Universal RuleRambling Life in the Digital Realm.How to disagree - Collaboration vs. fighting, women vs. men- June 29, 2008 Freakonomics blog discusses the nature of feedback from men and women: Why Does So Much Hate Mail Come From MenIn all the hundreds of such pieces of hate mail I've received, not more than a handful have come from women....Setting aside for a second that the readership is likely biased towards med, perhaps it's just your basic conflict vs collaboration Men like to compete. Women like to collaborate.This question arises a lot of further questions. As a completely different example, it is widely...http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/2008/06/29.html#a4913 Changing the world- June 29, 2008 Chris Guillebeau wrote an interesting (although simplistic) pamphlet on how to set personal objectives and how to change the world. The two key questions areWhat do you really want to get out of lifeWhat can you offer the world that no one else canThese are interesting questions, and hard to answer. Thinking about the future is hard, and I'm not altogether convinced that it is productive thinking. But I can look instead at today: what kind of things would I like to do if I would be able to do...http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/2008/06/29.html#a4912 The Britney Spears Problem- June 28, 2008 Brian Hayes has written on interesting article in American Scientist on the so-called Britney Spears Problem: "What I'm trying to understand is how we can know Britney's ranking from week to week. How are all those queries counted and categorized What algorithm tallies them up to see which terms are the most frequent"The article is an interesting discussion about a relevant computer science problem. Hayes ends his article in a wish: "Years from now, someone will type "Britney Spears" into a...http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/2008/06/28.html#a4911 Firefox shortcuts- June 26, 2008 I discovered new good things about Firefox, especially keyboard shortcuts. I'm now using the shortcuts extensively together with this: "Command + L = Selects the location or address bar, where you have to enter any URL or copy the URL." Also, Command + T (new tab) combined with shortcuts is fast way to visit favorite sites. Now I don't any more miss the Omniweb functionality of using Command-1, Command-2 to visit urls on the favorites bar.http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/2008/06/26.html#a4910 Not everything is perfect in Firefox 3- June 25, 2008 I discovered one web application which was not compatible with Firefox 3, although it works fine with Safari and Omniweb. It was an accounting system used via a web interface, and for some reason the basic functionality was missing. Probably some differences in interpreting JavaScript.I have understood that Firefox 3 is in some cases more strict about interpretation than other browsers. These other browsers are of course supporting bad coding style, but that is a compromise that you probably...http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/2008/06/25.html#a4909 Firefox 3 - how good can a web browser be- June 23, 2008 I have been using Firefox 3 for a while, and I'm a happy camper. I managed to get both bookmark syncing and in-window pdf viewing to work in Firefox. Thus, I don't have much to wish for. Well, perhaps there are some rough corners here and there (minor blemishes in appearance etc.), but nothing which really bothers me. And Firefox has been stable on both my aluminium iMac and my iBook. No crashes, no slowing down - everything works smoothly. There are some things which are better in Safari and...http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/2008/06/23.html#a4908 Firefox 3 is great- June 18, 2008 Started yesterday using Firefox 3 on all my Macs. Transferred bookmarks from Omniweb (via HTML file input, some cleanup needed), installed the Adblock addon, switched on color management and faster mousewheel scrolling. One nuisance remains: I am used to the keyboard shortcuts Command-1, Command-2 etc. for selecting the first, second etc. bookmark in the favorites bar, and this does not work in Firefox. Is there a way to get this functionality in Firefox 3A bonus: my blogging software (Radio...http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/2008/06/18.html#a4907 Is computational science really "science"- June 17, 2008 Norman Chonacky (and Greg Wilson) discuss the status of computational science in an interesting way in the MayJune issue of "Computing in Science and Engineering". Can computational scientists can call their work "science" The writers say that currently the "practices" on researchers in computational science are far from good. Scientific work should be reproducible and materials and instruments should have open and verifiable provenance. In computational science this is not (always) the...http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/2008/06/17.html#a4906 |