Software Development Wisdom

Here are a few gems of wisdom imparted from a class I'm taking:

• Being part of a team means having integrity and honesty, to yourself and others.
  
• It's not a good company that tries to keep people on its campus for as long as possible. It's a good company if a guy comes around telling people to go home.
  
• You need chaos to do anything creative, but you need order to present the results of that creativeness
  
• When dealing with people, everything has a purpose; focus on that and not the details.
• Always use the largest bandwidth communication channel possible.
• It is better for a team to be consistently good than unpredictably excellent.

Ivan the Great

A recent article in Northwestern's newspaper:

Ivan the Great

The comments are largely negative, which surprises me a little. But perhaps it is Jen Wieczner's slightly morose portrayal of Ivan that made me like the article so much.

And, to be honest, I kind of envy Ivan.

A Fresh Look at Microsoft and Facebook

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2008/05/portfolio_0508

UNIX Nerd Sex

Had this in my collection for a while, but I thought I would share it. Try this in your shell...

$> look
$> gawk
$> date
$> unzip
$> strip
$> touch
$> grep
$> finger
$> mount
$> fsck
$> more
$> yes
$> fsck
$> fsck
$> fsck
$> umount
$> sleep

Bird

Here's a bird. They're quite common at Northwestern, and probably all over the world too.


The text underneath is the last part of "climbing anchors," a guide book by John Long.

Understanding Humans

I've been slowly reading material on multi-agent models of society, which requires a simulation of certain human activities. Not all, but some.

The thought struck me today that this modeling of humans is a little controversial, depending on how I phrase it. One could say that I'm reducing human behavior into a set of rules, which is true in the literal sense. But in doing so I'll also be discovering and understanding more about human psychology and social behavior, which seems like a more academic goal.

Personally, as a transhumanist, I don't think behavior as rules is a bad thing at all.

Updates!

Haven't written about myself for a while.

Classes are going fine. I'm not really putting much effort into them... which is sad. I'm doing a lot of other things which don't compensate though. I've worked on my GPA for the last two years, now it's time to let it slowly slide down...

This past weekend I went to Devil's Lake, my third trip there (although it feels like I've been there more than that). As always, rock climbing was fun. The weather could have been better, warmer, sunnier, but we still got a half day of sun, which I'm happy about.

Pictures

Also, on that note, I'm now president of NUOC. Heheh... now I'm obliged to focus on that and not schoolwork. I love my life.