Despite how obnoxious they make the airport security experience, I try extremely hard to give the Transportation Security Administration a fair shake–I remind myself they’re mostly normal people who get searched when they fly just like the rest of us, I read their well-written and mostly credible propaganda blog, and I sit on my rants [...]
At the NPL convention today, there was an experts panel that spoke about trivia: what makes a good question, how do you research questions, what about pub trivia, trivia in crosswords, and some stories from researching for Who Wants to be a Millionaire. I figured I’d post my notes for those who couldn’t be present [...]
I first heard about the world of online competitive software development from an announcement on Slashdot back in 2003. It guided me over to TopCoder to sign up for the second annual Google Code Jam . I think I missed (by mere minutes) the registration deadline for actually competing in Code Jam, but since that [...]
Jennifer and I arrived into Denver this afternoon for the annual convention of the National Puzzlers’ League. We missed a picnic hosted by Mike Selinker (or at least he provided the entertainment). I don’t know exactly what the entertainment consisted of, but I know that it was based loosely on a game of his, Link [...]
One of my bosses at Microsoft told me about some advice that a Software Engineering professor of his gave him: Once you’ve estimated how long a particular work item will take, you have to pick a fudge factor. Multiply by ‘e’ if you’re confident in your estimate, or ‘pi’ if you’re not.
Roy Leban blogs about stupid password policies over at his thisUser blog. I’ve got some good news for Roy and his readers: I’m currently making a living turning all of the things that he rants about into relics of the unenlightened past. And while I have to concede that it’s a slow uphill climb, there [...]
A post on TechCrunch today about how incredibly much AT&T charges, per byte, for SMS messages reminded me to throw up my quick thoughts on my dream for a future where bytes aren’t discriminated against based on information about their content. Or at least not quite like they are today. While I have to tip [...]
Kudos to Microsoft for announcing its intention to bring OpenID support to HealthVault, and congratulations to TrustBearer for being HealthVault’s first announced OpenID provider! Assuming Microsoft isn’t just in this for the press release, and gets support for this turned on fairly quickly, this is the first public enterprise-grade OpenID Relying Party of which I’ve [...]
Nathan Bell blogs about how he wishes OpenID would just go away, or at least fade into the background so that users don’t have to know quite so much to use it. I really like how he’s thinking over there, and will take some time to write up my thoughts on most of it sometime [...]
I was at lunch today with Chris Messina and some others from Vidoop, and somehow as often happens with me, we got into a very interesting discussion about the way Microsoft does things. In particular, Chris indicated some frustration with a lack of traction that he’s gotten with Microsoft in the past regarding technologies that [...]