At Urban Outfitters Bike Shop, you can. You don’t have do any fancy welding, just go to their interactive web site and go from there. You start with a pattern like this:

And they help you with designing it yourself. This model, the Plato Dutch Diamond, comes in around $399 for a fixie/1-speed. I have a bike like this (not from them), and I love it. There’s even a random option if the choices overwhelm you. Now you can have that 5 colour bike you always wanted. 🙂 Or for that matter, a basic black model with a touch of red. Whatever, you have lots of flexibility. And in the end, a bike all of your own.

I love this recipe for pie crust: Stop Being a Wuss: How To Make Pie Crusts the Easy Way | The Awl. Most recipes are dry and detail oriented. Not this one. It has loads of personality, wit and humour. And it is still a valid recipe for how to make pie crust. More than that, you will WANT to try and make a pie when you are done reading it. But wait, you say: what do I do once I have the pie crust? That, my friend, is easy. If you want to be terribly lazy, when you are at the grocer, pick up some pie filling and pour it into this wonderful pie of yours. If you think, “that’s wussy!”, then go all the way and look up apple pie or some berry pie recipes on Google. You will be glad you did.

Now, you are no longer a wuss, and even better, you have pie.

Yes, even new runners training for something less than a marathon can benefit from some speed training. This article, Adding Speed Workouts to Marathon Training – NYTimes.com, is focused on marathon training, but I think anyone running should give it a read. I am a big fan of fartlek training and at a minimum, I’d recommend people that run regularly should add to their training. This article covers that and more. A good read for runners of all types.

I bookmarked this ages ago, but this post, How I Hire Programmers by Aaron Swartz is worth reading. It’s from 2009, but it is timeless.

I am sure it could be applied to anyone, not just programmers. It’s a very humane way of interviewing and hiring people.

That’s more or less what the Congress gave the Secretary of the Treasury (Paulson, under President Bush), in order to save the economy when it was threatening to crash and burn in the fall of 2008. Here’s the Text of Draft Proposal for Bailout Plan (NYTimes.com).

Basically it gives Paulson the ability to buy any mortgate-related asset from anyone for any amount up to $700B. It’s a remarkable document. Read it just to see how much leeway Paulson had. It’s astounding.

How do I know this? Easy! I went to Data Paradigms – Data, data, data! and looked at this chart.

And yes, it is hard to read: you will need to go to that site or here (Next Pope) to play around with the prediction tool. Let’s see. It says the top five candidates are Scola (Italy), Ouellet (Canada), Scherer (Brazil), Turkson (Ghana) and Bertone (Italy).  I will be surprised if it isn’t one of those.

For those who like looking into data centres, there’s this: Search Me – The New York Times > Magazine > Slide Show. I think data centres are mysterious things for many people, which accounts for the fascination with them. Once you’ve been in as many as I have, though, they seem pretty straightforward, despite the visual complexity.

Of all the photos in that spread, this is my favorite:

You may think this is far fetched, but you’d be surprised how people will randomly hit buttons in data centres.

While Obamacare is the law, there are lots of developments happening there, and the GOP is still battling it in a number of ways. If you want to keep track of that, or many other topics concerning healthcare in the United States, take a look at Kaiser Health News. It has a focus you won’t find at alot of other news sites. Well worth reading.

This site shows it  from 1983 to 2009.  It’s fun and amazing to see how much cell phones have evolved in a very short period of time. If you are like me, you will go through it and think, “oh, I remember THOSE!” :). For example,  I still remember being so impressed when I saw this for the first time:

Anyone wanting to make predictions about the future of mobile technology might want to review this and see just how much changes and how dramatically are the changes.

I am a big fan of Microsoft Project: I think it is fantastic not just for work, but for home. If for some reason you can’t get a copy of that software, I highly recommend that you consider this software: OpenProj – Project Management | Free Business & Enterprise software downloads at SourceForge.net. It’s free, and it looks very similar to the software from Microsoft. It will even open and work with files that come from Microsoft Project.

I highly recommend both tools.

So, working backwards from this, Paul Krugman Bankruptcy Story False, Spreads – Business Insider, I go to here, Paul Krugman Files Chapter 13 Bankruptcy | Stock Market Summary (NSDQ, NYSE, AMEX and more) on Boston.com, which got it from this Austrian paper, here Paul Krugman ist pleite • format.at,
which got it from…..The Daily Currant – The Global Satirical Newspaper of Record. Yes, the Daily Currant! The one that states it is satirical right up front. To be fair, I have fallen for the Currant’s posts before, but I also don’t work for a newspaper.

