8 Free Utilities

CamStudio is a utility for recording screen-casts, interleaving audio and video simultaneously, then producing final content in Web-friendly Flash files for easy, cross-platform consumption.

CDBurnerXP is a free full-featured CDburning program that includes the ability to create ISO files from CDs and DVDs, and it can burn CDs, DVDs, HD DVDs, and Blu-ray DVDs.

Comodo Firewall Pro The program provides a smorgasbord of information and options for advanced users, but it's simple enough for beginners, and runs smoothly and silently in the background.

DriveImage XML enables you create a complete backup image of any logical drive or partition, allowing to to restore your entire operating system along with installed programs, user settings, registry and all.

GParted LiveCD aims to be fast, small in size (~50MB), and use minimal resources to get that disk partitioned the way you want it. GParted LiveCD is based on Gentoo-catalyst, and uses Xorg,the lightweight Fluxbox window manager,and the latest 2.6 Linux Kernel.

JkDefrag is a disk defragmentation and -optimization utility for all modern versions of Windows.

PageDefrag uses advanced techniques to show how fragmented the paging files and the Registry hives are, and to de-fragment them. In addition, it de-fragments event log files and Windows 2000/XP hibernation files (where system memory is saved when you hibernate a laptop).

TestDisk is a free software data recovery utility to help recover lost data storage partitions and/or make non-booting disks boot-able again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally erasing a partition table).

Fruit & Vegetable Art

Color Test

This is pretty neat! See how you do with the colors!

It takes an average of 5 tries to get to 100%.

A brain waker-upper for today!

http://www.humorsphere.com/fun/8787/colortest.swf

Death

This video has been downloaded a million times. Definitely worth watching! (When you have a spare 12 minutes)

http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=ithct48cqw

The last lecture may be found @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

This is Maya

How many of these movie stars do you recognize?

http://glumbert.com/wii/view.php?name=womenfilm

[Maya (Sanskrit माया māyā ), in Indian religions, is the principal deity who creates, perpetuates and governs the phantasmagoria, illusion and dream of duality in the phenomenal Universe.]

Predictive Systems Biology

A really nice piece of systems biology work in the journal Cell, in which researchers have developed a predictive model for a free cell, in this case the Archea organism, Halobacterium salinarum NRC-1.

What’s more, the authors suggest that even though their model is for a relatively simply organism (~2400 genes), the approach used to build it can probably be used to tackle complex organisms.

http://www.qibebt.ac.cn/uploadfiles/pdf/2008/1/3/142713.pdf

A Few Business Books

"The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable" by Patrick Lencioni
"It's also a novel and a quick read. It teaches a model of teamwork that's based on trusting one another enough to hold each other together as a team – while you debate and have vigorous conflict around each idea. We're following this model, and we've had huge breakthroughs – growth in market segments where we didn't have a clear plan."

"It's Your Ship: Management Techniques From the Best Damn Ship in the Navy" by D. Michael Abrashoff
"It's about a Navy ship that was constantly under-performing and, through culture, became what they called 'the best damn ship in the Navy.' This book swept through the organization. Now we talk about it routinely: How do we become the best damn division in the company? We want to be the best damn supplier to our customers."

"Kanban Made Simple: Demystifying and Applying Toyota's Legendary Manufacturing Process" by John M. Gross and Kenneth R. McInnis
"People used this as a practical guide. It had examples, it came with a disk they could use. They took a part of our business that ran six days a week and started running it five days a week."

"Ideas Are Free: How the Idea Revolution Is Liberating People and Transforming Organizations" by Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder
"Competitors can copy big ideas, so you need a systematic approach to generate as many small ideas as you can, and you need to measure them… It's a natural fit with an employee-owned company. You're an owner, and this is what you should be doing – coming up with ideas that benefit us all."

"The Gold Mine: A Novel of Lean Turnaround" by Freddy Ballé and Michael Ballé
"This business novel tells the story of a manufacturing company. It's a lean-manufacturing transformation story. There's a lot of human story, but it teaches practical tools, like making only as much [of the product] as the customer wants to buy, at the rate they want to buy it."

"How to Get Rich" by Felix Dennis, the founder of Dennis Publishing
"An insightful and entertaining book of going from dirt poor to filthy rich."

"The SAIC Solution" by J. Robert Beyster, the founder of SAIC, and Peter Economy
"This is a combination autobiography and business book, with the emphasis on the latter. Mr. Beyster grew the business from nothing to 45,000 employees over 30 years at the top. Lots of interesting advice and lessons for entrepreneurs, particularly those in the technology sector."

"The Big Box Swindle" by Stacey Mitchell
"This is about how an independent business can succeed in competing against corporate giants through collaborative efforts."

Neural Java

Neural Java is a series of exercises and demos. Each exercise consists of a short introduction, a small demonstration program written in Java (Java Applet), and a series of questions which are intended as an invitation to play with the programs and explore the possibilities of different algorithms.

