Musings

[danielna]

Imagine you’re tasked with building a computer controlled gun that can accurately hit a target about 50 meters distant. That is the only requirement. One way to do this is to build a complex machine that measures every possible variable (wind, elevation, temperature, etc.) before the shot and then takes aim and shoots. Another approach is to build a simple machine that fires rapidly and can detect where each shot hits. It then uses this information to adjust the aim of the next shot, quickly homing in on the target a little at a time. The difference between these two approaches is to realize that bullets are cheap. By the time the former group has perfected their wind detection instrument, you’ll have finished your simple weapon and already hit the target.

from Ten Lessons from Github's First Year

[danielna]

Upgrading a Macbook Pro SSD with SuperDuper!

I figure this might help someone, if the google desires it so.

When I first bought my current MBP in early 2012 (13" unibody) I bought it with base specs.  The Apple upcharge on upgrading individual components being what it is, it was significantly cheaper to buy the MBP with a 320GB HD and 4GB RAM and upgrade everything myself.  A 128GB SSD and 8GB RAM later (which is much cheaper now than it was then), my laptop was a freaking workhorse.  The single biggest upgrade in performance was, by far, the SSD.

I couldn't convince myself to spring for the 256GB drive then, mostly because the price for the drive was around $450.  Needless to say, prices have dropped.  A lot.  With 50GB of music taking a big chunk of my hard drive space, I was getting tired of having to move media off to external drives.  I decided recently that it was time to upgrade.

I took a long, hard look at the Optibay, which allows users to install a hard drive into their optical bays.  In fact, I actually went so far as to order one, open up my laptop and attempt to install the thing.  I became quickly annoyed that the published instructions did not have a schematic that closely matched the internals of my own computer, in addition to the required removal of a number of tiny screws that ran the risk of falling into the depths of my laptop forever.  It was also unclear to me exactly how battery consumption would be affected by continually powering a second drive, which had the potential to derail my semi-frequent coffee shop sessions.  Ultimately I sold the Optibay off to a friend who had better luck with the installation.

Here's what I did:

Purchased a 256GB Crucial M4 SSD from Amazon;

Downloaded SuperDuper!, a program for Mac that allows you to make an exact, bootable copy of your drive to an external disk;

Used a 2.5" SATA to USB 2.0 HD Enclosure to connect the SSD to my MBP via USB;

Opened Disk Utility (Applications ->Utilities -> Disk Utility) and erased the empty SSD and formatted it (Mac OS Journaled Extended);

Copied the contents of my current HD to the SSD via SuperDuper!;

Replaced the old SSD with the new SSD;

Set the startup disk (Settings -> Startup Disk) to the installed 256GB drive. (If you install a new SSD and it takes unusually long to boot, the Startup Disk is likely not set.)

Originally I was going to add another step to this process (SuperDuper to external HD, install empty SSD, boot from external HD, copy from external HD to empty SSD) but a friend suggested that I eliminate the external HD middle-man by using a USB enclosure.  Great suggestion that hadn't crossed my mind, and it ended up saving me a load of time.

The key difference between a tool like SuperDuper! vs. Time Machine is that it allows you to create fully bootable backups of your hard disk, so if your machine ever goes kaput you can still boot (by holding Option during the boot up sequence and selecting the backup).  At $28 for the "Smart Update" feature (only saving what's changed between backups) it's a great value.

[danielna]

Ladies Love Cool James. I literally LOL'd when I saw this at the National Portrait Gallery. The thing is massive, which is probably the only appropriate scale for such a portrait.

[danielna]

How much am I paying for this again?

At a company meeting a few months ago, the CEO of my company shared an anecdote about buying a highly sought-after car.  Because the supplies were low he had to wait for shipment, which was fine.  Because the car was innovative there were technical difficulties, which was expected.  But due to some failures in customer service, at some point the thought crossed his mind -- "This is what I'm spending my money on?  How much am I paying for this again?"

The point of the anecdote is that clients are willing to spend a premium to get a job done correctly and smoothly, with little hassle and proper direction from a hired contractor.  The process should be so painless that the cost of the service is never a concern.  There should never be any doubt that the service is worth the cost.

