Perceptum Thought Squad

Bryan and I have recently begun to adopt Google Wave as our central tool for business communications – as a distributed development house, with he and I living in different provinces, good communication is essential. Google Wave is proving to be an exceedingly useful as a communications medium. We've found that collaborating on software specifications through wave is just so much better than working off traditional documents, because the “document” can evolve naturally. We can work on draft documents together without needed to shoot different versions of a spec backwards and forwards between each other, having to keep track of who has the “latest copy”, and having to wait until it is “our turn” to edit. Google wave makes genuine realtime collaborative composition possible, and this is a big win.

• What is Synergy+?
• Interesting features
• The Problem
• The Solution

What is Synergy+?

Synergy+ (synergy-plus) lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, without special hardware. All you need is a LAN connection. It's intended for users with multiple computers, where each system uses its own display. It's a little like having a 2nd or a 3rd desktop... It's not a KVM or VNC tool, but it does achieve similar results (but with added convenience). No need to press any buttons when you want to change desktops, and your keyboard input goes to the same screen that your mouse cursor is on.

Interesting features

* Move your mouse easily between computers
* Requires nothing other than existing ethernet
* Copy and paste between your computers
* No need to press any buttons (unlike KVM)
* You can still use multiple monitors on the same computer

I have been looking into SCRUM processes again, in an attempt to improve our delivery, customer experience and quality. I found Hamid's awesome 10 minute overview of SCRUM. Check it out if you are at all interested in SCRUM. Its really well produced, and a great overview.

I've just put up a new blog entry. that tries to capture the gist of the great African philosopher Paulin Hountondji's book "African philosophy : myth and reality".

Hope you enjoy.
Bomoko

Back in 2006, Steve Yegge wrote a really great blog (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/math-for-programmers.html) about what Maths programmers should / can learn and how / why. If you have a moment - go read it. Its inspiring to any programmer, who like me, suffer from a somewhat knee-jerk reaction to a discipline that, if embraced, can be wholly enlightening and actually - as Steve suggest - (whispers *fun*)

Perceptum lends its ethos from our understanding of Manuel DeLanda's sense of how things are versus how they could (or should) be.

In an interview DeLanda is quoted as saying "I agree that the domination of this century by linguistics and semiotics (which is what allows us to reduce everything to talk of “frameworks of interpretation”), not to mention the postcolonial guilt of so many white intellectuals which forces them to give equal weight to any other culture’s belief system, has had a very damaging effect, even on art. Today I see art students trained by guilt-driven semioticians or postmodern theorists, afraid of the materiality of their medium — whether painting, music, poetry, or virtual reality (since, given the framework dogma, every culture creates its own reality). The key to break away from this is to cut language down to size, to give it the importance it deserves as a communications medium, but to stop worshipping it as the ultimate reality. Equally important is to adopt a hacker attitude toward all forms of knowledge: not only to learn UNIX or Windows NT to hack this or that computer system, but to learn economics, sociology, physics, biology to hack reality itself. It is precisely the can-do mentality of the hacker, naive as it may sometimes be, that we need to nurture everywhere."