Next was the future

The Next computer was way ahead of its time.

The presentation from Steve Jobs (from 1991?) shows some stuff that arrived much later on other platforms. Some of the stuff you can not do on windows even now. I recently learned that Doom and Quake was developed on a Next station ( http://rome.ro/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday.html ).

Christmas at the office

Pros and cons of working at x-mas:

+
No incomming phones
Can play loud music
Actually getting things done

-
At the office..

The homeless guy

Today I discovered a very interesting blog:
http://thehomelessguy.blogspot.com/

The guy writing the blog is homeless, and gives a very interesting perspective. It is nice that blogging enables people the media don't care about to be heard -- with their own voice, not spun by a journalist.

The power of X

I bought a Mac Mini when I was in NYC. Getting it to work in Norway was very simple. I used the travelers adapter for the power supply, connected a keybord, monitor and mouse, and pushed the power button. Worked like a charm!

OsX is very nice. It seems very solid and stable, and the possiblity of getting a computer virus is empirically much lower than with windows.

The next step is to install a pascal development environment. FreePascal / Lazarus is said to work, but first I need to install Xcode. It seems that it wasn't preinstalled on the machine, but it can be downloaded from Apples website. But to do that I need an AppleId, and I haven't gotten around to that yet. Another option is to develop on Windows with Delphi.Net, and deploy for Mono for the Mac. I have no idea if this is a workable option.

Bork Bork Bork

Early morning Sunday I leave for a two week long vacation in Denmark. The place is actually called "Bork"! Now we know where the chef in Muppet Show comes from.

The Search

I started reading "The Search" by John Battelle today. The subtitle is "How Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture". Very interesting stuff. Recommended.

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

An Inconvenient Truth

I saw the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" today. It is based on the talks former vice-president Al Gore has made about the global climate change. His main point is that the climate change is happening right now, that the consequences can be enormous, but that it is possible to reduce the problem if there is a political will to do so. The required technology is available now.

I think Gore's view is correct. All scientific studies agree that a human caused climate change is happening. Only two advanced economies has not signed the Kyoto agreement: Australia and the US.

Information about the movie can be found at: http://www.climatecrisis.net/

Coffee in New York

It is quite difficult to get a nice cup of coffee in New York. You have to go to the right places. If you go to Starbucks you get some brown liquid, but I would not call it coffee. You have to be especialle careful if you order an iced mocha. First of all they put to little espresso in it (even if you order a double). They also put far to many ice cubes in the cup, instead of shaking it with ice cubes and then removing them. The worst part is that you have to be very careful so that they don't put whipped cream on top. And even without wipped cream a large cup of mocha is 400 calories. A meal in itself.

There are exceptions, of course. For instance the coffee bar at Macys ("the worlds largest store") makes nice coffee.

Here is nice page with slander about Starbucks: http://starbucksgossip.typepad.com/

Post conference

The NAPW 2006 is over. It was a nice conference, and Bill Green did a great job as organizer. There were several interesting papers, but as far as I know not any big steps further in the theory of frontier estimation. It seems to me that the average quality of papers is higher now than is was 5 years ago, but we are still waiting for the Next Big Step. I think the three main challenges in DEA theory is (1) getting better at estimating and correcting for sampling error and measurement error, (2) getting better ways of discovering the reasons for the difference in efficiency between firms, and finally (3) making a tighter connection between DEA and SFA.

I will stay in New York City on vacation until July 5th. I can confirm that this is the city that never sleeps!

Hot in the City

Yesterday was spent walking around Manhattan. After a little recon in the area around Times Square, I decided to wallk to lower Manhattan. I found out that the distance down to 12th street and back is a long walk. Furthermore, with the humid weather this time of year it makes for a really sweaty experience. But on the other hand, I guess it is good exercise.

I found out that a pub close to my hotel shows every game from the World Cup in soccer. Only problem is the time difference between the east cost and Germany. The two games tonight start at 11pm and 03am.

Business and pleasure in New York

Yesterday I arrived in New York City. The main reason for this trip is to attend the North American Productivity Workshop (NAPW2006) at Stern Business School. I will also take a few days vacation after the workshop. Right now it is very hot and raining on Manhattan. The hotell I stay in is "New York Inn". It is located on 8th avenue, close to Time Square. It is cheap ($100), but I think that the standard of the rooms and the hotel in general reflects the price. I don't mind, though. The reasons for me to be in the City is not to stay in a hotel room.

Kylix lives!

I have installed Mandriva Linux 2006 on an old PC.

I do some computer programming, partly in the office, and partly as a hobby. My favorite programming language is Object Pascal, and my favorite IDE is Borland Delphi.

Borland created a version of Delphi for Linux in 2001 (IIRC); Kylix. I got Kylix 3 bundled with Delphi 7 when it was new. Conventional wisdom is that Kylix does not work on newer Linux distributions (with Kernels newer than 2.4).

However, I found this information on the web: http://www.theo.ch/kylix/suse10.html

Using the hints from the link above I patched Kylix 3. And now it works perfectly. Including the debugger and code completion.