The Day Programmer vs. The Night Programmer « notgartner

Now – day programmers are the most prevalent in this industry, and you find them mostly in organisations which have historically tolerated a certain amount of inefficiency. Day programmers have the following characteristics:
1. They are mostly led and seldom lead.
2. The have trouble coping with complexity.
3. They cannot visualise a solution.
4. They don’t load their development tools at home.
5. Typically don’t participate in the development community.
6. See programming as “just a job”.
via The Day Programmer vs. The Night Programmer « notgartner.

Musings :: 2010 04 23

  • Attended my sister’s graduation from the College of Education.  It was disorganized compared to Engineering’s but the way people showed appreciation to their Dean (Who I hear is a wonderful teacher.) and other Educ faculty was heart warming.
  • Whenever I hear NO or am about to say NO to anything/anyone a part of me repeats this quote. ““Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”-Mark Twain
  • What has always been my irk with the operators and spin doctors of Villarroyo is how they seem to play us for fools. A little subtlety please.
  • I miss school. I think it started when I had a John Hughes marathon and felt nostalgia for school stuff. I must be getting old. yuck.
  • I was able to sample a lot of dishes from 145 Fahrenheit for Pam’s(My sister’s) grad lunch out. Food was great.
  • Was able to watch 2 Filipino films this week. Anne Curtis and Sam Milby’s Babe, I love you and Erich Gonzales and Enchong Dee’s Paano ko sasabihin. Let’s just say that Babe, I love you would have failed if not for Anne Curtis spirited acting and that indefinable quality known as charisma, she just overflows with this unlike Sarah Geronimo or Bea Alonzo who needs a solid script and a great character to shine. Paano ko sasabihin? was the opposite. They had solid but leaning to the weak side performance of both leads but had a better than average material (script soundtrack peg etc) who suffered greatly from the malady of the ending is decided by how you view the world malady that Richard Linklater seems to love.
  • PS:: Anne Curtis’ legs would be the second best reason to watch this film, although you see a lot of that in Showtime. hehehe . joke!

rePost::Bitterness « Paulo Coelho’s Blog

I know I’m getting bitter on one facet of my life, I pray that other facets are saved from this bitterness. I’m pretty much sure they are.

The main target of Bitterness (or Vitriol, as the doctor of my book preferred) is desire. People attacked by this evil begin losing their desire for everything and in a few years are unable to go outside their world – because they have used up enormous energy reserves building high walls for the reality to be what they wanted it to be.
When avoiding outside attack, they also limit internal growth. They continue going to work, watching television, complaining about the traffic and having children, but all that happens automatically, without really understanding why they are behaving like that – after all, everything is under control.
The great problem of poisoning by Bitterness lies in the fact that passions – hate, love, despair, enthusiasm and curiosity – also don’t appear any more. After some time, the bitter person has no more desire. They had no more will even to live, or to die; that was the problem.
via Bitterness « Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

rePost::How Mona Lisa Died – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos

I used to not care that much about the “Population Scare” this is because especially for our country we have tax rates that rival that of the more successful countries and countries that have substantially better social safety net. For me the Philippines problem was the money going into the coffers of the government is not used in a way that would help increase Investment and Capital, money/pork barrel/ira allotments were used for projects that were less helpful to the economic engine of the Philippines.I even defended in a blog post Sen. Manny Villar’s stance that population is not the problem, opportunity is. I believe this because we are doing so little to help people achieve what they can achieve.
What has changed since then to convince me of the importance of RH bill?
Two things:

  • The increasing likelihood that there would be an HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Philippines
  • Studying/Reading the lecture notes of Brad Delong on Industrial Revolution and Malthusian Economics etc.

I’m basically convinced that the Black Death/Wars/Spanish Influenza has helped in increasing the household wealth of Europe. This allowed consumption to rise and thus there was money for what industry produced.This started a virtuous cycle that has produced the stellar growth of world wealth that we enjoy today.
What this means is that I’ve basically given up on any help from the government to increase investment in useful industries and hope that the virtuous cycle of investment, and growth can be jump started by increasing the household wealth available to Filipino households and by creating pressure to increase wages because of a smaller population.
What this means is that people who oppose the RH bill are in essence ok with the status quo.
Anti RH Bill people are ok with double digit unemployment rates.
Anti RH Bill people are ok with us being an OFW nation. (The effects of which are still not truly apparent)
Anti RH Bill people are ok with people getting HIV/AIDS.
The problem is the asymmetry of the supporters. The Pro RH bill people must be heard. They must make themselves heard or the bullying few will get their way!!!

When the House reassembled on January 18, however, RH had disappeared from the Speaker of the House’s list of priority bills. Inquiries by proponents of the bill produced evasive replies from the House leadership. When the House adjourned for the elections on Feb 3, RH was dead. The reason, however, was painfully obvious.
In December, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) instructed the electorate not to vote for candidates who espoused RH. Alongside this decree had unfolded a massive campaign that involved systematic disinformation about the bill. Among the malicious allegations that were spread was that the bill imposes penalties on parents who do not allow their children to have premarital sex. Another was that the bill promotes the use of abortifacients or methods of contraception that induce abortion.
via How Mona Lisa Died – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.

rePost:Why the Apple iPad Rocks Part 3:The iPad is NOT a Computer, its a Briefcase w/Gizmos | Angry Bear

read the whole thing. If you haven’t seen it google sixth sense computing ted talk watch the 2009 one presented in TED india. For me the iPad is a step towards having the sixth sense computer that is seen in that TED conference. It is the tool to of the rationalist wannabe to help make great decisions. I still remember how wikipedia/the internet in general, has changed conversations; I believe making it better. The advent of wikipedia allowed people to stop debating useless info because you can look at it at wikipedia and then you’d know. Now it has been a problem because sometimes the conversation stops because we have no way at looking at wikipedia.  This is what made the iPhone useful. The iPad is the next logical step. If it only had a camera it wouldn’t take a genius to create some of the sixth sense apps that was demoed in the TED talk. The iPhone/iPad/iTouch because of the app store has become the platform where we can build towards the sixth sense technologies that we I believe already need to traverse this ever complex world!!!!

