Category Archives: Uncategorized

Donnie Darko

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I just went to download the song “Mad World”, which is featured in a really cool commerical for Gears of War.

When I went to download it, I found that the song, along with a remix, were part of the Donnie Darko sound track.

Donnie Darko was one of those movies that almost no one saw, and somehow I ended up renting it, and it was fantastic.

I guess I am really attracted to movies like Darko.  The Butterfly Effect was another movie that the critics, and most people I guess, didn’t like, but I also throught it was really cool.

Both feature people who are experiencing things that shouldn’t be happening…  I guess you could throw the Matrix movies in with this group too, but they were really popular.

Another one like these is The Forgotten, where a Mother wakes up and finds that no one can remember that she had a child at one point.  She questions her own sanity, as does Darko and so does the Aston Kutcher character in Butterfly.

The Mothman Prophecies is also a pretty similar film, although, not quite as good. 

But all of these movies kept me very interested, and really left a creepy feeling after they were over.

 

University of Chicago Academic Calendar

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I find myself frequently trying to find the dates on this calendar, and I can never find any links to this site.

http://academic-calendar.uchicago.edu/future/index.html

It has all the dates of academic interest (days off, starting and ending days of each quater).

This quater I am planning on taking Bioinformatics.

I saw a presentation on Bioinformatics at Fermi Lab.  They have searching programs to look at, I believe, the genome sequence, to find similar patterns.  Pretty interesting.

Hopefully the course will be good too!

Getting Real

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Here is the online version (free) of 37Signals.com book on development: Getting Real.

I think they have basically an agile approach to not only software development but business as well.

Like almost all development methodologies, I think some of their ideas are pretty valid, unless they aren’t.

For example, some of the things I hear a lot from the sort of XP / Agile development styles are things like:

 “Get your app out as soon as possible, even if it isn’t fully debugged or fully complete.  Let your users tell you what features need to be added, rather than spending the time guessing what they want”

and

“2 rules of performance optimization. 1) Don’t.  2) Not yet!”

 

1) If you get your app out, and you start spending you time getting people to use it, and it sucks, then you have actively made people who had no opinion of your product now have a negative opinion.  If you fix the bugs and add features later, they will just remember that they tried it, and it sucked.

2) You can always add performance optimization later, except what about when need to rewrite 2 months of work because you were too lazy to spend an extra 4 hours during the design phase to build in some ability to scale?