June 06, 2006
New Civ4 mod Released
My friend Christian has been working with several other people on a major mod to Civ4. The mod is called Total Realism 2.0. The announcement and details are found on the forum announcement, and you can get more details on the project page.
Posted by mishkin at 10:21 AM
April 05, 2006
Friend's Blog
A friend that I met in Jersey City, Laura Harley, has a blog about music and art.
Posted by mishkin at 02:56 AM
December 02, 2005
Amazing Programmers Reference: Katas
Code Kata lists many very interesting practice coding or coding-related exercises. I haven't done any of them yet myself, but I certainly will be. This would be a great mechanism for learning a new programming language. I will be adding this to my list of Software Resources.
Posted by mishkin at 06:17 PM
October 20, 2005
Daz 3D
Free 3D human figure modelling software: http://www.daz3d.com. Why am I telling you about it? Because I love 3D software and I'm always looking out for cool stuff and because part of the license to use it for free includes telling 2 other people about it... at that would include you, dear reader.
Posted by mishkin at 05:25 PM
August 23, 2005
My Friend Danio
Danio has a blog! He actually writes in it and puts effort into his posts! I'm never going to be able to read back through all of them. Hi Danio!
Posted by mishkin at 08:35 AM
August 11, 2005
2005 Mazda 6 GS Stick Shift
I'm going to lease a car. I have driven so many different rental cars for work it has become very difficult for me to be in a crappy car. I decided that my business would lease a car for me to use for work in the states. So I got a Mazda 6. Actually, I haven't heard back yet about the financing... hopefully today. Then it will take a little while longer to actually get the car. I'm hoping by Monday :-) but that's probably optimistic.
My dad has been visiting since Sunday night. We've been super busy. He's helped me out with my Agile Work Seminar that I'm presenting for the first time as a coherent whole on Friday. I've done the bits before, but this is my first time putting them all together. Fun!
Dad also has lots of photos from his trip to visit Alexei in Beijing. I've only seen some of them so far...
Posted by mishkin at 09:43 AM
August 04, 2005
Stickmen
Christian showed me this amazing flash stuff: stickmen fighting.
Posted by mishkin at 08:45 AM
July 31, 2005
Toilet Trouble?
Here's an in-depth course on toilet function and repair. Fun! I might be able to learn how to repair our toilets!
Posted by mishkin at 01:57 PM
July 16, 2005
Fonts for Many Languages
http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/fontguide/
Posted by mishkin at 10:54 PM
July 15, 2005
Alternative Power Sources - DIY
http://www.otherpower.com/ - has a cool wind power project!
Posted by mishkin at 12:16 PM
DIY LCD Projector Project
http://inventgeek.com/Projects/HomeTheater/HomeTheater.aspx
Posted by mishkin at 11:18 AM
July 05, 2005
Sun Screen? Bah!
Vitamin D may be effective in fighting cancer, including skin cancer. Kinda cool... eh?
Posted by mishkin at 01:24 PM
July 03, 2005
Hybrid car that can be plugged in
Too bad it's a custom modification.
Posted by mishkin at 11:29 PM
June 30, 2005
Neet article about starting anything.
Guy Kawasaki: The Art of the Start
Posted by mishkin at 08:11 PM
June 28, 2005
Too Bizarre NOT to Mention It
Check out the real article on zombie dogs - dogs killed and then brought back to life.
Posted by mishkin at 12:20 AM
May 25, 2005
Found a great online resource
http://www.scriptarchive.com/ has many excellent, easy-to-use scripts for web servers.
Posted by mishkin at 02:47 AM
May 12, 2005
Article about starting businesses when young
http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html
Posted by mishkin at 10:11 PM
May 06, 2005
Free Radicals, Anit-oxidants and Aging
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=0004094A-849D-127A-849D83414B7F0000
Posted by mishkin at 12:36 PM
May 02, 2005
Agile Advice Blog - Growing Contributions
The Agile Advice blog that I have set up now has two contributors besides myself. There are two more poeple who I am hoping will become contributors shortly. This blog is probably the best way to get insight into the sort of work I am doing.
