Happy, Self-deceptive Entrepreneurs?

Andrew Wright writes about the difficulty of making realistic risk assessment.

It's the same feature as in Christopher S. Putnam's article , just placed in a business setting. Andrew points to a British survey that suggests that enterpreneurs are more prone to overly optimistic thinking than people on average.

Sooo... If happy delusions are necessary to avoid depression, and enterpreneurs are more optimistic than people on average, then entepreneurs should also be happier than people on average. Right?

35% of coding time spent on IE/FireFox incompatibilities

David Berlind reports his discussions with Tim Hamilton of OpenTeams.

My experiences resonate with Tim's. I can't say if it's been 35% for me, but it's a big pain. However, it hasn't been enough to stop me using FireFox as the main develoment platform and only work around the incompatibilities in IE, even if I only have to support IE. The development tools available for FireFox are that much better.

Another problem I frequently encounter is the performance of javascript when the size of the dataset increases.

The latest Flash Player versions feature a JIT compiler ... I think I'll have to find time to play with Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight a little. Bummer!! For some reason I fancy the idea of being able to create rich apps on plain browsers.

Still Waiting ...

More than two months since I've signed up for EC2.

Travis Reeder has migrated three apps to EC2 and has summarized his experiences.

He also provides some advice on how to build apps on EC2. Which all make sense, but point number 3 might prove difficult if your data is highly structured.

Videos about Type Systems

A couple of Google videos about type systems.

Faith, Evolution, and Programming Languages
Philip Wadler


Advanced Topics in Programming Languages Series: Parametric Polymorphism
Phil Gossett



Phil Gossett's talk is based on papers from Wadler.
Wadler's talk covers more than just type systems, including

• lambda calculus
• Java generics
• Links: Evolutionary Type System (mixing typed and untyped languages in a controlled way)
  

My First Post

I just read an article (The Total Perspective Vortex) about the relation between realistic self-perception and mental disorders, and thought that I have to store a pointer to the ideas presented so I can refer to them later.

But what would be the best place for that pointer... a blog. Of course!!

So this is my first entry of my first and only blog. And it's purpose is to be a reminder of the idea that it's typical human behaviour to:

• view oneself in unrealistically positive terms
• believe to have more control over ones environment than one actually does; and
  
• hold views about the future that are more positive than the evidence can justify.

Being able to deny realism in relation to oneself helps people remain sane.

Depressing.

The name of the blog is inspired by the article.
Maybe there will be more posts.