Philippe Monnet :
I like the idea of having one show focused on an interview and one on the weekly news chat.

thumbs up

I promise that we’ll do our best not to let the quality of the show drop. 😉 I think that if we’re efficient then we can do two shows per week and still do a good job. I think we’re going to follow this format for the length of the summer and then reevaluate. If it helps to accelerates our growth (which is the plan) and people think we’re doing a good job, then we’ll probably stick with it.

Also, thanks so much for helping to spread the word on TechZing!

The Teddy Bear principle is definitely an old idea 🙂 I used to work with a guy who had a plastic penguin on his computer which he would explain technical problems to! From then on whenever we needed someone to bounce problems off we would ask if they would be a “plastic penguin”!

Interestingly I think the Teddy Bear principle has a lot in common with Test Driven Development. I TDD you have to define your boundaries and in doing so can produce a good solution. By explaining your problems you are setting the issues in stone (as it were) and making them visible. A path through the problem is therefore much easier to see.

BTW I’m evangelizing Techzing on my twitter account! I hope I can funnel some extra listeners your way. You can follow me at @alexgemmell 🙂

There are indeed anaerobic organisms which generate their energy without using any oxygen, but they get much less energy that way.

I have another show segment suggestion for you: “questions from the listeners aka the mailbag”.

HackerRadio sounds a bit old-fashioned and PG-fanboy-ish, but if it works for you two, I’ll go there to get my shows. The name doesn’t matter much.

On the iphone antenna issue, I’m with Justin simply because Apple is supposed to stand for awesome design. If you go to McDonalds and whine about the quality of the burgers or stay at Holiday Inn and want 5-star service, then sure, you need your head checked, but expecting more from Apple, even when everyone else has similar issues, is not asking too much. What got Apple to where they are today is all the stuff they get right that others can’t/won’t. I doubt they wanna go back to the “oh well, that’s just how it is people, suck it up” land.

OTOH, I agree with Jason too in the sense that some people complain for the sake of complaining. There are too many drama queens out there who don’t seem to have anything better to do with their time.

@justin I’m getting a bear! Found “Tell it to the bear” insightful.

For python (for most science code), we usually “cheat” by binding to code that is written either in c or fortran for the heavy lifting (for example, numpy, or scipy).

For a very simple curve fitter, I was thinking of Marquardt-Levenberg. I have code (with a clean license) and it might be worthwhile to put together a little package just for fun to see how much is possible in the browser.

Anyway, let us know how it goes and please post in the comments anything interesting you discover on this topic.

By the way, what algorithm are you wanting to use for the curve fitting?

Here’s my two cents: Everybody has an alternate view of how the world should be, and we have the unique capability of expressing that alternative view by rearranging the raw materials of nature. Here are some examples ;
– Rearranging the natural processes of vegetation in order to produce an alternative abundance of fruits, vegetables, flowers etc. = Farming/Gardening
– Transforming the earth’s raw materials in new and different ways that are more useful, or interesting, or valuable = Manufacturing
– Taking the human experience and rearranging it so that it creates an alternative human narrative = Literature/Film
– Rearranging the execution of bits to create alternative binary outputs = Software Development

As for Startups and Aliens.. 😛

You’re just kidding about having that same dream, right? That would be very strange. 😉

I don’t know if you already know but your podcast got a mention on the phpclasses podcast, it is a pretty painful podcast to listen to http://bit.ly/bc6NcI
but your mention is near the beginning so you wouldn’t have to endure to long if you wanted to listen.

Keep up the great work, out of all the podcasts I listen too yours is the one I navigate to first on my mp3 player.