Thursday, December 30, 2010

Just Finsihed Reading: "Fooled by Randomness" #books

For Christmas my girlfriend's mother followed the advise I long ago gave to my girlfriend: "Only buy a book for when you don't understand what it says on the cover." That resulted in the book Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It covers a number of points, one of which is excellently explained in the Dilbert strip below:

Dilbert Strip

One of the point that Taleb makes is one that Bruce Schneier also makes: the difficulty for people to understand causality and correlation. It is such a difficult subject that even Taleb confuses correlation with causality when it comes to smoking, for which I assume he has a distaste, and this exactly proves the point that his book is making.

Brilliant book!

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posted by redhat at 2:00 pm

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

A catalog of this year's risks #2010

Programming Hands

Risk is something which can be difficult to evaluate for the average person, there is a lot of work which goes in to learning not to do the two things that people usually do when they are confronted with risk:

  1. Ignore
  2. Overreact

It looks like every man and his dog needs to have a Facebook page, even banks...

It has been almost 1.5 weeks since Google’s FeedBurner removed the Frie...

Some days ago I tweeted to Prosper, a personal loan marketplace, whether they...

I don’t really think most people get “it” when it comes to ...

Just noticed that Google Translate translates the name of the Dutch social ne...

I find a 400 plus page manual of office policies and job descriptions for eac...

In the last two days I’ve not been posting so much, and focussing on up...

I started playing with Google Scribe and wanted to see if patterns emerged so...

I have my Google account set up with English as the preferred language, my br...

For the last 2 years LinkedIn has been running a bad poor IT management depar...

When I just started I too had trouble with getting all the items I required t...

On August 11th 2007 I exceeded my GMail quota, I blogged about it here. At th...

Brian Szymanski send a reply to me concerning another bank implementing SMS b...

I don’t understand why url expansion after url shortening is such an is...

I just read an article Web Coupons Know Lots About You, and They Tell in the ...

This morning/night China’s networks were sending rerouting messages to ...

The lack of trained and experienced computer security people working in small...

Last week I saw an episode of a popular Dutch Ombudsman program Kassa, they r...

After seeing a program about a lifecoach trying to find the time to get his p...

Image source Radio Nederland Wereldomroep

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posted by redhat at 9:00 am

Monday, December 27, 2010

This year's book reviews #2010

Programming Hands

As always I read far more in 2010 than I blogged about, and most of the books I did blog about were treasures. I hope I inspired you to read at least one of them.

I’ve had this title in my head for about a week now, the title is natur...

I’m reading Bruce Sterling‘s Islands in the Net – Amazon de...

As followers of mine will know I love xkcd, and he has some gems such as this...

I read Amsterdam: The Brief Life of a City by Geert Mak in English rather tha...

I’ve seen the film more than a dozen times, but I had yet to read Star ...

Brian Jacques‘s book Outcast of Redwallfollows Veil the ferret who is r...

The Odessa File, by Frederick Forsyth, is another of the books I am keeping s...

Brian Jacques‘s book Martin the Warrior is another book from the Redwal...

I found The Moon’s a Balloon, by David Niven, in a box of old books. I ...

Mossflower by Brian Jacques is probably my favourite of the Redwall series, t...

Timothy Leary once told us to “Turn on, tune in, drop out“, and a...

For some reason I had the book Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, by Br...

After having seen many films and read many books I expected that Hitler: The ...

One of my first real American comics was Thor, I really liked it. Sadly it re...

I like Ontologies, Taxonomies and Folksonomies. I’m currently reading W...

I read Mario Puzo famed book The Godfather after having seen the movie a numb...

As I previously said I bought Anathem at the same time I bought Cryptonomicon...

I borrowed a number of books from an aunt of mine, who reviewed these books f...

I was standing in a secondhand book store with my father, and we wandered rou...

As an early Christmas gift my father gave me vouchers he didn’t want to...

The Snake is the first book I have read by John Godey, it was recommended to ...

In the company I work for they are introducing the Agile FrameWork, in the fo...

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posted by redhat at 12:00 pm

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Special Brands articles about "Programming" #2010

Programming Hands

In 2010 I was less focussed on programming articles on the blog than previous years, still I have managed to create some interesting articles with code in 2010. This is an overview of the activity:

Having some fun today with QR codes, JavaScript and the Google Analytics URL ...

The only questions that are asked in the Daily Scrum, aka Stand-Up, are: What...

UPDATE: GMail has introduced my number 3. YEAH! (Gmail introduces Priority In...

I like YouTube, and often subscribe to new channels and unsubscribe after a w...

Since I started working for my company I’ve been exposed to PCI DSS (Pa...

I don’t understand why url expansion after url shortening is such an is...

VeriSign – Personal Identity Portal is a OpenID provider with multiple ...

Image source D'Arcy Norman

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posted by redhat at 9:00 am