“Capstone projects and time management”
Joel On Software, on one of the few similarities between student projects and professional ones:
It’s taken me a while, but I finally learned that long-term deadlines (or no deadlines at all) just don’t work with professional programmers, either: you need a schedule of regular, frequent deliverables to be productive over the long term.
That applies to things like Project X too, a fact I’ll have to keep in mind.
“The Status of the P Versus NP Problem”
“It’s one of the fundamental mathematical problems of our time, and its importance grows with the rise of powerful computers.”
“Privacy”
Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, has a unique perspective on the world’s ever-decreasing personal privacy. (Hint: it’s not all bad.)
“Terrorists Strike U.S. Infrastructure”
We just can’t seem to stop those darn terrorists.
“A Language of Smiles”
Musings on how the muscles used to enunciate a language might affect the mood of the culture that speaks it. I find this stuff fascinating.
(For what it’s worth, I lean toward the “classical conditioning” hypothesis, though the “intrinsic properties” idea could also have merit.)
“Boffins ‘write directly to memory’ of living brains”
Happy Hallowe’en! Here‘s a vaguely Hallowe’en-themed article I stumbled across last week. It’s exciting, but the scary part is what an amoral dictator could do with it once it’s perfected.
“Six diseases you never knew you could catch”
More fascinating research.
VMware Fusion 3
The guys at VMware have really improved VMware Fusion.
Most of the claimed improvements were apparently made for Windows 7, which I’m not running yet, but it’s a major improvement even without that. With version 2 (at least on this MacBook Pro), hard drive accesses from the VMs were extremely slow, though the virtual machines ran at essentially bare-metal speeds otherwise. I bought version 3 very early yesterday, and after fixing a minor problem with the VMware Tools installation script on Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit, it ran beautifully — and disk accesses are much faster now, with both it and my Windows XP VMs. Ridiculously so, in fact… they seem to be at near-bare-metal speeds too now.
I’m seeing some odd behaviors with memory on my Ubuntu (64-bit) VM. Memory usage climbs to well over 90% usage over about fifteen seconds sometimes, for no apparent reason, then later drops back to less than 50% at about the same rate — again, for no reason I can find. But the VM seems to work fine throughout it, so maybe it’s not a problem.
In addition to the speed improvements, several minor irritations when running some programs have been fixed: shift-select operations (which didn’t work at all in v2), Windows mouse cursor stuff (the cursor would appear in odd colors, or only appear as a solid black block, in 8-bit color mode in v2 — required by some games), and various occasional screen resolution bugs. Probably others too, those are just the ones that I’ve noticed so far.
I’m very happy with the upgrade. Well worth the money, in my opinion.
“Comcast pop-ups alert customers to PC infections”
I don’t know why ISPs didn’t start doing this ten years ago. It was easily possible then, and there was certainly a need for it at that point too. I hope more of them pick it up in the future.