Posted by mishkin at 05:56 PM
Irreducible Complexity
Both Slashdot and Kuro5hin are running a big discussion about intelligent design and irreducible complexity. I posted discussion entries about my formal discussion of irreducible complexity where I essentially disprove it from a formal stance. I've had 118 hits on the page today as a result (so far).
Update: 3 hours later that's at 285 hits!
Posted by mishkin at 02:49 PM
April 28, 2005
Very Cool Web Standards Test
http://webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html#top
Posted by mishkin at 11:02 AM
April 18, 2005
Satellite Image of My Home
Courtesy of Google Maps. To find our house... There is a major street going roughly N-S. There is also a street coming from the East and ending in a "T" at the N-S street. We are on the West side of that intersection. We're the upside-down "L" shaped house in the very center.
Oh, and here's the Chicago Temple.
Oh, and here's where I lived and worked in Jersey City.
Posted by mishkin at 10:52 AM
April 17, 2005
God, Police and a Movie
A few hours ago, Cal and I were sitting quietly at a cafe, talking. I noticed the time and realized that we had 5 minutes to get to our movie. Cal and I jumped in my rented Corolla and sped off. Along the Kingsway, I joked with Cal "We're on a mission from God. Speeding is okay and we'll get there with time to spare." I'm weaving through traffic, going 80k in a 60k zone. I pass a large white Suburban-style truck only to get stuck behind a slow-moving car. A few seconds later I notice lights flashing in my rear-view mirror. The white truck was a cop. So I flash my turning signal on, slow down and pull over into a side street. The conversation went something like this:
Cop: "Some sort of emergency?"
Me: "No."
Cop: "Did you know you were going eighty in a sixty zone?"
Me: "I didn't realized I was going that fast sir."
Cop: "Can I see your driver's license and registration please."
Me: "Sure, the car's rented." (hand over docs)
Cop: "You didn't notice my marked police truck?"
Me: "No sir."
Cop: "You just weren't paying attention."
Cop goes away for a few seconds, probably checking license and registration. Comes back.
Cop: "Where were you going in such a hurry?"
Me: "We're late for a movie."
Cop: "You realize that's a $110 ticket and 3 points?"
Cop hands me my docs and walks away.
No ticket. Mission from God, indeed.... but I guess I have to appreciate the humorous warning from on High.
Posted by mishkin at 12:27 AM
April 10, 2005
Excellent article about Copyright, Music and P2P in Canada
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_4/geist/
Posted by mishkin at 10:17 PM
April 09, 2005
Gardening and Landscaping
Today I bought a cool laser level for doing my landscaping for oue front yard. It is a simple class II laser with a mount and a tripod. The mount is three-point adjustable level with a bulls-eye bubble, much like a mount for a surveyor's transit. The set cost me $50.00. I'm going to build my own vertical height stick by using a 1x2 piece of wood, mounting a metric scale to it and a bulls-eye level bubble. This will allow me to create very accurate grades. Im going to have to adjust the drainage in my front yard by creating a rock stream bed.
Posted by mishkin at 07:18 PM
April 06, 2005
Launch of AgileAdvice.com Blog
Two days ago I set up the AgileAdvice.com blog. It will be a professional blog about Agile Work including of course Agile Software Development. Both my dad Garry Berteig and my friend and co-worker Christian Gruber will be contributors. I have already posted one entry about how lean queueing theory applies to agile product backlogs.
Posted by mishkin at 11:31 PM
Crazy stuff about words in the English language
http://members.aol.com/gulfhigh2/words.html
Posted by mishkin at 03:00 PM
March 31, 2005
I've added more of my music...
I've encoded seven songs which I consider finished. They can be found at http://www.berteig.org/mishkin/BrokenPhetishMusic.html. There is a nice variety of music including some dance, some ambient, some experimental, and some je-ne-sais-quoi.
