Sean’s Mental Walkabout

‘Orphan Works’ Copyright Law Dies Quiet Death | Threat Level from Wired.com
Sadly, the House isn’t going to look at this at all.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Amazon.com: Sports Night: The Complete Series 10th Anniversary Edition: Peter Krause, Felicity Huffman, Thomas Schlamme: Movies & TV
If you haven’t seen this show, you are missing out big time. Buy this and correct it.

freshmeat.net: Project details for ProcessMaker OSS
ProcessMaker is workflow and business process management software that allows small to medium-sized organizations to automate document intensive, approval-based processes across various systems including finance, HR, and operations. An entirely Web-based, AJAX-enabled application built on the popular open source WAMP/LAMP stacks, it includes tools to design forms, create documents, assign roles and users, create routing rules, and send alerts. A full service-orientated architecture (SOA) and Web Services interface allows the software to directly connect with popular business intelligence, content management, and enterprise resource planning systems.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Web 2.Rockstar: The robotic tale of Jonathon Coulton: Page 1
Susan and I went to Coulton’s show in NYC a few months ago, and it was hands down the best show I’d ever been to. Goes to show that there is a way to make a living under creative commons.

Overturning Copernicus, eliminating dark energy
A new model that eliminates dark energy from the universe equations. Plus, I like how the article ends…

“In addition to the concepts put forth, this paper illustrates nicely how science works. Pseudoscience often argues that controversial or contrarian papers and ideas never get published, suggesting that the “establishment” won’t listen to new ideas. But this paper puts forth a completely novel idea, and in the process overturns a long held philosophical pillar of astronomy, and yet it is set to be published in one of the top-tier physics journals.

The main idea put forth here is vastly different from the generally-held consensus of how the universe works; however, as in all of science, every idea is tentative. Future surveys of supernovae may tell us whether or not we are special in relation to the rest of the universe.”

Popularity: 1% [?]

The traditional workplace is broken - (37signals)
dead on

rc3.org — Why executive compensation should be on the table
“The bailout is corporate welfare. Welfare is supposed to be for people who have no other option. I don’t know whether limiting executive compensation is the right penalty for participating companies, but some penalties are essential or this is just a handout.”

Windows 7 to Dump E - Webmonkey
And now “un-bundling” is cool? Interesting.

Popularity: 1% [?]

New Furniture With Echoes Of Past — Courant.com
Great article on my friend Mike Fogg who does custom furniture work in Connecticut

Popularity: 1% [?]

Go Big Always - Anatomy of the Enterprise Octopus
Fun graphics, plus some good insight.

Server-side JavaScript on the Java Virtual Machine (Google I/O Session Videos and Slides)
This is really good. While there is a blog post writup on this, watch the youtube recording instead, you’ll get a lot more out of it.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Will your next meeting pass the “blizzard goggles” test? - (37signals)
I need to start doing this a lot more. Meetings suck off way to much actual productive time.

Obama/Clinton support visualizer that rocks - (37signals)
Ok, I’ll stop linking in 37 signals blog posts soon, but it’s impressive how much good stuff is in this backlog. This is a brilliant visualization tool.

Workplace Experiments - (37signals)
It’s reasons like this that while everyone wants to become google, google wants to become 37signals (and I really wish I still had that graphic around somewhere).

Cooking For Engineers - Step by Step Recipes and Food for the Analytically Minded
The cook charts are just amazing. I’m going to have to check out a few more things on here.

“You have to treat your employees like customers” - (37signals)
In an era where most of a companies actual resource is it’s people, this hits the nail on the head

Dunning-Kruger effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge (or skill) tend to think that they know more (or have more skill) than they do, while others who have much more knowledge tend to think that they know less.”

Public Speaker - ActiveWiki
Seriously? Active worlds users only get to hear the 50 closest people to them?

Phusion Passenger™ 2.0 RC 1 and Ruby Enterprise Edition released « Phusion Corporate Blog
Interesting, they also support django now. Passenger is definitely a great piece of software.

Popularity: 13% [?]