Determination, Success and Innovation

I’ve been interviewing for new positions at various companies, and one of the questions that seems to keep coming up is this idea of success can be attained if one works hard enough. And while I cannot know what they are expecting or looking to hear, as in what is the “right” response. I’m not willing to say anything that I don’t believe and as such I’ve repeatedly answered that there is an amount of luck associated with success. I’d like to explore the concept here, to potentially try to change the tide in society.

The idea that hard work alone leads to success, can be analyzed form the perspective of the Wright Brothers (you know the brothers who devised flight). At the time the government had given tons of money to Samuel Pierpont Langley:

 secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and one of the most esteemed scientists in the country. Langley was the only flight experimenter to get government funding.

–npr

While Samuel (along with many others going back to the time of Da Vinci) all worked on manned flight all had no success. So were they less dedicated than the Wright Brothers? Did they not try as hard as Orvill & Wilber? Were they less persistent? I wouldn’t say so, many people were just as willing to risk their lives to fly, so how did the Wrights’ get it right? I suppose many would say  “Insight”.

Lessons From Birdwatching

The Wright Brothers spent a great deal of time observing birds in flight. They noticed that birds soared into the wind and that the air flowing over the curved surface of their wings created lift. Birds change the shape of their wings to turn and maneuver. They believed that they could use this technique to obtain roll control by warping, or changing the shape, of a portion of the wing.

–Ref

Were the Wrights the first to look at birds and think.. “Hey they can fly why can’t we?”

Where does “Insight” come from?

Insight is also defined as noesis which is the magical switch that ‘clicks’ allowing someone to connect things in a unique novel combination resulting in knowing something new. A lot of the insight definition implies painstaking study of a problem or knowledge of the problem. However, the other half of the definitions lead to intuition, also commonly called “the gut feeling”.  An article by inc suggests:

In general, any experience is a good experience, and the more we have of them, the more accurate our gut feelings become.

–ref

Thus, Insight is all of the contributions (conscious and subconscious) which allow forward progress to be made. O.k. well that apparently answers the question, work, study, explore & repeat. Surely this is the only answer.. So why are there so many people out there who have been trying to have kids, studied, done everything right, are healthy, and still not reproductively successful?

Lets investigate the idea that there is “Luck” (or more realistically a chance/random component). At the very least we can roll back “Luck” to only one point in life (to simplify this discussion), Birth. All people are born on a spectrum from rich to poor, loving to abandoning and many other dimensions. But the thing here that plays into the above discussion is that of how experience parlays into intuition, which in turn relates to innovation and ultimately “Success”. By the above admittedly simple discussion, we can easily arrive on the notion that if you have more relevant experiences to a given problem (or opportunity) you will be more likely to have good intuition which is relevant to that situation. It should go without saying that the converse is also true, if you never experience things you will have no basis upon which to derive insight. Additionally, it is the nature of the experiences (good /bad, success to failure) that also educate your insight. If you’ve only ever been exposed to bad decisions with terrible (or no real positive) outcomes, you are ill-equipped to make big insightful innovations. So at the very least having a family that teaches hard work and dedication can lead to success (by example) you have managed to be “Lucky” and your are therefore more likely to be insightful and innovative.

So, the bottom line is if you want to be successful, surround yourself with successful innovative people, learn from them, and if your Lucky you too will succeed.

 

 

http://www.radiolab.org/story/radiolab-presents-media-busted-americas-poverty-myths/Radiolab

More Space Ship Comparisons

The Nerdist posted this:

In the original Star Wars movie, Han Solo boasted that his beloved Millennium Falcon was “the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.” In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, that meant that Solo’s ship was not only extremely fast, it was also capable of navigating a dangerous cluster of black holes with Han and Chewie at the helm.

But is the Millennium Falcon the fastest ship in the universe?

A newly released infographic tackles that question by comparing the Millennium Falcon and several other iconic sci-fi ships along with a few real world spaceships built by NASA. As it turns out, Solo’s ship really is among the fastest ever imagined. It just edges out Boba Fett’s Slave One as the fastest ship in the Star Wars universe. However, it only comes in as the sixth fastest ship on this list.

By no means is this infographic completely comprehensive. And we can’t help but notice that no ships from Babylon 5 or Farscape made the cut. But the infographic does pull in famous starships from numerous franchises and even a few obscure sci-fi films. Star Trek, Doctor Who, Stargate SG-1, Battlestar Galactica, Red Dwarf, Firefly, Transformers, and more are all represented here.

More intriguingly, the makers of this infographic actually considered the math when making the list. For example, “Eagle 5 from Spaceballs is said to be going ‘1,500 light leagues per minute.’ A league is the distance a man can walk in a day. If a light league is the distance light can go in a day, Eagle 5 can travel at 90,000 times the speed of light unless Lone Star has a bottle of Liquid Schwartz. Spaceball 1 can attain a new speed definitely faster than light speed. It’s a speed so fast it causes the universe to appear in plaid. After engaging Ludacris speed for 1 minute and 5 seconds of movie time, Barf says Spaceball One must have overshot the space RV by ‘a week and a half.’ This sets our top speed for the megalithic Spaceball One.”

