Finer Recliner

At my friend’s company, they use a software service that restricts their employees to only be able to install “approved” software on their work computers. The System Administrators are their gate keepers, and sometimes they need to manually approve their developers for common tools like version control software and an IDE. My friend complains how torturous it can be jumping through hoops just to get the correct version of a compiler that is already being used by the rest of the group.

Our other friend chimed in with the following rationale:  by making it frustrating and difficult for their employees to install new software, they weed out the people who don’t really need that software, thus saving money on unneeded license costs! He called it an example of “Management Through Pain”. My friend admits he doesn’t know the real reason behind their policy, but the theory didn’t sound too far fetched hehe.

Anyone else have overly restrictive permission on their work-computer usage?

The AGILE development process is vastly different than the traditional “waterfall process” for software development. A project I recently came off of was using AGILE, which I was unfamiliar with at the time. As I learned the process, I saw the advantages in many of their methodologies and practices. One thing I found to be especially useful was our daily stand-up meetings. Here’s a quick rundown on why these meetings are truly effective.
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Microsoft is hosting an online treasure hunt. The first person to find a hidden web page on the internet, using provided clues, will win $10,000. Sounds simple right? Read the rest of this entry »

A surprisingly entertaining article about how complicated cryptography really is and how easy it is screw up. It’s also insightful in that, “I understood about 15% of what you just said” sort of way.

Give it a read here:

Typing The Letters A-E-S Into Your Code? You’re Doing It Wrong!

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My co-worker forwarded this to me. It’s all sorts of true.

Well that just launched my career ambitions out the window…

A unique, new service, called Wolfram|Alpha, just officially launched yesterday, and the internet is excited to try it out with wild inquiries. W|A aims to be a “computational knowledge engine” — a service that lets you search and compute any known model, number, algorithm, or method. It’s utilizes an advanced “human text” parser, so you can enter queries in the common English instead of programming syntax. It then searches its databases of 10 trillion pieces of information and renders your results on the back-end with Mathematica. Basically its a gem of a tool for chemists, physicists, engineers, students, and so many more.

You can convert between units, compare stock prices, look up nutritional facts for food, compute MD5 hashsums, find the distance from NYC to London, and do your calculus homework all in one place. The amount of information you can quickly grab from this thing just blows me away. Definitely try it out to see what I mean.

Here are some of my favorite results:

• where am I?
• next solar eclipse
• mean wage maryland software engineer
• am I too drunk to drive?
  
• growth chart male, 22yr, 5′8”, 150lb

Does anyone think they could use this website on a daily basis at your job? Let me know what you think in the comments!

I came across this quote from Kurt Vonnegut, now titled “Sit Up Straight”. He’s always been one of my favorite authors for his satirical novels, and this excerpt is no exception:

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The WordPress team has just created a new project called BuddyPress that lets you create your own social networks. WordPress is a blogging platform that is known for it’s ease of use and flexability. Those features are now being brought to the social networking world as you can now make your own myspace or facebook variant. Like WordPress, BuddyPress will be completely open source. In fact, BuddyPress is actually just a group of plugins on top of a WordPress instance.

Not all of WordPress’s projects have been as popular as their blogging platform. bbPress, for instance is a simple bulletin board framework, but has not seen as much development. The BuddyPress demo site has already seen a ton of activity, so I hope it does well. I’m very interested to see what new communities spring up.

Check it out at http://buddypress.org/

(PS: finerrecliner.com is prowdly powered by WordPress software!)

I received this advertisement in the mail recently:

wtf??