Krugman is having fun with this, as you can see here: Breitbarted – NYTimes.com.

As for the other writers that ran with this… well, I fact checked that in a couple of minutes. Not sure why they couldn’t.

This is not a ubiquitous idea, but it could be. It’s also one of the better uses of QR codes that I have seen. Ideally if I had one major medical condition (e.g. a specific allergy), then I would like to see it written next to the QR code. Of course the advantage of the QR code is the ability to contain alot of information on a very small place, which is ideal for people who do have a number of medical conditions. Plus the stickers are cheap and you can have them everywhere.

For more information on this, go here: Lifesquare. Found via this article: Personal QR codes could help first responders get vital patient information | IBM Smarter Trends

This article, This Story Stinks – NYTimes.com, received some bad comments itself, mostly for stating the obvious (or at least the obvious to some people on twitter). I think it is worth reading, though, because it verifies what we suspected: negative comments have an effect on a reader. Indeed, as the article states

The results were both surprising and disturbing. Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.

It would be great if more people learned to not read the comments, but they do. Bad comments, like spam, are one of the awful things about the Internet. It needs to be treated seriously and tackled with energy. Studies like this will help us decide how to do this and proceed.

According to this, Algorithmic Rape Jokes in the Library of Babel | Quiet Babylon, the T shirts were generating automatically and the company that sold them, Solid Gold Bomb, is saying that they not responsible because, hey, algorithms. I agree with the article: this is a bogus excuse. It’s like someone saying I wasn’t responsible for my car putting you in the hospital if it hit you because, hey, the car hit you, not me. Just like you are the operator of the vehicle and you are responsible for the operation of that vehicle, so too are companies and the people that run them responsible for their algorithms / computer technology as a whole.

You are responsible for the technology you deploy, and if you don’t understand that, you shouldn’t deploy it.

Also, Amazon needs to act, too. It’s a great company in many ways, but this and other practices that occur on their web site needs to be cracked down on.

Then check out this post: (Feb 2013) How Many People Use the Top Social Media, Apps & Services?

A comprehensive compilation of social media stats. Very impressive.

I mention this because Daniel Gross (@grossdm) on twitter pointed out this article, which was written in March, 2009: Michael Boskin Says Barack Obama Is Moving Us Toward a European-Style Social Welfare State and Long-Run Economic Stagnation – WSJ.com. Is this true?

It’s true that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was low when that article was written, dropping to a relative low of 6,626.94. However, Obama took office in January, 2009. During the summer and fall of 2007, the DJIA was just over 14,000. It then proceeded to fall month after month, with big drops in the fourth quarter of 2008. And just who was in office in 2007 and 2008? President Bush.

What has happened since March, 2009? The DJIA has been rising consistently, with a small dropoff in July, 2010, after which it recovered and now stands at just over 14,000 as of February, 22, 2013.

There is still too much unemployment as well as other problems with the U.S. economy. But the stock market has been the beneficiary of President Obama and his form of governing.

And by the way, who is Michael Boskin? According to the article, “Mr. Boskin is a professor of economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.“

All DJIA come from here: Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) History

If this works, the recipe is here: https://ifttt.com/myrecipes/personal/2934895

It may seem odd to talk about the success of these two devices. Many of the reviews that I (and likely, you) have read have said that the Pixel is a great device, but too expensive and to be avoided. And Google Glass is not even shipped yet. Given that, how can I talk about their success?I think their success can be measured in another way. Regardless of the success of these or other offerings, Google is successfully positioning itself as a leader with regards to emerging technology. This is important for IT companies. If you are perceived as failing, then regardless of how good your technology is, it will always be framed in terms of your failing to lead. (see RIM/Blackberry or Microsoft). Likewise, if you are someone like Apple, a perceived leader, then whatever you do is measured in those terms. Given that, Google succeeds on the whole even if individual products do not. Furthermore, Google was gaining a reputation for missing the mark (Wave, Google+). Products like these can help change that perception.The Verve has two good reviews of these products here (Chromebook Pixel review) and here (I used Google Glass: the future, but with monthly updates). If you want to know more about these products, I recommend those articles.Finally, since this is IT related, I should state these are my opinions only and do not and do not necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer (IBM).

Why? Because it will be soon the end of Posterous (R.I.P. Posterous). The good news is that you can migrate from Posterous to other platforms, but you may want to do so soon.

