goldenv's link blog: 2008

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

How Caramel Developed a Taste for Salt - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/dining/31cara.html

Friday, December 5, 2008

Stuart Halloway on Programming Clojure

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Stuart Halloway on Programming Clojure

Stuart Halloway, author of "Programming Clojure", tells Susannah Pfalzer all about this new and cool programming language. Stuart explains how Clojure helps you move beyond noun-based programming toward verb-based programming, and why pure functions are important for concurrency. It's a lot of Lisp, but with Less parentheses--even fewer than Java itself. See how to be more expressive on the Java VM, and how Clojure is different from Scala and Groovy.

Monday, December 1, 2008

The Two Okinawan Diet Rules (or How I’m Getting Leaner During the Holidays)

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The Two Okinawan Diet Rules (or How I'm Getting Leaner During the Holidays)

Article by Leo Babauta. (Follow me on Twitter.)

Like many people, I tend to overeat during the holidays, from Thanksgiving through New Year's. It's kinda part of the tradition to consume huge amounts of food, you know?

And like many others, I also tend to gain weight during the holidays — some people can gain 5 or more pounds (though for most it's usually only a couple pounds).

Not this time around.

On Thanksgiving, while I enjoyed time with my family, and while everyone else pigged out, I ate moderately and wisely. And I felt great about it. I also got a great workout in the morning after — heavy deadlifts followed by two brutal 10-minute weight circuits and finished with 15 minutes of hard intervals.

This will be the healthiest holiday season ever for me. I'm also starting a meal plan and exercise routine that will have me drop some fat while gaining muscle by New Years, I promise. I'll publish more about this plan after I see the results (3 pounds dropped already).

But the really cool thing I started on Thanksgiving comes from the Okinawan people (who don't live too far away from my home, the beautiful island of Guam).

The Okinawan Diet Rules

The Okinawans (the indiginous people of the Ryukyu islands in Japan) are famous for having the longest life expectancy in the world. This single fact has had them studied from every angle, from diet to lifestyle to genetics to environment. And while all of these have played a factor, there's no doubt that their traditional diet has played a big part — when they eat a more modern, Western-style diet, they don't live as long or as healthy.

So what's their secret? Actually, there are two secrets (and they're not really secrets), and I used these rules to guide my eating on Thanksgiving (and beyond):

Rule 1. Eat to 80% full. The Okinawans call this rule "Hara Hachi Bu", and if you haven't tried it, you should. I did this on Thanksgiving — while I usually stuff myself with all the good food, I just ate until I was about 80% full. Of course, there's no way to know exactly how full you are, but it's a guideline. And as our brains are 10-20 minutes behind our stomachs, it usually turns out that when you think you're 80% full, you're actually full … while when we eat to 100% full, we are usually overstuffing ourselves.

The result of this rule for Okinawans is that they end up eating fewer calories than most people. They tend not to gain too much weight as a result, and coupled with their active lifestyles (they farm and garden and ...

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Constraint satisfaction problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_satisfaction_problem

Monday, November 24, 2008

GPS Tracklog: Garmin Oregon 400t review

http://gpstracklog.typepad.com/gps_tracklog/2008/08/garmin-oregon-4.html

Thursday, November 20, 2008

OAuth for Secure Mashups

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OAuth for Secure Mashups

Posted by Eric Sachs, Senior Product Manager, Google Security

A year ago, a number of large and small websites announced a new open standard called OAuth. This standard is designed to provide a secure and privacy-preserving technique for enabling specific private data on one site to be accessed by another site. One popular reason for that type of cross-site access is data portability in areas such as personal health records (such as Google Health or Microsoft Healthvault), as well as social networks (such as OpenSocial enabled sites). I originally became involved in this space in the summer of 2005, when Google started developing a feature called AuthSub, which was one of the pre-cursors of OAuth. That was a proprietary protocol, but one that has been used by hundreds of websites to provide add-on services to Google Account users by getting permission from users to access data in their Google Accounts. In fact, that was the key feature that a few of us used to start the Google Health portability effort back when it was only a prototype project with a few dedicated Googlers.

However, with the development of a common Internet standard in OAuth, we see much greater potential for data portability and secure mash-ups. Today we announced that the gadget platform now supports OAuth, and the interoperability of this standard was demonstrated by new iGoogle gadgets that AOL and MySpace both built to enable users to see their respective AOL or MySpace mailboxes (and other information) while on iGoogle. However, to ensure the user's privacy, this only works after the user has authorized AOL or MySpace to make their data available to the gadget running on iGoogle. We also previously announced that third-party developers can build their own iGoogle gadgets that access the OAuth-enabled APIs for Google applications such as Calendar, Picasa, and Docs. In fact, since both the gadget platform and OAuth technology are open standards, we are working to help other companies who run services similar to iGoogle to enhance them with support for these standards. Once that is in place, these new OAuth-powered gadgets that are available on iGoogle will also work on those other sites, including many of the gadgets that Google offers for its own applications. This provides a platform for some interesting mash-ups. For example, a third-party developer could create a single gadget that uses OAuth to access both Google OAuth-enabled AP...

Living Simply: The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Your Clutter

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Living Simply: The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Your Clutter

"Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you." - Lao Tzu

Article by Leo Babauta. (Follow me on Twitter.)

For many years, I was a packrat, clinging to possessions like a safety blanket, like trophies, like you might cling to the past. My life was filled with clutter, from my closets to my living room to my countertops to my desk at work.

That changed about a decade ago, when I realized that I simply had too much stuff.

I was owned by my possessions, and they were no longer making me happy. I wanted to conquer my clutter.

And so I did, one heap at a time. I think I saved the closets for last, because they were way too intimidating. But slowly, I made progress, and simplifying my possessions was (and is) an ongoing project.

Today I'm pretty happy with the way I've simplified my home (and workspace). I'm pretty minimalist, and while clutter still does accumulate when I'm not vigilant, I tackle it head on every now and then to keep things fairly clutter-free.

I'm not saying everyone needs to be as minimalist as I am. Take my minimalist workspace, for example — I don't expect anyone to reduce clutter that much, nor do I think they'd even want to. Everyone has their ideal level of simplicity — what matters most is keeping what's essential to you, and getting rid of the rest.

And so today I'll take a look at how you can conquer your clutter, no matter what your goals are or how bad things are now. Note: I've written about this topic a number of times before, but I thought I'd gather together the best strategies and tips into one powerful guide, useful both for those who have read previous articles and for those who haven't.

First: Why Should You Simplify?

What's the problem with clutter? Well, nothing, if that's the way you like things. Everyone lives differently, and I'm not saying the decluttered lifestyle is better than the cluttered one.

However, I've found some benefits of decluttering from my decade or so of experience with this issue:

Less stressful. Clutter can be a lot of visual distraction and mental stress. It's basically a bunch of things you have to do (put away clothes, file papers, pay bills, get rid of junk, etc.) that you're procrastinating on. While you don't want to think about them, in the back of your mind you know they're there.

More efficient. I don't know about you, but I work much better in an uncluttered home or workspace. There aren't as many distractions, which means I can focus...