Teh Journalz

It is worse than that. B and C might have to reorganize to the extent that they cease to exist in order for the company to reap the benefits of Agile. For example, a company may no longer need a Project Management Department, because though Agile teams have leaders, they don't necessarily have project managers. Of course, the Project Management Department will oppose such changes.

Interesting insights in here. In anti-spam, we called this kind of thing a "flag day" and if your solution required one, it was dead in the water. Should be easier to change a single organization than the entire SMTP-conversing universe, however ;-)

TLDR

This article shows off a Ruby gem which has the power to overwrite a Ruby binary in memory while it is running to allow your code to execute in place of internal VM functions. This is useful if you’d like to hook all object allocation functions to build a memory profiler.

This gem is on GitHub

Yes, it’s on GitHub: http://github.com/ice799/memprof.

Joe Damato does it again with this awesome post on building a memory profiler for Ruby with hot-patching. Man, that guy is just awesome! :)

The latest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser contains a bug that can enable serious security attacks against websites that are otherwise safe.

The flaw in IE 8 can be exploited to introduce XSS, or cross-site scripting, errors on webpages that are otherwise safe, according to two Register sources, who discussed the bug on the condition they not be identified. Microsoft was notified of the vulnerability a few months ago, they said.

This situation has two stable outcomes, one in which nobody cheats, and the other in which everybody cheats. The everybody-cheats outcome is stable because each player figures that he has only a 1/26 chance of facing enforcement, and a 1/26 chance of losing $10 is not enough to scare him away from the $1 he can get by cheating.

It might seem that deterrence doesn't work because the cheaters have safety in numbers. It might seem that deterrence can only succeed by raising the penalty to more than $26. But here comes Kleiman and Kilmer's clever trick.

The enforcer gets everyone together and says, "Listen up, A through Z. From now on, I'm going to punish the cheater who comes first in the alphabet." Now A will stop cheating, because he knows he'll face certain punishment if he cheats. B, knowing that A won't cheat, will then realize that if he cheats, he'll face certain punishment, so B will stop cheating. Now C, knowing that A and B won't cheat, will reason that he had better stop cheating too. And so on ... with the result that nobody will cheat.

Interesting application of game theory. Hope the RIAA is dumb enough not to use it.

Really cool comic with some neat facts about coffee.

One of the more contentious things in the negotiation between an entrepreneur and a VC over a financing, particularly an early stage financing, is the inclusion of an option pool in the pre-money valuation. As my friend Mark Pincus likes to say, "it's just another way to lower the price".

I'll accept that critique. And take it one step further. The option pool is absolutely a piece of the price negotiation. But it is a very important one as I'll explain.

Great writeup on how an option pool affects VC negotiations.

This post is going to show how the same things can be done when using a native graph database, namely Neo4j. To begin with it's good to have a grip on how your data actually looks, and when it comes to graphs I prefer a graphical representation, so here goes:

Neo4j is definitely a rockin' piece of software :)

Training monkeys on a two-choice visual task, researchers found that the animals’ brains kept track of recent successes and failures. A correct answer had impressive effects: it improved neural processing and sent the monkeys’ performance soaring in the next trial. But if a monkey made a mistake in one trial, even after mastering the task, it performed around chance level in the next trial—in other words, it was thrown off by mistakes instead of learning from them.

Wow. Gotta love an on-chip terabit switch :)

Conversely, if you’re building a real-time web service, think not only in terms of the value it provides to producers of content, but also in how you can make it valuable for the consumers of content. “Find out that the balloon boy news was a hoax, within a minute” is not valuable enough to most people to warrant the constant interruptions. If you don’t provide some kind of tangible value to people, your service probably won’t be successful in the long run, however trendy and sophisticated the technology.

Yes! Fully concur. Real-time notifications are a tool, like anything else, and going full-bore with real-time for everything is a serious mistake.