As an IBM employee, I am happy to see IBM has their own tumblr: IBMblr | IBM Innovation on Tumblr. There’s lots of good stuff on it, including this:

I also like this:

>

I came across this entry about Melba Roy from this tumblr, Vintage Black Glamour. I tried to do searches on her to see if I could find more information about her, but I couldn’t. This is a terrible shame, since Ms Roy appears to be very accomplished, from what I read on the Tumblr. Not to take anything away from the tumblr, but here’s what it said:

Melba Roy, NASA Mathmetician, at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland in 1964. Ms. Roy, a 1950 graduate of Howard University, led a group of NASA mathmeticians known as “computers” who tracked the Echo satellites. The first time I shared Ms. Roy on VBG, my friend Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a former postdoc in astrophysics at NASA, helpfully explained what Ms. Roy did in the comment section. I am sharing Chanda’s comment again here: “By the way, since I am a physicist, I might as well explain a little bit about what she did: when we launch satellites into orbit, there are a lot of things to keep track of. We have to ensure that gravitational pull from other bodies, such as other satellites, the moon, etc. don’t perturb and destabilize the orbit. These are extremely hard calculations to do even today, even with a machine-computer. So, what she did was extremely intense, difficult work. The goal of the work, in addition to ensuring satellites remained in a stable orbit, was to know where everything was at all times. So they had to be able to calculate with a high level of accuracy. Anyway, that’s the story behind orbital element timetables”. Photo: NASA/Corbis.

I think this is an impressive story and we should know more about her. If anyone does, please post it here or the original tumblr. The world should know more about her.

P.S. Yes, I happen to love the IBM computer behind her. That makes her even better IMHO.

I was skeptical of this, but Carl Franzen pointed out this detailed article: ChromeBook as Developer Machine. It makes a good case for how a developer can get alot of use out of a Chromebook for their development needs. I think the same can be said for anyone with a tablet or iPad with a bluetooth keyboard as well.

Well done. Worth reading.

As this article points out, Why Russians Are Obsessed With Dash-Cams, Russian roads are a lawless place, and your best chance of limiting your liability when you are driving on them is with a dash-cam. Hence, the proliferation of them in that country.

I would not be surprised to see them in North American cars soon. Our roads may be more lawful, but there’s still enough bad driving and bad driving conditions here to make for some interesting footage.

Love this.

Skrillex – Summit (feat. Ellie Goulding) – YouTube

Can be found here: Doing beautiful things with self-tracking data « RescueTime Blog.

I thought turning self quantified data like this….

….to be a brilliant idea. But there are numerous brilliant ideas on that blog: well worth a look.

(Thanks to AmritaMathur on twitter for that)

It’s simple. Go to a Starbucks. Pick up one of those cards that has free apps/movie/song of the day. On the back is a code. Use that as your password. Keep the code in your wallet. Do this on a frequent basis.

Want to make it more secure? Add numbers and punctuation to the beginning or the end.

Worried the code isn’t random enough? Type it in backwards or add punctuation and random characters in the middle (e.g. after the first three characters).

For example, here is the code on the card I have: A63RKXMEWWJ6. (No, it is not used on any of my passwords.)

If I go to a site like this, How Secure Is My Password?, and type it in, it tells me it will take 37 years to break it using a PC. If I add !123 to the end of that, it will take essentially forever to break it (16 billion years).These times are based on using a PC to break it. But even if the hackers had an enterprise class computer, it will still take a long long time. Furthermore, if you change your password very often, you will make it next very difficult to hack your password the way the passwords were hacked at the New York Times.

There are ways to get your password that doesn’t requiring stealing and cracking the password database. But you can practically eliminate this way if you take this approach.

It’s a very retro moment that Sly Stallone has a new movie out in 2013 with Walter Hill! In 1984, almost 30 years ago, Hill had a big movie out that was also very retro at the time called  Streets of Fire. Here’s a clip from that film

While this HuffPo piece is about a new service from Vine, Twitter’s ‘Vine’ App Users Can No Longer Find Friends Via Facebook, it also has a great rundown of all the feuding going on between social media companies these days. For example…

(Facebook and Twitter) have been feuding since this summer, when Facebook announced it would buy Instagram for $1 billion despite Twitter’s reported prior offer, supposedly worth $525 million, for the photo-sharing service. Twitter responded to the snub by preventing Instagram users from syncing with their Twitter followers. Facebook followed up by making it impossible for Twitter users to embed Instagram pictures in their tweets.

Twitter and Facebook are certainly not the only feuding tech companies. In August, Craigslist stopped allowing search engines to index user’s ads in order to try to defeat competitors like Craiggers. In early January, Google experimented with blocking Google Maps on Windows phones, although that experiment didn’t take.

