Category Archives: Culture

Geek culture

Naming Conventions

The cool thing about starting a new company, or having a child, or even a new project, is that you get to name it.

I fell onto Wikipedia’s list of laws, and found Diana Goodman’s Law, which says that in online discussions between women, eventually someone is accused of not having kids. Goodman is truly horrified by some of the names handed out to kids.

Unlike children’s names, with company names pretty much doesn’t matter what you call them. I’ve got one friend who named his company after a psychedelic drug, another who chose his hobby for a basis and a third after a Futurama character. Others pick some lame set of initials and add ‘consultants’ or whatever on the end. Myself, I went for truth-in-advertising: Intellectual Mercenaries. I was toying around Fictitious Deduction for a while, but rejected it as being a little dangerous in the accounts receivable department.

You’re not going to see truth-in-advertising in Project naming, no project Keeping Up With The Competition, or Dragging This Pile of Bones Kicking and Screaming into The 1990s. Acronyms seem to be very popular, even if a lot of the time the acronym becomes rather forced. Microsoft and Chip companies seem to like US Cities, perhaps because it doesn’t give anything away.

Project naming needs some flair. I suggest Pokemon Characters. I was going to suggest another Japanese franchise, but realised someone’s already gone down that path (sometimes my brain can’t keep up with my imagination).

What memorable namings have you seen (in any of the above categories)?

What is on your USB memory stick?

Some people responded to the question, What is on your USB memory stick?

Best response: IF_FOUND_RETURN_TO.txt or REWARD_IF_FOUND.txt
Interesting: heavily encrypted financial data / keys
Interesting: run anywhere Firefox

My memory stick is also my MP3 player, so it’s mainly songs. Plus an old version of a website I was putting together, plus some miscellaneous crap like resume/CV. I think I’ll put the reward thingy on it.

So, what have you got on your memory stick?

Wireless Skate Speedometer – a solution looking for a problem?

Finally, a Wireless Skate Speedometer, so now you can know how fast you’re skating. As an added bonus, it’s water resistant at up to 30ft/10m, for when you accidentally skate into a swimming pool.

You have to turn it on and off, because the batteries will only last 300hrs. I can’t imagine that would be hard to do, given where the wheel is – on the bottom of your shoe. And heaven help you if you forget, two weeks later your speedo will be knackered.

Of course, the wheels and bearings wear out, but they thought of that. Just buy your wheels and bearings from them! An electronics company! They’ll also sell you a battery kit, I guess because it uses special batteries or something. Or perhaps because they know you’re going to forget to turn the darn thing off.

They’ve got a big write-up on their site about how pushbikes have the wheel in contact with the ground all the time, but skates don’t, so their computer has to do all sorts of tricks to figure out the right answer. Perhaps hooking up a GPS might have been a better idea?

And of course, you have to consider the privacy implications or wireless transmission of personal data like your velocity…

Where are the aliens?

Coffee drinkers are easier to persuade.

Fermi’s Paradox is explained by aliens getting adicited to computer gaming.

Strom reckons he knows how to make money with a website: ads! Plus a little other stuff.

An Irishman has a rather good summery of how to negotiate an intial salary.

Cross-platform rounded corners without images, extra markup nor CSS. The holy grail of web-design dweebs.

Alternative fuels don’t solve greenhouse problem

Popular mechanics examines various alternative fuels, but isn’t good at figuring out cause and effect.

Point one:
Global warming is caused by too much greenhouse gases; Burning stuff creates carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Burning stuff causes global warming. Not digging stuff up out of the ground.

Point two:
Hydrogen is easiest to create by passing electricity through water. Electricity is mostly created by burning coal (heating water, turning turbine, yada yada yada). See point one. This has just been pointed out in an Age opinion piece on public transport.

Which is why ethenol, methenol, biodiesel, natural gas, electricity and hydrogen aren’t anti-greenhouse fuels; Solar, wind, hydro, nuclear and geothermal are.

Only electric batteries / hydrogen cells can act as crossover technologies from renewable generation sources to transport. Anything else is going to have water lapping at your front door in a century; but hey, Venice is a romantic city – and wouldn’t it be great if many more of the cities of the world were romantic like Venice?.

Safe surfing for the kiddies

Every parent must wonder when their kids get to computer-using age, about installing monitoring/pr0n-site blocking software. I’ve pondered it myself, but not gone down that road yet, since there’s other methods of avoiding nasties.

What I’ve done with my kids is to set them up with an account each on the computers, and set up their browsers (both IE and Firefox) with Google Safe Search turned on. It will stick if your browser is accepting cookies.

They’ve also been shown how to customise their accounts with their own wallpaper, colours, bookmarks/favourites etc, which is a motivation for them to properly logon as themselves when using the computers. Not that it’s hard with XP; just point at the name/face from the Logon/Switch User screen. (One of the two machines is Win2K, so no Switch User capability, but we survive.)

As an added bonus, their accounts are standard users, not Admin, preventing them downloading and installing software. My account has a password, but theirs don’t (surprised they haven’t objected to that actually).

They’ve been taught not to download programs without permission anyway. Through the school internet policy they know to close any browser window/tell an adult if they see anything “making them uncomfortable”.

And I’ve taken the advice that a wise man once told me: while Net Nanny etc have their uses, nothing beats the kids being educated in what they should and shouldn’t be looking at, and placing the computers in a public, visible part of the house, rather than tucked away in a back room.