i’m in michigan [grand rapids] on vacation and it has snowed every day since i’ve been here. it’s a regular winter wonderland.
i was so inspired that i actually went snowmobiling yesterday. i’ve never driven a ‘sled’ before.
if you find yourself negotiating a turn at an angle, don’t slow down. slower is not better. you’ll tip over.
after dumping a couple of times, i went fast.
very fast.
the complexity digest is superb. where else are you going to find out about Transmission of Information and Herd Behavior: An Application to Financial Markets :
“We propose a model for stochastic formation of opinion clusters, modeled by an evolving network, and herd behavior to account for the observed fat-tail distribution in returns of financial-price data. The only parameter of the model is h, the rate of information dispersion per trade, which is a measure of herding behavior. For h below a critical h* the system displays a power-law distribution of the returns with exponential cutoff. However, for h>h* an increase in the probability of large returns is found and may be associated with the occurrence of large crashes. ©2000 The American Physical Society ”
More Than Just Jabber. jabber + groove:
“Whiteboarding document sharing inside of a Web browser—collaborative browsing, they call it. A lot of applications already do this. But what we’re building is one generic architecture that can really handle the back end for all sorts of those applications. Say you’re in Palm Pilot and you want to sync your address book. If you had your address book defined in XML—working with SyncML synching it up to your server—these applications might be using Jabber to send or receive these things on the fly. When you update your address book in one application, it’s automatically pushed out to the server The server announces the change to all the other applications listening to that XML, and they receive those updates. ”
[via dave]
Building an adaptable Web app front end with XML and XSL:
“Using XML to describe parts of a Web app user interface can make it easy to convert the UI for multiple devices via XSL style sheets. The article describes using XML data and XSL style sheets to build the user interface of complex Web applications. A Web calendar sample application demonstrates the basic techniques and concepts. The article also includes more than two dozen code samples that you can
easily extend for your specific requirements.”
[via jonas beckman]
i’ve been picking-up the pace of tinkering with linux at home. it’s always a drag because there’s always some application or another that requires m$ and hasn’t been ported to linux. although the list of applications is getting smaller, and it really feels like it’s almost possible to not have to boot up the windows partition on a regular basis, there’s always something. this time groove is messing up my reboot times. although there are problems with groove the file-sharing feature quickly has become indespensible and, of course, there’s no linux client.
lo and behold win4lin looks like it may be a cheap way for me to have my cake and eat it too:
” If you are a Windows user who really wants to migrate to Linux, but you think you’ll feel disenfranchised without your Windows productivity applications, Win4Lin is a must-have. If, on the other hand, you want to run Linux without breaking company rules about which Windows applications you must use for work, then Win4Lin is an absolute necessity.”
here’s a more recent comparison of win4lin and vmware.
there’s really only three things you need to remember: food, friends and family.
[via peterme]