That's a fantastic litmus test for consumer satisfaction.

[danielna]

I am damn proud of this whiteboard.

[danielna]

Five months later: launch day!  Seriously proud to be part of such a stellar dev team.  The long hours were worth it, and the site looks fantastic.

Built on our open source Brightspot CMS, the new Coca Cola Company corporate site is dynamic, responsive across computing devices, interactive and integrated with social media.  Lots of cool technology going on under the hood here, and the start of my growing infatuation with JavaScript.

But hey, don't take my word for it. Check it out for yourself!

[danielna]

The workday views.

[danielna]

Some experiences can only be pursued when young and vigorous, before strength and agility begin to wane. When my husband broke his leg a few years ago, he understood what it would be like to be enfeebled. It made him realize that the time to travel was now rather than later. Students should be encouraged to think about the stages of life—and the logic of pursuing experiences and activities, even if it means financial sacrifice, that they won’t be able to pursue when they’re older.

from Andrew Sullivan's post, from Paula Cohen's piece in The American Scholar.

[danielna]

Welcome to the world, Alyssa

[danielna]

[danielna]

"Teach Me How to be President"

“You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price. “You can’t wander around,” he said. “It’s much harder to be surprised. You don’t have those moments of serendipity. You don’t bump into a friend in a restaurant you haven’t seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss of surprise is an unnatural state. You adapt to it, but you don’t get used to it—at least I don’t.”

From Michael Lewis' excellent profile of President Obama in Vanity Fair

[danielna]

My idea of a perfect Saturday afternoon.

[danielna]

Cured

Five and a half years ago I was diagnosed with cancer.  Acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), to be exact.  I went from being a stressed-out-of-my-mind junior year engineering student to a quietly terrified but strangely placid 20 year old cancer patient.  It was, and in some aspects somewhat continues to be, surreal.

I've written a lot about my sickness, and even shared it publicly to hundreds of people in the last several years.  The point of this post isn't to recap those words.  It's to share about today.

For the last five years I've lived under the fear of relapse, a word which I would go out of my way to avoid using in conversation, even in unrelated contexts.  Within the first year out from chemotherapy, the chance of relapse is highest; making it to the second year without incident is a significant milestone.  Each subsequent year up until five years is an additional milestone, with the odds of relapse decreasing substantially each year.  After the fifth post-chemotherapy year, if your body tests with normal blood levels then you are medically "cured."  For all intents and purposes, the medical likelihood of relapse is effectively zero.

Six months ago we set the five year appointment date for August.  Today I went to my oncologists office for the last time.

I am cured.

I'm not a very outwardly emotional guy, but I was overwhelmed as I left the oncologists office this afternoon.  Down the same steps I've walked hundreds of times, often with a face-mask on as to prevent infection in a post-chemotherapy neutropenic state.  Into the same garage I parked in every day during the early months of 2007 in order to get my blood counts checked.

When I started my treatment, I can't honestly say that I expected to make it to today.  Today was a figment of my imagination, a day so far into the future and past so many hurdles that even considering it seemed pointless.  Cancer wasn't an "I'm going to beat this!" gung-ho thing for me.  Life, God, science and medicine would ultimately take its course and I knew that.  There was little point in openly hoping to survive, so I didn't.  I had no ultimate expectations.  I took every day for itself and nothing more.

But as I sat in my car today, I realized that wasn't true.  God, I wanted to survive.  For five years I was scared to admit it, because doing so would set myself up for disappointment if it didn't happen.  But I realized today that in my soul I wanted to survive.

I asked my doctor today, I think for the first time, why I was diagnosed.  And my wonderfully intelligent, experienced and awesome doctor, with her years of schooling, residency, and full-time cancer work, said "we don't know."

"Sometimes cells replicate incorrectly.  Sometimes DNA corrupts.  In your case it's not hereditary, and there isn't a risk of you passing it onto future generations.  It's just one of those things that medicine doesn't know."

Five years of my life, and my friends and family's lives, summed up with a shrug of the shoulders.