The iPad is NOT a Computer, its a Briefcase w/Gizmos
Posted by Bruce Webb | 1/28/2010 01:18:00 PM
technology
9 comments
by Bruce Webb
Geekery below the fold.
Steve Jobs was a little hyperbolic in his language yesterday which led some people to laugh. Well there are reasons he is a self-made billionaire and you are not.
The key to understanding why the iPad and similar devices can change the world it to understand that it is not a computer without a physical keyboard, or a multi-media player, or a portable display, sure all of those are built in but they don't add up to what the iPad really is, which is a magic briefcase full of Gizmos.
What's a Gizmo. Well the online dictionaries have boring definitions but for my purpose a Gizmo is something that does something for you. A Gizmo generally isn't big and it mostly isn't multifunctional, it just does what it does in a fun and efficient way. The iPad is designed to be a repository for Gizmos along with Games and Books and Music and allows you to use all of them anywhere you go. Now it sounds silly to put it this way but it doesn't have to be, if you were a Building Inspector it might be nice to have one Gizmo to record your findings and another that allowed you to look up the International Building and Fire Codes on the fly, and maybe another to allow you to record your time on the job. And on a dirty, dusty or muddy job site it might be nice to have one in the same form factor as the clipboard you had been carrying rather than some clamshell lap top vulnerable to the environment.
via The iPad is NOT a Computer, its a Briefcase w/Gizmos | Angry Bear.

rePost::Merienda with a Nobel Laureate | Filipino Voices

Prof Wiesel advices Pinoy academics that these S&T incubators will only deliver its promise if the academics themselves adopt a more daring interdisciplinary view of things. This would imply a major shake up of how university bureaucracies are run which at present promotes departmental isolation. He suggests that academic departments and even the various UP campuses be daring enough to set up shop at the technohub (which should facilitate departments to collaboratively how to hatch projects). He gives the example of UP Manila’s health sciences research units. Medicine should not limit itself to clinical research but look into the potential of basic science research which can be incubated as new medical technologies. The best place to do that is in UP Diliman’s technohub since UP Diliman is strong in the basic natural sciences like physics, chem, biology and environment.
via Merienda with a Nobel Laureate | Filipino Voices.

Research::The Dutch Disease Gets a Brazilian

I believe we can do the same study for the natural gas in malampaya (I think I’m not sure but the one that pays taxes to the Provincial Government of Batangas). I feel that the results would be similar. I hope they are not.

The Dutch Disease Gets a Brazilian
By Paul Kedrosky · Saturday, January 23, 2010 · ShareThis
The Dutch disease – the economic hollowing-out and corruption effects of domestic resource exploitation – has an interesting twist when it happens in Brazil:
Oil windfalls and living standards: New evidence from Brazil
Francesco Caselli, Guy Michaels, 20 January 2010
Does the “resource curse” exist? This column presents new evidence from Brazil. Municipalities that receive oil windfalls report significant increases in spending on infrastructure, education, health, and transfers to households. However, the windfalls do not trickle down and much of the money goes missing. Indeed, oil revenues increase the size of municipal workers’ houses but not the size of other residents’ houses. [Emphasis mine]
via The Dutch Disease Gets a Brazilian.

Introspection::It Stops Here

The students were interviewed after the study and most appeared “genuinely flabbergasted” to learn that an experimenter swap had occurred, yet they still responded differently to the prostitution scenario compared to the control group. Proulx and Heine say these results are similar to other studies where people have been made to feel threatened before making a judgement: when threatened, people are harsher judges of others. The researchers suggest that the students implicitly noticed the change of experimenter, but since this type of a swap is unusual in real life, they never became conscious of it. Because of this implicit detection of an unusual event, the students behaved as if they had been threatened.
via What if you saw something that rocked your world … and you didn’t notice? : Cognitive Daily.

Read the whole thing it’s very intructive. I’d like to just say that we should try to understand other people’s predicaments. Some are just simply lonely/sad/insecure and that’s why they are acting like class A @$$h0135. There was this movie “Pay It Forward”, where in upon receiving a major blessing from another person, you Pay It Forward. I think we can make something different. I don’t have a gift for naming things so let’s just call it “It Stops Here”.
Whenever somebody is acting harshly towards you, take a few deep breaths and tell yourself “It Stops Here”.
Whenever some other driver cuts you off, You don’t go ballistic. Respectfully correct the driver , take a couple of deep breaths and tell yourself “It Stops Here”.
When you get home after a long stressful day at work, before entering your house, you take a couple of breaths and tell yourself “It Stops Here”.
See when we are insecure we go into defensively offensive mode.  If you really are the strong one, then you roll with the punches and make it stop where you are. We must make it such that there is a voice inside our heads that says “I would not be abusive because another person is abusive towards me.”,” I will not let my insecurity become the reason I shout at another person.” It’s the small things like this simple act that make the world so much more livable.