Dave Naffziger’s Blog

Interesting:

• First unmanned attack squadron. The Air Force has long resisted the idea that unmanned aircraft would become the dominant platform, but that looks like it is beginning to change.
• Proximity is a Hack. Tim Converse, formerly of Yahoo Search and now at Powerset, offers a great writeup about the limits of keyword proximity in determining relevance.
• Cure for fear. MIT biochemists have identified a molecular mechanism behind fear, and successfully cured it in mice.

Cool:

• Theo Jansen’s Kinetic Sculptures (from Kurt). Incredible wind-powered constructions that literally walk along the beach. Stunningly beautiful. You can find more incredible videos with a simple YouTube Search
• Democratic sports team management. Chip in $50 and get an equal say in the management of an English Soccer Team I’m really curious to see how this real-world experiment in the wisdom of the crowds works out.
• Photographic memory demonstration. (from Ed). An autistic British man redraws every last detail of historic Athens based on a 30 min helicopter ride.

Useful:

• Time to First Byte Measurement Tool (from Casey). While we’ve been working on JB’s page performance, this simple Firefox add-on is great for taking simple ad-hoc measurements of the time that web pages take to deliver the first byte.
• Reduce Firefox memory leakage. Firefox invariably ends up using 300MB of RAM after a solid day’s usage. This page has a list of problematic extensions that should theoretically improve memory management, although none have solved my issues.
• Excel 07 (I’m not sure where I link). I’ve been using Excel 2007 for a few months now. While I found the new menu system a bit awkward at first, it is actually significantly faster once you learn it. However, the largest improvement was definitely the 1M+ row count - a simple, but hugely beneficial change.