Tonight I sit and write this blog post, but today I stand on the shoulders of giants.  I owe so much to the love and support of my mom, my sister and her husband, my family, my girlfriend, my friends, and my church.  I owe so much to the diligence and knowledge of my doctors both from U-Penn Hospital and Virginia Cancer Specialists (Dr. Patel in particular) and the number of awesomely patient and supportive nurses I had throughout my hospital/outpatient stays. 

There are so many people who had an unknowing hand in creating that piece of my soul that wanted to press on and live to see today.  If any of you are reading this, I truly thank you for everything.

August 20, 2012: The first day of the rest of my life.

[danielna]

Ovens of Peace

Relationships are fragile in Beirut. Instability at the top filters down into your intimate life. Neighbours, brothers, sisters, lovers – they can all turn on you overnight. Governments collapse. Friends emigrate. Houses that survived the Ottoman Empire disappear in a week, killed off by sky-high real estate values. Trust is essential; trust is impossible. That’s one legacy of the long, lingering civil war, which officially ran from 1975 to 1990 but never really ended. But the furn is another legacy. During the war, cooking gas would periodically run out. When that happened, Beirutis returned to a tradition as old as the city itself, the habit of the communal oven. The practice of sharing an oven goes back to the ancients, when Babylonian temples fed their subjects on the leftovers from the feasts of the gods. But the urban public oven came into its own in the medieval Whenever there’s the threat of violence, people rush to the bakery for bread, of course, but also, I suspect, for reassurance. Mediterranean. In cities all around the Middle Sea, Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Armenians alike brought bread and other foods to the oven at the pandocheion, a Greek word for inn that means ‘accepting all comers’. For a small fee, the public baker would cook your food, saving scarce heat and fuel for all to share – a kind of culinary carpool. Private ovens encouraged segregation; public ovens led to mixing, cross-pollination, and negotiation – in a word, relationships. And probably, I imagine, a fair amount of food and recipe sharing across religious and ethnic lines.

from Bread of Beirut (via Andrew Sullivan)

As I become exposed to different cultures, it does seem that American culture is missing the communal quality that a lot of other cultures exhibit.  Maybe this article is onto something.  Maybe economic and technological prosperity provides an easier means of pulling us apart rather than bringing us together [1], with an emphasis on self-reliance over co-reliance. 

That is, uh, with the exception of things like Facebook. 

[1] "in-person"

[danielna]

This fills me with more emotion then I thought it would: excitement, wonder, hope, amazement.  I can't imagine what watching the moon landing was like live (or in Houston), but it must've been mind-blowing.

I've never felt such a strong desire to crack open a physics textbook.  They should show this video during the first lecture of the year at every engineering school.

If we want to inspire future generations into STEM, it's this kind of stuff that will do it.

[danielna]

This video is fantastic.

This is the best example of "manufactured virality" that I've ever seen.  The production quality, the party beat/melody, the emphasis on "fun," the humor, even the color selection - all intentional.  And I bet this wasn't made with Korean audiences in mind, despite the fact that 99% of the lyrics are in Korean. 

The reason it's exploded across American social networks is because of its "wtf, seriously?" quality.  People who aren't familiar with PSY won't know that he's something of the Andy Samberg of Korea, known more for his humor than musicianship. I mean, PSY is far from the prototypical pop star; he's 35, mildly overweight and there's a scene of him rapping from the toilet.  But that ignorance is part of what makes this video go viral.  It's also people wondering to themselves, "is this what music in Korea is actually like?"

One way to make money in Korea is to create a song that Korean audiences love.  One way to make a lot MORE money in Korea is to make a song that Americans love too. The goal of this song/video was not to produce good music, but to make a ton of money.  They've succeeded spectacularly.

[danielna]

Ever wonder what happens to the clothing donated to Salvation Army that doesn't sell, or the pre-fabricated "Super Bowl Champions" t-shirts of the losing team?

They end up in countries like Zambia, serving as a microcosm for the potentially devastating economic network effects of dumping our excess for cheap in foreign nations.

(read more at PBS.org)