Steve Polyak’s blog

brave new classroom 2.0

nobody@vox.com(Steve Polyak) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:58:03 -0500

Students at every level, from grade school to grad school, face dramatic changes in the institutions they attend thanks to new digital technologies. PCs, the Internet, whiteboards, presentation software, and other high-tech devices, once considered educational aides for the library, the media lab, and the home, are increasingly a central part of the classroom curriculum itself, with results that have yet to be fully understood.

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/10/brave-new-classroom-20-new-blog-forum/

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MIT's Introduction to Algorithms

nobody@vox.com(Steve Polyak) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:34:05 -0500

MIT's great lecture series on the classic Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest Introduction to Algorithms content. All software developers should be required to review the lectures in this course.

video

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large hadron rap

nobody@vox.com(Steve Polyak) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:45:10 -0500

it's, like physics... yo.

Large Hadron Rap

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the water

nobody@vox.com(Steve Polyak) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:19:18 -0500

the water washed away everything
but the chance to begin again

so we came from cities & towns,
from long golden fields
& we stood side by side
until we made a bridge to dry land,

back to a place
we have promised to hold safe
for each other's children,

back to a place
called America

- storypeople

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olivine?

nobody@vox.com(Steve Polyak) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:01:01 -0500

the mars phoenix onboard microscope analysis might have a nice chunk of olivine. we shall see what the results say...

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how to save a city

nobody@vox.com(Steve Polyak) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:59:22 -0500

the situation:

water rising well above the 500 year flood stages. flooding on all fronts.

the solution setup:

buy a massive amount of sand (actually something that looks more like kitty litter)
buy a massive amount of bags (burlap, plastic, etc.)
buy a massive amount of plastic ties to tie off the bag openings
put up 20-30 stations of sandbag manufacturing, each station consists of:

two saw horses
a wood panel with 3 holes cut out
three traffic cones turned upside down in the holes

the front line sandbag production jobs:

the bagger: the bagger sits in front of an inverted cone and places an empty bag beneath the cone opening
the digger: shovels the sand mixture into the inverted opening of the cone
the finisher: twists the bag and ties it off with a plastic tie
the pitcher: throws the completed bag into a forklift so that it can be loaded into a truck for distribution

requirements:

large machinery, dump trucks, forklifts, etc.
heavy gloves
lots of gatoraide, food stuffs

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An pan we fi waan you to shake dat ting

nobody@vox.com(Steve Polyak) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:45:48 -0500

To quote that modern day poet, Sean Paul, "An pan we fi waan you to shake dat ting" [reference]. word. shake indeed! the Mars Phoenix explorer has successfully managed to shake dat ting! Not quite ready to move to the wet chemistry (see Britannica.com ref) analysis though yet...

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linkedIn architecture

nobody@vox.com(Steve Polyak) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:59:58 -0500

read an interesting post about the architecture behind the professional networking site, linkedIn.

features: tomcat/jetty, mysql+oracle, spring, lucene, straight JDBC (no hibernate, etc)

Site Statistics
22 million members
4+ million unique visitors/month
40 million page views/day
2 million searches/day
250K invitations sent/day
1 million answers posted
2 million email messages/day
more at:

http://cookiesareforclosers.com/blog/2008/06/linkedin-architecture

oh, and here is my public profile on linkedIn :-)
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevepolyak

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Mars exploration

nobody@vox.com(Steve Polyak) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:12:28 -0500

Mars Phoenix is finally ready to do its soil analysis. For more on this amazing planet, see what Britannica has to say about Mars

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my MBA

nobody@vox.com(Steve Polyak) — Sat, 24 May 2008 10:41:17 -0500

really pleased so far with my macbook air (MBA)! my main machine at work is my ubuntu (hardy heron) dell 3GHz and my main machine at home is my Mac Pro. aside from being a perfectly capable machine in its own right (e.g. doing xcode iPhone sdk development, java-eclipse development, making keynote presentations) the MBA has quickly become my portable, always with me gateway to either machine via xwindows or remote management. as a bike commuter i get a little smile every time i slide this slim guy into my messenger bag. the keyboard feel great. i got a blue tooth mouse for longer work sessions. i also got a laptop case for it that was made from a recycled billboard sign. with the sling player it has become my portable television as well. yes, i am officially an apple fanboy now :-)

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