Posted by mishkin at 12:47 AM
March 30, 2005
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
I'm very concerned about my impact on the environment. There are many signs that things are changing for us here on Earth. Here is yet another report about this: the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.
Posted by mishkin at 09:16 AM
March 26, 2005
This is a very cool fun Flash thingy
http://www.globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml
Posted by mishkin at 04:27 PM
March 08, 2005
AI Processor
Slashdot has an article about a PPU - Physics Processing Unit. It would be cool for computer games since it would allow more realistic physics modelling. Another cool idea would be to have an AI Processing Unit. I could have some basic stuff like some back-propagation classifiers, some random number generators for different probability distributions, some fuzzy logic capabilities, various path-finding heuristics, etc. I think one would want to keep it pretty low-level so that the applicability was broad.
Posted by mishkin at 10:50 PM
February 10, 2005
Solar Vehicles
Solar powered small vehicles. Very cool, very inexpensive.
Posted by mishkin at 01:38 AM
December 29, 2004
Good Link about Learning French
How I learned French in One Year. For what it's worth, I still think that Rosetta Stone is an excellent method for learning a foreign language.
Posted by mishkin at 10:10 AM | Comments (0)
December 26, 2004
Moles and Games
Found a mole in our basement - the small furry kind - the kind that moves around, not the kind on one's skin. And played a bit of Morrowind again. Justice has been enjoying a game called "Blackbelt Chinese" - basically Mah Jong for learning Chinese characters by matching them with little iconic pictures. My mom is visiting. I would like to highly recommend a software product: "DVD Idle" for allowing viewing of any region DVD's as if they were region-free. Also has nifty stuff like allowing you to automatically skip the FBI warnings and the previews (particularly obnoxious on Disney DVD's) to go directly to the menu or the film itself.
This is the extended entry designed specifically to irritate a particular "Y".
Posted by mishkin at 05:30 PM | Comments (1)
December 21, 2004
Changing my Tune
I recently purchased two Linksys NLSU2 Network Storage Link thingees...
At first I was very very disappointed with them: I couldn't get them to work with my external USB2.0 hard drive enclosures. They wouldn't format the disks. I did tonnes of web searching and finally decided to try upgrading the firmware to some open source stuff. And it worked! Now I love these things. I've got two 200GB disks each in a separate enclosure. One disk holds all my stuff: personal and business files, mp3s, etc. The other disk is the backup. The NLSU2 does the backup automatically for me every night. Okay, so its not off-site, but it's a sight better than before (no backups). Now. If you're not comfortable doing risky things with your hardware, I strongly recommend avoiding this product. However, if you're technically minded and interested in fiddling a bit, these things are yet another great product from Linksys.
Posted by mishkin at 01:14 PM | Comments (0)
November 08, 2004
Painting by dad...
Posted by mishkin at 10:45 PM
October 25, 2004
Skype
Thanks to my friend Jesse at iSEC Partners LLC I have discovered Skype. Go get it! Save money on phone bills, if you have a good internet connection. Oh, and conference call for super cheap - just did a conference call with Jesse, Christian (on their computers) and my dad (on his cell phone)!!! Woo hoo!
Posted by mishkin at 11:24 PM
August 31, 2004
OpenOffice.org Tools and Software Resources
It's really early in the morning: 4:54am. I've just finished writing up a cool little OpenOffice.org spreadsheet to help calculate ROI on rental properties. Basically it allows a whole bunch of parameters to be set relating to mortgage, expenses, income etc. I've created a new web page to highlight tools that I create in OpenOffice.org. You can download the spreadsheet from there if you're interested. The sample data shows what we did with our house in Elmvale (although not completely since it assumes we were renting it for the full 5 years). Let me know if you would like to see it changed in any way! Next step? Maybe a version for MIDP2.0 devices such as the Palm...
I've made some updates to my list of resources for software professionals.
Posted by mishkin at 04:54 AM