Find it @ http://lcn.epfl.ch/tutorial/english/index.html

FANN Library

Fast Artificial Neural Network (FANN) Library is a free open source neural network library, which implements multilayer artificial neural networks in C with support for both fully connected and sparsely connected networks.

Cross-platform execution in both fixed and floating point are supported. It includes a framework for easy handling of training data sets. It is easy to use, versatile, well documented, and fast. PHP, C++, .NET, Ada, Python, Delphi, Octave, Ruby, Prolog Pure Data and Mathematica bindings are available.

It is available @ http://leenissen.dk/fann/

SparkIP

The online company, founded in October 2007, has launched a Beta version of an intellectual property network that presents information on some 3.5 million patents and 3,800 licensable technologies. These are displayed graphically in “SparkClusters,” akin to subway maps of connected areas of research with hubs and interchanges.

The company’s dataset includes information from the United States Patent Office (USPTO) dating back to the 1960s.

I like the way it displays the information using Web technologies and enables navigation among "similar ideas".

Check it out @ http://www.sparkip.com/#1%3B0

Life After Coding

There is Life even without coding:

http://potw.news.yahoo.com/s/potw/61785/how-to-become-a-rock-star

Speed Bumps

Latest Speed bumps:

Dealing with Bad Apples

Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick on how to deal with bad apples in project teams:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645

Why is climate sensitivity so unpredictable?

http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~juminder/pcc587/lectures/Roe_Baker_2007.pdf

And

http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~juminder/pcc587/lectures/Roe_Baker_2007_sup.pdf

Zachman Framework

The Zachman Framework, as it applies to enterprises, is a structure for identifying and organizing the descriptive representations (models) that are important in the management of enterprises and to the development of the systems, both automated and manual, that comprise them.

The Zachman Framework has gained wide acceptance specially since the United States Federal Government, in response to the Clinger-Cohen Act, must demonstrate architectural planning for the budgeting process.

The States have organized architectural bodies that govern and control IT architecture in conformance with the Clinger-Cohen Act. Much of their work utilizes to the Zachman framework.

More detailed discussion may be found @ http://apps.adcom.uci.edu/EnterpriseArch/Zachman/

And a tutorial @ http://apps.adcom.uci.edu/EnterpriseArch/Zachman/Resources/ZachmanTutorial.ppt

Web Security Sites

These are useful security sites for Web applications:

• The Open Web Application Security Project @ http://www.owasp.com/

• Web Application Security Articles for ASP. Net @ www.shrinkster.com/ujj

• Threat Modeling Web Applications (technology agnostic) @ www.shrinkester.com/ujk

• Official CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) site @ http://www.captcha.net/

Leman Lake Ice Storm Photos

Leman Lake Ice Storm Photos, Janauary 2007

Duet

Duet™ is a first-of-its-kind software solution from SAP and Microsoft that enables users to easily and quickly interact with SAP business processes and data via their familiar Microsoft Office environment.

I think this is the correct approach since the installed base of MS Office is estimated to be around 500 million copies world-wide. In particular, I think that the MS Outlook 2007 product should be considered the universal information-management client for today's information workers.

MS Outlook is widely available, it is usually running all the time on the desktop, and using Visual Studio 2008 tools for Office Development one can create new ribbons and panes for the delivery of complex information (including the results of BI & Data mining analysis) to the user's desktop in a convenient and timely manner.

Metadata and Ontologies

Cory Doctorow provided one of the best critiques of the limitations of metadata @ www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

One limitation of an ontology is that it is a data model of entities over a domain ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(computer_science) ).

Although the relational data model (see E. Codd, “A Relational Model for Large Shared Databanks,” Comm. ACM, June 1970, pp. 377-387) can be used to represent any model of data within a domain, it does not address the semantics of any database because defining an entity (relation) is arbitrary (W. Kent, Data and Reality, North Holland Publishing, 1978); partitioning an entity into a hierarchy (Codd’s normalization) is arbitrary, and there is no a priori best hierarchy for this partitioning (W.S. Jevons, The Principles of Science, Dover Publications, 1874); and partitioning a set of sets (concept domain) into non-overlapping subsets is an NP-complete problem and has no polynomial time-limited algorithmic solution.

The best that can be done is to test a given partitioning to see whether it has overlapping subsets. If you do not require non-overlapping subsets, then any arbitrary partitioning will do, but you will not be able to use it for reasoning about the domain.

This makes the creation of an ontology (from a folksonomy or any other source) an arbitrary exercise of the author, and it reflects all of the author’s unstated assumptions and prejudices.

From the United Kingdom

The Scallop, Aldeburgh Beach

Sir John Betjamen, St Pancras Station




The Meeting Place, St. Pancras Station

John Lennon, Liverpool

Nelson Mandela, Parliament Square

Sir Stanley Matthews at Stoke City

Women of World War II, Whitehall