thehoffmen

With relatively little effort (one afternoon of listening and “voting” for particularly poor or good songs) I was able to “tune” www.pandora.com to play a steady stream of trance music that perfectly matches my desired sound background for coding tasks.

I’m not particularly picky about my trance, so that may be part of it, but I did have as many thumbs down as up the first day. Now that I’ve been listening off and on for about two weeks, I’ve had very few thumbs down. Not a lot of thumbs up either (every time I’ve identified one, it was already marked with a thumbs up.)

My experience with creating a “nothing but Rush” station hasn’t worked as well. It would play a fair amount of Rush, but never got to the point where it played nothing but Rush, which is what I was hoping to achieve. My tastes in the “rock” genre is far more specific, so perhaps it needs more training? Don’t know. Although, it did suggest some nice Steve Morse, someone I’d completely forgotten about.

All in all, a big thumbs up for Pandora!

Sadly, the NSF is once again showing it’s altruistic colors (I guess I should never be surprised when an agency such as it is altruistic) with it’s recent announcement of the 14 engineering challenges facing the 21st century.

What a paultry list that confuses politics with engineering in over half of the cases. “Restore and improve urban infrastructure” is not an engineering challenge. Neither is “prevent nuclear terror.” These are political problems, as are at least half of the items listed. Taking the urban infrastructure as a single example. We know how to build infrastructure. By challenge I take it to mean, “something we don’t know how to do now.” Well, I think it’s pretty clear we know how to build cities. Maybe not cities that the politically correct want us to build, but for those of us who live in reality, the cities are great. The issue is a political one in that city governments (at least US major metropolitan areas) are typically the most corrupt and it shows in their urban cores. It’s really that simple. Reality cannot handle contradictions, it pays you back for your contradictions. Always. And we see it in the urban core. I could write an essay on the irrelevance of half of the list, but that would digress me from my main point. Which is, what are the *real* engineering challenges for the next 100 years.

So, here is my list of engineering challenges, in case you care.

• Commercialization of space (the engineering aspects, again, huge political aspects, we ignore those here, and won’t mention this again.) including routine commercial interplanetary travel.
• Programming the human (and non-human) genomes
• Direct human machine interfacing
• Extend human like conciousness indefinitely, either through life extension enabled by nano-technology or uploading into computers
• Nano technology to rework human beings, and multitudinous other entities
• Energy from Fusion (hey, they got at least one right….)
• Get computers to pass a real TuringTest.
• Create robots that can pass as humans (this is one the Japanese are taking very seriously)

Well, not bad for 5 minutes work, and a hell of a lot more interesting than the fluff from the NSF.

Setting up a new computer from scratch. Given my profession amazing how long that’s been. Here’s the software list.

• java ee
• eclipse
  • subclipse
• cygwin
  • emacs
  • postgress
  • subversion
  • cvs
  • wget
  • bash
  • perl
  • python
  • ruby
• maven
  • Maven eclipse plugin
• ant
• mysql
• putty
• tomcat

My first post, on this website. Been a while since I’ve had a real website…. 15 years in fact. How the fly does time! Welcome, and hope you enjoy the trip. Of course, these days I is the wrong word to use. This is WE, US, All of us. That is, THEHOFFMEN!!!!