And this image caught my eye:

It is very reminiscent of the ship size comparison post I’ve been keeping alive.

This Robotic Mannequin Can Match Your Exact Measurements And Improve Online Shopping

This mannequin looks like a suit or space age armor…

I Quit: What Really Goes on at Apple

This is why you should not support Apple products!

Road Less Travelled

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. – Steve Jobs, June 12, 2005.

I’ve just escaped the Apple institution. I’ve sent in my resignation, and fled down its bright white corridors curated by crass colourful pictures of iPhones past. I handed in my security pass and in return I was able to re-claim my creativity, individuality and free thinking from the secure Apple cloak room.  Finally now, for the first time in two years, I feel light, creative and inspired. I am again an individual with my own creative ideas…

View original post 1,473 more words

Stunning Time-Lapse Reveals Auroras and Earth From Space

National Geographic posted this Stunning Time-Lapse Reveals Auroras and Earth From Space:

Seriously the earth looks better from space…

Pictographs at Hegman Lake

Early in the summer of 2012, I went up to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW). I bought a Fischer #9 map from the Duluth Pack store  in Canal Park, and drove up to Ely for a day trip to Hegman. We rented canoes and equipment from Wilderness Outfitters, and drove up the Echo…

The road was  a bit bumpy, but that happens, the 80 rod portage into South Hegman was mostly down hill, and relatively well kept. We paddled across South Hegman to the North,  where you portage past a beaver dam (5 rods). We paddled north through a couple of sprinkles (drizzling rain) to a “promising”boulder/rubble wall or two, until we passed the Island and all the loose boulders, then we came to a Narrowing in the lake with a tall 20-40 ft mostly shear rock face, where half way up were the Pictographs.

N. Hegman Flowers by the Pictographs

Distant pictograph image (see the red Center Left) On the West Shore.

A fern

Pictograph

The view looking north while at the Pictographs

looking south on N. Hegman by the Pictographs

An interesting looking plant.. Sick maybe?

Looking south-east on by the Pictographs.

 

Since when is this a “Religious Symbol”

Symbology or the study of the meaning of symbols, has IMHO come to new importance in the Modern Apps era where you need to convey meaning in an image. I’ve no idea how this particular symbol has been designated as a “Religious Symbol”. Admittedly it does resemble a Triquetra in a new age sorta way. But I am confused then with what is meant as a “Religious Symbol”, because someone somewhere has bent the de facto meaning of the concept…  You know how all these youth’s nowadays have turned almost every symbol into something “tribal” or with barbed wire epitomized with these gems:

Is’t that Lovely? Because nothing say’s I’m a Bad @$$ like a barbed wire Heart.

MVC SVG Tutorial (Sample code)

We all know that it is best practice in a responsive world to use SVG, but this is slightly more complicated within the MVC Razor view engine. Since SVG files are recognized as xml files and not image files other steps must be taken. Here are the steps to get SVG working in your MVC Application:

1. Add some SVG files to your solution.
   I like The Noun Project for my icons so I am using a Factory from Amelia Wattenberger.  There are a lot of sources for getting and or making your own SVG. I’ve talked about them previously, and I recommend Inkscape since it is very full featured, free, and has plenty of good tutorials. I have also found it helpful to build out the raw image in Power Point and then go to image.online-convert.com to convert your simple image to something that is closer to what your looking for..
2. Add this Helper to your Solution:
   1. using System.Collections.Generic;
   2. using System.Reflection;
   3. using System.Xml;
   4. using System.Xml.Schema;
   6. namespace System.Web.Mvc.Html //<– Note this namespace!
   7. {
   8.     public static class HtmlHelperExtension
   9.     {
   10.         public static MvcHtmlString SVG(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper, string path, object htmlAttributes)
   11.         {
   12.             Dictionary<String, Object> attributes = new Dictionary<String, Object>();
   14.             var fullPath = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(path);
   15.             var xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
   16.             xmlDoc.Load(fullPath);
   17.             string xsi = “http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance&#8221;;
   18.             XmlSchema schema = new XmlSchema();
   19.             schema.Namespaces.Add(“xsi”, xsi);
   21.             PropertyInfo[] properties = htmlAttributes.GetType().GetProperties();
   22.             foreach (PropertyInfo propertyInfo in properties)
   23.             {
   24.                 if (xmlDoc.DocumentElement.Attributes[propertyInfo.Name] != null)
   25.                 {
   26.                     xmlDoc.DocumentElement.Attributes[propertyInfo.Name].Value =
   27.                         (string)propertyInfo.GetValue(htmlAttributes, null);
   28.                 }
   29.                 else
   30.                 {
   31.                     XmlAttribute xsiNil = xmlDoc.CreateAttribute(propertyInfo.Name, xsi);
   32.                     xsiNil.Value = (string)propertyInfo.GetValue(htmlAttributes, null);
   33.                     xmlDoc.DocumentElement.Attributes.Append(xsiNil);
   34.                 }
   35.             }
   36.             return new MvcHtmlString(  xmlDoc.OuterXml);
   37.         }
   38.     }
   39. }
3. Add this where Where you want your SVG to be Displayed. at this point it becomes a bit of a preference discussion. However the standard for choosing which tag to use tag seems to be: prefer object over embed. The helper above is to include the svg in the rendered HTML (without either the object or embed). The reason I choose this approach is multi-fold:
   • The object/embed approach is simple enough that you don’t really need the overhead of an Html Helper.
   • The helper can get inside the XML and make modifications on the SVG which makes it more extensive.
   • Syntactically it is more in “tune” with the Razor View Engine.
   • Better to reduce/reuse code.

