
Some of the world's most famous T.rex specimens, such as 'Sue' at the Field Museum in Chicago and the specimen at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, have holes in the lower jaw, which is a classic symptom of trichomonosis, say the team of US and Australian researchers.
- Scot Mcphee
Agile is an improvement framework. It will expose quite painfully where the problems are, it is up to you to recognize them and solve them.
- Scot Mcphee
He was a 14-year-old blind kid, angry and alone. Then he discovered that he possessed a strange and fearsome superpower — one that put him in the cross hairs of the FBI
- Scot Mcphee
leopard.jpg Below is a list of applications and their compatibility status with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, the most recent operating system from Apple. Please collaborate by sharing your experiences using each application and by adding applications not already listed. Note: due to abuses, registration is now required to edit the list. Thanks for your cooperation.
- Scot Mcphee
Eric discusses the need for strategic thinking an how early design decisions have major impact on the organization and the entire development process. He uses the lens of DDD Strategic Design principles (emphasizing "Context Mapping" and "Distilling the Core Domain") to show how to avoid strategic failures and achieve strategic successes. Winning strategy starts with the domain.
- Scot Mcphee
WORST SLOGAN EVER- open for business was accepted by legislature as WV state moto- and promptly repealed less than a week later by unanimous decision by the people.
- Jimminy Fuller
"A cardboard lid is lifted and four archivists peer inside. A postal box from Paris. Who sent it? A piece of crusty wedding cake. Whose? Another box: $17,000 in cash. Yet another: An autographed picture of a naked Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis."
- Scot Mcphee
from Bookmarklet
This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
- Scot Mcphee
Though it’s located just a short drive from the company that launched SimCity and Spore, the Walnut Creek Model Railroad Society has stuck by these venerable techniques and still makes believe the old-fashioned way. Members operate one of the largest, exclusively HO scale train lines in the United States and have conducted at their current location since 1974.
- Scot Mcphee
In The ThoughtWorks Anthology a new book from the Pragmatic Programmers, there is a fascinating essay called “Object Calisthenics” by Jeff Bay. It’s a detailed exercise for perfecting the writing of the small routines that demonstrate characterize good OO implementations. If you have developers who need to improve their ability to write OO routines, I suggest you have a look-see at this essay. I will try to summarize Bay’s approach here. He suggests writing a 1000-line program with the constraints listed below. These constraints are intended to be excessively restrictive, so as to force developers out of the procedural groove. I guarantee if you apply this technique, their code will move markedly towards object orientation.
- Scot Mcphee