The Hillary campaign and their supporters all want the Clintons back in Washington, and one of their chief arguments to make that happen is the perception that Hillary has this wealth of experience. Mr. Clinton even went so far as describing a vote for Obama as a “roll of the dice”.
What just occurred to me however is that its no more of a roll of the dice than a vote for Clinton in ’92, when he was just a governor from Arkansas with no Washington experience.
That seemed to work out well enough for the Clinton fans, so why not roll the proverbial dice (if that’s how you want to think of it) again? Is anyone really ready to be president on day one, a job unlike any other?
Author: James Kebinger
Barack Obama Rally In Boston
Kristi and I went to a rally for Obama in Boston last night. It was much bigger than I expected, though in retrospect I think I should have expected more. It was my first time at a political event of any kind. I enjoyed it a lot, despite all the standing around. He invited everyone to head up to New Hampshire to volunteer there (reminding us “its only an hour away”), so who knows, maybe I’ll try my hand at canvasing one of these days.
Flickering LED Christmas lights
Beware LED christmas lights by Phillips – they have an annoying 60Hz flicker!
I decided to do the power saving or environmentally conscious thing and buy LED christmas lights to decorate the apartment this year. We picked up a 60 “bulb” set by Phillips for $12 and once they were up it was immediately noticeable that they flicker at a rate just low enough to be perceptible. It should be obvious to anyone that has taken the most basic of electrical engineering courses that AC current flows in two directions, and diodes only let current flow one way, so the LEDs will be dark half the time. Any useable LED set needs to have a rectifier to power the LEDs with DC current instead so they light up steadily.
I saw a review of them here (after the fact of course) and it indicates the flicker might have been fixed in this year’s model, but I can confirm its not.
So if you’re in the market for LED lights, look for some higher quality lights that give off steady light – the things last practically forever so it’s probably worth the investment.
Late to the cloud computing party
I saw on nytimes.com today “I.B.M. to Push ‘Cloud Computing, ’ Using Data From Afar“. The idea is to make it easier to process large volumes of data using centralized computing capacity in the “cloud”. Despite having several hundred phds working on this, they’re offering the exact same software (Hadoop) and vaunted “google programming model” as you can already use, (at 10 cents per server-hour) on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.
When you’re out innovated and out maneuvered in bringing a (open source) technology to market by a book company, its no wonder your stock price is basically stagnant.
I recently had the opportunity to use Amazon EC2 to process ~35 gigs of log files for someone and it was quite easy, costing me about $15 in data transfer and CPU time fees, and I bet it would have been cheaper/faster if I’d taken the time to use something like hadoop.
Obama
Andrew Sullivan writes a great article “Goodbye To All That” in this months Atlantic painting 2008 Presidential election as the continuation of the Boomer-generation’s civil war that started with Vietnam and lumbers forward even now, and more importantly how Obama can bridge that bitter divide (claiming more republicans would vote for him than any other democrat) and rebrand America.
There’s also a follow up interview with the author.
A recent NYT op-ed mentions this article too.
Full-time student
For a little while at least, I’m a full time grad student. I finished up my fifth class (wireless sensor networks) this summer to reach the halfway point in my master’s program and was starting to think about going full time.. in fact I’ve thought about it the last two summers because the Tuft’s CS program really isn’t conducive to part time study. All the “interesting” classes are offered at 10:30 unfortunately. I’d also been interviewing for new full time positions. In the midst of that deliberation this time around, I had the good fortune to get laid off from my full time job…
So now I’m taking Intro to Machine Learning, Intro to computational biology and a seminar on Brain-Computer interaction. I’m also tagging along with one of my advisor’s research groups which will hopefully afford me the opportunity to carve off some work to get started on my Master’s degree project.
In my (ever declining) free time, I’ve also been doing some Ruby on Rails work for a small company in Cambridge as a contractor.
I’m big (in China)
I had my first patent granted recently, in China of all places. I’ve put up a two page PDF here. Page one is the English abstract, page two is the front page of the patent in Chinese. Now I know what “Kebinger” in Chinese looks like.
Boston Ruby User’s Group meeting
I attended my first Boston Ruby User’s group meeting earlier tonight. I wasn’t sure what to expect exactly, but I was surprised how many people attended (in the neighborhood of a hundred I would guess).
Both of the speakers were quite interesting.
- David Black gave an interesting talk on the way Ruby implements inheritance with a particular emphasis on giving objects that “spring from” the same class different behaviors without defining additional classes.
Learned a lot from this exercise in meta programming because I’ve really only dabbled in Ruby so far. - Zed Shaw had a really energetic, engaging and entertaining presentation touching on his http server, Mongrel, its competitors, evildoers and anti-social behavior on the internet and how he aims to address that with his Utu project
The sessions were video taped so they’ll apparently be up on Google video sometime soon. You don’t really have to know or care about ruby to enjoy and learn from Zed’s talk.
One of the great things about living somewhere like the Boston area is that people I’ve heard of before show up at things like this – attendees of the meeting tonight included Martin Fowler and John Resig (wrote JQuery), along with many other folks much smarter than me.
My personal info on lost IBM tapes
I received a letter today marked “Urgent message from IBM. Please open immediately”. What’s this I thought? It turns out my information relating to my IBM employment was on the tapes lost back in February. I had read about the incident some time ago when it became public back in April.
At the time I figured I couldn’t be involved, because I hadn’t already been offered this free id-protection for a year. Turns out they just took a month and a half to notify me after it became public knowledge (3 and a half after it happened). Nice job all around IBM.
Not so much java for local web startups
There’s a local group of entrepreneurs and developers that meets every couple of months in Cambridge. I was curious about this month’s presenters’ choices of development platform, so I took at look at their headers and here’s what I found.
Of 7 presenters the platform stats fall out thusly:
2 Ruby on Rails (plus one suspected, but not confirmed)
2 PHP
1 Asp.net
1 Python (cherry py)
By way of contrast, a quick and dirty survey of jobs in boston/cambridge/brookline on craig’s list turned up the following stats
232 jobs containing Java
113 jobs containing ASP.net
164 jobs containing PHP
46 jobs containing Python
34 jobs containing Ruby
Presumably the difference is because of lots of folks in the area are working at medium sized companies on older, established (i won’t say “legacy”) systems?