New blog

I've got a blog on the front page of my website now (ie: Emlyn O'Regan's Website) . It's likely to supercede this one, so anyone who is reading this (especially if anyone actually subscribes), prepare for this blog to grind to a halt. I'll probably keep it going until I can get an rss or atom feed coming out of my new blog (which requires a little bit of development yet on my part). Stay tuned...

National Novel Writing Month

National novel writing month! OMG! This is the most outlandish thing I've heard of in a long time. I'm going to do it! (I think the "National" relates to the US, but why worry about that?)

From the site:

What is NaNoWriMo?

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and -- when the thing is done -- the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.

Democratizing Innovation

This looks like an interesting book on the change from mass manufactured consumer goods to much more customised consumption possibilities - leading to people creating their own innovations, ie: self actualising rather than being sheep!

The book is free online in pdf format at the link above.

Start of Chapter 1 :
"When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services—both firms and individual consumers—are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents. Moreover, individual users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit from innovations developed and freely shared by others. The trend toward democratization of innovation applies to information products such as software and also to physical products."

The World Clock - Time Zones

Need to know what time it is in another country, or convert dates and times? The world clock can convert times in many understandable ways.

I just used it to work out when to start watching the Darpa Grand Challenge. It seems that around 6:30am over there on October 8 is about 10:30pm tomorrow (Saturday) night here in Oz, so that's when I'll start monitoring the site.

I'm excited!!!

Nick Cave's Love Song Lecture

I found a copy of Nick Cave's lecture on the Love Song online, and copied it onto my site. It's a truly extraordinary piece of writing. I've linked to that copy above, and include an excerpt below:

How beautiful the notion that we create our own personal catastrophes and that it is the creative forces within us that are instrumental in doing this. We each have a need to create and sorrow is a creative act. The love song is a sad song, it is the sound of sorrow itself. We all experience within us what the Portugese call Suadade, which translates as an inexplicable sense of longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the Love song is the light of God, deep down, blasting through our wounds.

I agree with his idea about inexplicable yearning inside us all, but I'm not convinced (as he is) that the love song is the ultimate genre for its expression, even though I'm a huge fan of his love songs.

But do read the transcript, it's a high quality use of anyone's time.

Battle of the giants: python bursts eating gator - Science - Specials

From the article:
A four-metre python exploded when it tried to swallow a two-metre alligator whole in Florida.

Scientists stumbled upon the gory remains in the Everglades last week.

Scientists have documented four encounters between the giant snakes and alligators in the last three years. The encroachment of Burmese pythons into the Everglades could threaten an $8 billion restoration project and endanger smaller species, said Frank Mazzotti, a University of Florida wildlife professor.

etc...

Thought for the day

A career in IT is like crossing a poluted stream by leaping from one
sinking turd to the next. Early on you think "eeew, a turd, better
leap onto that thing over there", then are surprised to find it's
another turd, lather rinse repeat. Eventually you realise it's all
turds and you stop bothering to try to keep your shoes clean.

Open Source: Now It's an Ecosystem (Business Week Online)

From the article: "This software movement is branching into not just mainstream business applications but also the associated services. And VCs are eager to help

Eighteen months ago John Roberts, Clint Oram, and Jacob Taylor decided to quit their jobs at Epiphany, a maker of customer-relationship software. The trio wanted to target the same market, but write a new application developed using open-source code. It took them only three months to create the program and just another month to close their first round of funding.

Little more than a year later, their company, SugarCRM, has given away more than 325,000 copies of its software, and raised a second round of capital, for a total of $7.75 million. "

Grand Challenge Home

I blogged this earlier this month (see "Robotic Vehicles Race, but Innovation Wins). It's happening soon, October 8. The link for this post goes to the home page, where you can see competitor's blogs, all kinds of background info, and where on October 8 the race will be online live.

Rational trigonometry

Wikipedia carries this entry on a new system of Trigonometry, to replace what we all learned in School. From the entry:


Rational trigonometry is a modern envisioning of trigonometry by Dr. Norman Wildberger of The University of New South Wales, explained in his book Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry.

Instead of distance and angle, it uses as its fundamental units quadrance (square of distance) and spread (square of sine of angle). This choice of variables enables calculations without square roots and trigonometric functions that generate irrational numbers - hence the name. For distinction, he refers to the traditional trigonometry as classical trigonometry.

It is otherwise broadly based on Cartesian analytic geometry, with a point defined as an ordered pair (x,y) and a line as a general linear equation Ax + By + C = 0.


It looks kind of cool. I get the feeling that it would feel weird to
use his approach for someone trained in "classical" trigonometry (his
term), until you grok it, then it would be really smooth.