Dave Naffziger's Blog

Cool by Dave Naffziger + on September 11, 2007 at 11:00 pm

Interesting:

First unmanned attack squadron. The Air Force has long resisted the idea that unmanned aircraft would become the dominant platform, but that looks like it is beginning to change.
Proximity is a Hack. Tim Converse, formerly of Yahoo Search and now at Powerset, offers a great writeup about the limits of keyword proximity in determining relevance.
Cure for fear. MIT biochemists have identified a molecular mechanism behind fear, and successfully cured it in mice.

Cool:

Theo Jansen’s Kinetic Sculptures (from Kurt). Incredible wind-powered constructions that literally walk along the beach. Stunningly beautiful. You can find more incredible videos with a simple YouTube Search
Democratic sports team management. Chip in $50 and get an equal say in the management of an English Soccer Team I’m really curious to see how this real-world experiment in the wisdom of the crowds works out.
Photographic memory demonstration. (from Ed). An autistic British man redraws every last detail of historic Athens based on a 30 min helicopter ride.

Useful:

Time to First Byte Measurement Tool (from Casey). While we’ve been working on JB’s page performance, this simple Firefox add-on is great for taking simple ad-hoc measurements of the time that web pages take to deliver the first byte.
Reduce Firefox memory leakage. Firefox invariably ends up using 300MB of RAM after a solid day’s usage. This page has a list of problematic extensions that should theoretically improve memory management, although none have solved my issues.
Excel 07 (I’m not sure where I link). I’ve been using Excel 2007 for a few months now. While I found the new menu system a bit awkward at first, it is actually significantly faster once you learn it. However, the largest improvement was definitely the 1M+ row count - a simple, but hugely beneficial change.
Related Posts