Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

John Stossel of ABC’s 20/20 has taken a look at what politicians can actually achieve (very little), and it’s not pretty (but quite hilarious)..

..cancelling only took 25 days and 3 hours..

I received my Slingbox Pro that I ordered this weekend and hooked it up to my HD Box. All in all, it took me about 5 minutes in total.

What is it then? A Slingbox is effectively “Cloud TV” – it allows you to stream your TV/Cable/Satellite signal over a local network or the public internet to any computer you choose. In other words, you can control and watch your cable or satellite box from anywhere in the world!

Personally, I bought it mostly to stream TV over my home network, so I can watch my cable TV on one of my two 24″ monitors I have setup for my Mac – now I can watch TV while I work, or while I work out (I have a treadmill next to my office desk).
For that it is brilliant, and at £170, cheaper than the equivalent TV. Streaming on a local network is completely free of any glitches, and doing it over a wireless network is great. Not only that, I have full control over my cable box, so I can use my computer to start recording or schedule recording TV shows.

As for remote viewing? Probably won’t set it up for some time, although I might use it if I go away over Christmas. But knowing that the possibility is there is great.

org.hibernate.exception.GenericJDBCException: Could not execute JDBC batch update
at org.hibernate.exception.SQLStateConverter.
handledNonSpecificException

Huh?

It might be a good time to give a periodical update on the progress of Wicket RAD – it is evolving, albeit at a slower pace than it was during the summer. Much of this can be put down to the fact that for what it does, it is a reasonably mature and production ready framework (legal caveat emptor: no guarantees made).

It is evolving nonetheless: at the moment I am writing several webapps, both in my “9-5″ time (in which I do use Wicket and Wicket RAD), and outside for some new webapps I am working on, two smaller ones for my own company, and one larger for a “joint venture” of sorts with another entrepreneur.
This, together with influences from elsewhere has brought some new ideas and fresh blood into the framework: I am working on a lot of “glue” and utility type things for Wicket, that help me speed up my development across applications, and from this some common things fall out once in a while which can be put into Wicket RAD “proper” (core) or extension modules thereof.

0.6 will probably be a slightly more significant release than 0.5, Google Guice support will be added (leveraging the GuiceComponentInjector in Wicket of course..), and I’m also toying with the thought of extending what is in Wicket and Wicket Extensions so that it becomes quicker to just bolt together user registration and login type stuff (I seem to keep writing the same thing over and over..).

I guess this is sort of a rambling summary of what is going on, but the gist of it is that Wicket RAD will retain it’s Component generation roots, but it is also evolving into being a general set of Components and utilities for putting together most types of Wicket applications.

When dealing with leading edge user generated folksonomy based content, one way of leveraging synergized strategies is to implement a Content Event Bus.

A Content Event Bus (CEB) is a…

Nah, I’m just messing with your heads.

..but, I think my buzzword spouting intro was probably pretty close to a lot of the buzzword driven drivel that gets bandied about in the industry.
“Content Event Bus” was actually a “real” acronym/buzzword I came up with today, when I was considering the problem of how to capture various events from a CMS that needed to be acted on by other systems. I immediately realized what I had just done, so I made a joke about running off to write some white papers so I could triple my day rate while inverting the relationship between my renumeration and actual usefulness..

Apple updated their Macbook and Macbook Pro lineup today. The design has been revamped for both the Macbook and Macbook Pro to something that is very beautiful, but yet I am disappointed:

The 15″ Macbook Pro still only has a screen resolution of 1440×900. This is pretty bad, considering most 15″ PC laptops have had screen resolutions of 1680×1050 for the last three years, and it is now something you get on a budget $500 laptop. The fact that Apple are still not taking this step wreaks of being cheap while charging a premium, isn’t it time that Apple came into the 21st century and at least offered parity when it came to screen resolutions?

The lack of a screen resolution upgrade on the Macbook Pro’s probably make the Macbook the pick of the bunch when it comes to Apple’s notebooks: it is more lightweight than the MBP (0.5kg which makes a difference if you’re lugging your laptop around), yet offers performance parity in all aspects except graphics, but actually has a screen resolution that is on par with what other laptop manufacturers provide for the form factor.
The “plain” Macbook looks an attractive offer, whereas the Macbook Pro looks hideously overpriced for something that has an inferior screen.

I think I’ll hold on to my cash for a while yet until I actually NEED a new laptop, at which point I will probably either get a Macbook Air or a “plain” Macbook, depending on what my requirements at the time are (ultimate mobility vs. performance).

In Agile software development, the term “velocity” is used as a statistical measure of how quickly a team implements functionality in comparison to their initial estimates.
I think a similar measure is applicable in other areas of life as well after some thought:

I have often been amazed by how some people seem to achieve a lot in all aspects of life in a very short space of time, specifically many serial entrepreneurs and business men who seem to start a business, fail, end up on the brink of financial annihilation, yet somehow pull back with a new business in a short space of time, survive and thrive. All without actually taking up traditional jobs at any time.

I think I’ve cracked the code, and I’d like to call it “life velocity”: they have simply cracked the code of achieving as much as possible in as short a space of time as possible, they are not bound by the hours they work.
Now, if I knew exactly how they did it, I probably wouldn’t be going into an office tomorrow, but I think I have a good idea, they have learned to:

• Eliminate the tasks and timewasting habits others have, they don’t do stuff they don’t need to do to achieve their goals.
• Stop interruptions – they don’t respond to every e-mail, they don’t allow themselves to be interrupted constantly by e-mails and phone calls. Interruption disrupts your natural flow and productivity.
• Delegate the simple things, even if it costs a bit – don’t do things yourself if you can delegate it to others and focus on tasks you are better at. “Trade time and your comparative advantage” – it’s international trade in miniature form.
• Get to Go quickly – any time you spend on an idea before you make money off of it is pure speculation. Minimize the effort and resources spent on speculative work that may never pay off.
• Don’t limit yourself – most people never get anywhere because they don’t try to get anywhere, because they don’t think it’s possible for them to get anywhere. Most people who do get somewhere get there because they try to get somewhere. Simple.

In other words, people with a high life velocity delegate, eliminate, avoid interruption, get to the point quickly and avoid mental procrastrination. That’s the difference between doing what you want in life, and being cubicle bound for 40 hours a week.

I have been a strong critic of statistical/quantitative risk management long before the current financial crisis, and I have been equally critical of it both in the context of finance, as well as in the context of organizational- and software project management.

I think why it is a bad idea to predict the future based on statistical models of the past can be best described by this little anecdote paraphrased from the book “Black Swan”:

Imagine you are a pig, you are born into a warm comfortable environment, first being kept warm under heating lamps and being able to suckle the tit of your mother when hungry.

As you grow up, your life is comfortable, and each day is like the last one: you do not need to do a lot, you have all the food you would ever want, and all the mud you could possibly roll around in.
Life is good.
Until one day, when all of a sudden you find yourself being dragged away from your comfortable environment, ending up on the chopping board at the butchers. Game Over.

I bet the pig didn’t see that one coming. Based on his previous experience, he would have had no way of knowing.
And therein lies the problem with statistical and quantitative risk management: yesterdays events are a poor judge of what might come next, you only need one “unexpected” event coming out of far left field to blow everything into pieces.