I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
- Thoreau
There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student.
- Paul Graham on Start-ups
But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
- Paul Graham on High School
The problem is that this is a significant waste of time and attention, because only those efforts that address the constraint (the weak link of that value chain) are worthy of being called real improvements.
- First Cut
In order to understand how to speak to your manager, you've gotta figure out how they acquire information and, chances are, they either gather it Organically or Mechanically.
Mechanic: "An itch. Well. This itch seems familiar. In fact, I scratched this type of itch in January 2001. Let me first dig up my notes regarding that itching. Excellent. We're going to need an matrix. The vertical column will be action items I can think of that will assess different scratching scenarios and the vertical axis will measure our progress against these different scenarios. Ok, we're going to need a meeting to form a committee... "
Organic: "Wow, an itch. Hmmmm... well, this sucks. Hey Frank, we've got a itch.... whaddya think? Yeah, that's what I was thinking. You know, this itch seems familiar... I think I'm going to deeply consider this itch while I drive home, but, first, where's Mary? She knows all about itches and I bet she'll have some ideas.... I wonder what happens when I type itch in Google... HEY... there's an idea..."
...from Organics and Mechanics
I'm definitely an Organic.
Recently I've seen some of the havoc that results when extremes of the opposit typea meet and don't know how to relate to the others. (No, it's not me. :P)
Strongly recommended article.
You probably could care less. This is posted here so I can find it again later.
I take care of some servers that are firewalled from reaching the internet. After downloading the gem files to my laptop, and uploading them to the server, here is the sequence of install commands I run.
sudo gem install activesupport --local --no-rdoc
sudo gem install actionpack --local --no-rdoc
sudo gem install activerecord --local --no-rdoc
sudo gem install actionwebservice --local --no-rdoc
sudo gem install actionmailer --local --no-rdoc
sudo gem install rails --local --no-rdoc
Q: How does google maps work? Did they sell their soul to the devil?
A. Well, the Swiss actually did it first. :P ( http://map.search.ch/ )
This effect is created by few things you can do with javascript.
The map is built out of graphical tiles. As you scroll, it knows that it needs to load in more tiles on the side you are moving towards - which it does in the background. As the tiles pass out of your view, it removes them from the page.
It is fanatically well executed though
PS:
Gory details:
http://jgwebber.blogspot.com/2005/02/mapping-google.html
Strange hacks you can pull:
http://libgmail.sourceforge.net/googlemaps.html