I expect alot more of these to go on over the next few years. Eventually there will be winners, but also the social media business will be disrupted and displaced by other technology waves (think: mobile platforms and cloud computing and that the social media companies will no longer be a central/go to place. It will happen: ask AOL and various portal sites left by the side of the road). Until that happens, expect sharing to get harder, not easier.

O’Reilly media is doing something I haven’t seen before: using github as a repository for a book. Github is a famous code repository, and I have seen it extended to include government data. But this sees like a new way to use it. Expect more non-traditional uses of github. In the meantime see: http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/01/open-government-files-released.html

There’s a fascinating study here highlighted in Nature News & Comment that dogs and their domestication may have been a result of farming. Key quote:

Most humans have also evolved to more easily digest starches². Lindblad-Toh suggests that the rise of farming, beginning around 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, led to the adaptations in both species. “This is a striking sign of parallel evolution,” she says. “It really shows how dogs and humans have evolved together to be able to eat starch.”

Another interesting fact is that dogs have a gene that allows them to digest starch, a gene that the wolf does not have.

Well worth a read.

Really? Really! Amy Webb was not having much luck (to put it mildly) with dating sites, so she applied her excellent data analytical skills to come up with the best way to redo her profile to find her perfect match. See Hacking the Hyperlinked Heart – WSJ.com, for the details on how she did it. Well worth reading.

I am not familar with what other companies — including IBM — are doing in this area, but I think this story is impressive: Microsoft Global Foundations Services Blog : Microsoft Recycles Waste to Provide Clean Power for Data Center R&D.

Essentially Microsoft is using manure/poop/call it what you will to deliver power that they use to drive their data centers. I think this is impressive. I hope this solution spreads (no pun intended) to other power users. Kudos to them.

George Benson used to be huge. And for good reason.

This video is not special, but this song is, to me. Here’s George Benson- Give Me The Night

It seems incredible, but you can see the results in the video below.

Details on how Ben Krasnow built the CT Scanner can be found via clicking through.

Even though it is only a chicken, it is amazing to think about it being hacked like this. It also points the way to lower cost scanners.

(Via Tim O’Reilly.)

Yes, the Royal Canadian Mint has produced a Million Dollar Coin.

There are not many of them (five in all). And “why did the Royal Canadian Mint make the world’s purest and largest gold bullion coin? Because we can.”.

If that’s a good enough reason for a million dollar coin, it should be a good enough reason for a trillion dollar coin. 🙂

…then you should read this: The Top Five Career Regrets – Daniel Gulati – Harvard Business Review. What’s the number one regret? I wish I hadn’t taken the job for the money.It’s a good article and one anyone looking at their career should read.

If you are like me, you are getting more and more spam with little in it but a request to open a file. There’s two reasons for this. First, the less text, the more likelihood the spam will get past spam filters. Second, the opening of that file will potentially infect your computer with any number of problems. For example, if you open a PDF file, this page – — PDF Security Issues — describes some of the problems that could occur. Here’s a snippet from that page:

Javascript: Adobe Reader (and possibly other readers) contains a Javascript engine similar to the ones used by web browsers, but with a slightly different API to manipulate PDF content dynamically or to control some viewer features. Potentially dangerous features are restricted for obvious security reasons. However, this means that PDF documents are not purely static, and for example some actions may be used to fool a user (popups) or to send e-mails and HTTP requests automatically. Furthermore, experience shows that many recent vulnerabilities have been exploited using Javascript in PDF.

Launch actions: a PDF file may launch any command on the operating system, after user confirmation (popup message). Different command lines may be specified for Windows, Unix and Mac. On Windows only, parameters can be provided for the command. Until Adobe Reader 9.3.2, the CVE-2010-1240 vulnerability made it possible to fool users by modifying the text of the popup message. Since Adobe Reader 9.3.3, a blacklist restricts file formats that can be opened, blocking executable files by default (but a way to bypass it has been found, and finally fixed in v9.3.4).

Embedded files: a PDF file may contain attached files, which can be extracted and opened from the reader. This trick may be used to hide malicious executables in order to bypass some antivirus and content analysis engines. Fortunately, Adobe Reader refuses to open embedded files if their extension is part of a blacklist, such as EXE, BAT, CMD, etc. However, this blacklist is not perfect and formats such as HTML or Python scripts may be embedded in PDF and launched from Adobe Reader.

This is for PDF files. Similar things can happen with other files that can launch actions or embed files.

If you don’t know the person sending you the email, don’t open the file, even if you are curious. Just delete it.