Author: Steven Garrity

Notes from the Gnome Summit in Boston

by Steven Garrity

Photos from the Gnome Summit in Boston

I drove down to Boston this weekend for the Gnome Summit. I have posted my photos from the trip and collected some rough notes on the experience:

  • The who/what/where/when/why/how of marketing open source software to normal humans (non-developers) is uncharted territory. I’m skeptical that we should worry ourselves much about marketing at all.
  • It takes about 10 hours to drive from Charlottetown to Boston
  • Americans like to express their partisan politics with bumper stickers. Some stickers noted on the I-95: “Veterans for Bush”, “Veterans for Kerry”, “Veterans Against Bush”. There was no “Veterans Against Kerry” – but I guess Massachusetts is a blue state.
  • The Stata building at MIT (photos) is fascinating, compelling, and beautiful. However, it strikes me as architectural masturbation.
  • MIT has really nice projectors in the class rooms
  • Harvard is bustling with culture and diversity. MIT is eerily sterile.
  • The Gnome Summit was held in the William H. Gates building. I was please that this was not the subject of as much mocking as I had feared.
  • Where my hos at, biatch? (translations: “Open source software is suffering from a significant gender bias that will hinder the long term prospects of the movement. Biatch.”)
  • Geeks can be really set in their ways. I met people who still think the classic Mozilla browser is “more usable” than Firefox because it has more options and someone (you know who you are) that thinks Gaim sucks (it doesn’t). The hard-core geeks were in the minority now. There is a growing respect for artists, usability-dudes, and general well-roudnedness.
  • I met my first AIBO.
  • My father drove down with me to visit some friends and relative in Boston. It was fun and strange to travel with my father as two adults. He said it was the first time in his life he’s been on a trip and one of his children has paid for the gas.
  • People were nice to me.
 

A Math/Physics Word Problem

by Steven Garrity

If you are walking from point A to point B in the rain, do you get more or less wet depending on how fast you walk?

Sounds stupidly simple, doesn’t it. Not so (for me, at least). Here are some things we can assume for the sake of the problem:

  • let’s assume you are rectangular – let’s say, 1 meter, 0.5 meters wide, and 0.5 meters deep
  • forget about dripping rain – any drop that hits you counts as one drop
  • the rain is evenly distributed and falls at a constant and consistent speed

The qestion is, over a given distance, does the rate at which you move (in a straight line, you can assume) affect how many drops of rain you come in contact with?

If you run fast, you’ll “run through” more drops, right? However, you’ll also be in the rain for less overall time (remember, we’re going a set distance).

It might help to think through the problem in two dimensions.