   here is how you would use the HTML Helper:

4. 19. @Html.SVG(“/Images/icon_10948/icon_10948.svg”,
   20.        htmlAttributes: new { width=“351”, height=“257” })

   And here is a comparison of the footprint of all three approaches:
   It is easy to see that the HtmlHelper is a good compramise between the verbose and hard to maintain XCopy of the SVG XML into the cshtml file. and it is also shorter than the object approach.

I hope this helps you Happy Coding.

Infographic Misdirection and Bias Influencing

 

From the article
By Brandon Bailey

When I saw this infographic it instantly stuck me as off. I had to look very closely to discover exactly how it was misleading me. This article is clearly biased in the favor of Google, the info depicted here implies market share or importance of development to the observer. It becomes very clear that the author didn’t dig for breadth and this infographic is a much better representation of the viewpoint and focus of this articles author as opposed to the state of industry. There was no comment on Qualcomm Zeroth processors, and all of the approaches describer herein use CPU & GPU approaches not NPU.  Perhaps the blame should go to Doug Griswald the artist, please Doug read my post about infographics and data representation before you make another.


At the very least this infographic should have been in chronological order (which would put Microsoft as the last “achiever”), but to give the companies different sizes.. Come On man.. Seriously..

• Integrity -1
• Professionalism -2

 

 

Static Library vs Dynamic Linked Library (Lib vs. DLL)

The Kool Aid: “Using dynamic linking instead of static linking offers several advantages. DLLs save memory, reduce swapping, save disk space, upgrade easier, provide after-market support, provide a mechanism to extend the MFC library classes, support multilanguage programs, and ease the creation of international versions.”

Lib -This is a code “bundle” inside your .exe	DLL -This is a stand alone unit of code.
Performance
Code is always loaded with the executable Can speed up app load time	Small hit when the .dll loads  Can be deferred at App load time
Compiled Size
Larger file size for .exe	Many smaller files
ALM
Can only be used at compile time. Not prone to versioning problems. You will need to take extra steps to get the PDB’s rolled into the DLL PDB Must update each product which uses it separately Fights incompatibility issues requires you to replace the exe for upgrades. Some say Lib’s make it easier to support many platforms	Modularity Can Be used by multiple Applications. Can speed up development (reduced compile time) Can cause versioning problems. Can upgrade all products at once if dll is shared across product lines Forces you to update all related projects and can cause compatibility maintenance issues across your organization. Allows you to upgrade the application by replacing just the dll. Can make it easier to support new hardware or hardware changes
Operation
Used by the compiler at compile-time. Results in 1 Large file. Avoids dependency issues	Compiled and called at runtime. Results in many smaller files. Can be stored in the GAC
Misc.
All iOS binaries are static libs	Original implantation was the origin of DLL Hell Your Exe will produce a minimal Lib file at compile time to link to the dll Allow a game to easily support mods.
Architectural Consideration
Special care need to be taken when internal dependencies are not straight forward.	Allows for inter-process communication
Legal Implications
If you use an LGPL library statically your code automatically becomes Open Sourced	If you use an LGPL library then you only have to open source the changes made to that library/
Security
Everything is internal to the exe, thus contained	Data can potentially be ‘hacked’

If you are developing for windows 8 (win8)  then the quick answer is use a DLL

If your Developing for iOS then use a Lib

 

References:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/140061/when-to-use-dynamic-vs-static-libraries
• http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vcgeneral/thread/830bf2ad-3b42-43e2-963c-c0566b991f89/
• http://www.differencebetween.net/technology/difference-between-lib-and-dll/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic-link_library
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_library
• http://cboard.cprogramming.com/cplusplus-programming/30841-lib-vs-h-vs-dll.html
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1ez7dh12(v=vs.110).aspx