Wired News: Test Tube Meat Nears Dinner Table

I'm not sure what sounds better.. Meat material grown in a factory in a fungus soup, or "natural" meat harvested from a slaughtered animal who has wallowed in its own slop most of its life while being fed brain matter of other animals.

Either way, I'll be firin' up the grill this weekend. :)

Wikipedia Death

In Martin Fowler's blog he talks about how Wikipedia's controls differ from a completely "open" wiki

The interesting part is a nice summary of Agile's approach to control in its environment:

Much of the agile software movement is about loosening controls, shifting more to asking forgiveness rather than permission. Yet loosening controls isn't the same as anarchy and no control - a misrepresentation that's commonly thrown at agilists too. It's about asking how we can use a minimum of controls, so that that we don't suffocate the good in our desire to protect ourselves from the bad.

As we deploy engineering tools, there's an unnecessary desire to jump on available mechanisms for restrictive control, rather than deploying the utility of the tool and using its auditing capabilities to deal with problems as appropriate.

I'm finding tools to be most effective when the login is only required so you know who's doing what, not to enforce permissions and restrictions on what people can do. The latter is a management crutch for dysfunctional groups.

CCSDS and Disney

What does CCSDS (the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems) and Disney have in common? Why, "Roving Mars", the IMAX Movie, of course. See the press release here on how the Proximity-1 data communications protocol sends back significantly more scientific data to Earth than originally planned.

You can see the movie in any city in California, as long as it's San Francisco or San Jose.

SandHill.com | Engineering | The Case for Back-Shoring

I guess the advantages of Software Development here in the United States is obvious to the technical person or the line manager who is actually responsible for developing software--especially in a small company. But it's taken a while for the venture capital community to catch on..

"Made in China" is closer than you think

Saw this article on Digg about how pollution in China is getting worse. As I scanned through some of the comments, this sentence caught my eye: "look around and see if there's at least one object within 10 feet of you made in China." Funny thing about this exercise. If you're reading this, the thing within 10 feet of you that is made in China is probably in your hand (check your mouse).