3 Ugly Guys @ Tempe Music Festival

The 3 Ugly Guys (3UG) are playing this weekend at the Tempe Music Festival. Jen and I have gone to several 3UG shows and enjoyed them all. Our friend, Nick Rivette, is their lead guitarist and my personal Guitar Hero. They have posted a few of their songs on MySpace for your sampling pleasure.

So, if you're free this weekend or next weekend, I recommend checking 3UG out and supporting local music.

Rock on!

Big, Cheap DIY Whiteboard

I built a 3' x 5' whiteboard for $28.80 using materials you can find at Lowe's or Home Depot. A whiteboard of this size costs $200 or more, if you can find one at all.



Materials:

• an 8' x 8' sheet of white panelboard, also called tileboard, cut down to size. The fine folks at Lowe's did this for me.
• some 1" x 2" wood (birch?) and L-braces to frame it
• D-ring hangers (these are nice because they affix to the back of the frame very with minimal protrusion)
• 30-lb picture hanging hardware
• some wood screws to affix the panelboard to the frame

Assembly is just how you would imagine. If I were to do it again, I might skip the frame and just hang the panelboard directly. Don't be afraid to try that option first. You can always build a frame later.

This thing is sweet.

Ok, back to my architectural diagrams...

Hamlet goes to Spanish Class

Ser o estar?
Hay es la pregunta.

Book Review: Collective Intelligence

Have you ever wondered how:

• Google comes up with its search results
• Amazon recommends you books/movies/music
• spam filters decide good from bad

Well, Toby Segaran not only explains these topics and more in Collective Intelligence, but he does so in a way accessible to software developers that haven't worked on machine-learning problems before. He even provides working Python code for all the algorithms.

Oh, and Collective Intelligence reads incredibly well. I could not wait to get home and get back to it -- and when I went in to work the next morning, I usually had a new idea or two of how to improve our software. I also started implementing the most important examples in Groovy to make sure I got it.

If you are a Senior Software Engineer or "better," this is a must-read. Proper application of the algorithms in this book are a great way to simplify your system and avoid getting nickel-and-dimed to death with new ways to prioritize/categorize/slice-and-dice your domain data.

It's not a bug...

There is some excellent surrealist (ala Magritte) programmer humor at:

http://www.photobasement.com/not-a-bug/

For those who don't get it, but want to, see the Jargon File.

Brilliant.