The Musing Mill

Today is the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. It is this event that caused my parents to leave Hungary and come to the US. I’m lucky that they did. Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1956 was the Hungarian Freedom Fighter. My father led a troop of 32 people during the uprising. I have found 2 good websites memorializing the event. They are;

Site with downloadable book
and
Hungary1956.com (photos)

It lasted just several days until the Soviet army returned with tanks and reinforcements and brutally crushed the revolt. The uprising is historically significant in that it was the first successful overthrow of a Soviet occupied state, and led to the revolution in Poland. It showed just how weak the Soviet hold on it’s states were. Ultimately, this revealed weakness directly contributed to the fall of the Soviet empire.

For a while it looked like the Hungarians would win and the Soviets would stay out. It is a fact of history that a second-rate diplomat named Yuri Andropov was the ambassador to Hungary in 1956, and he was the one who suggested re-occupying Hungary to Kruschev (the Soviet leader at the time).

This event ultimately catapulted Andropov to be the head of the Kremlin. He was not a leader cut our for such a position, and the Soviet union collapsed in part due to his leadership in the early 1980’s. In fact, most experts agreee that without Andropov’s support, Gorbachev would not have succeeded him as head of the Kremlin. You can read about him here;

Wikipedia on Yuri Andropov

Given the situations today in the mideast, I think our world leaders could benefit from paying attention to the phrase “Do not forget history, unless you want to re-live it.”

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If you think that MOG.com is as cool as I do, and you hack Ruby code, then you’ll probably understand why Starfish extends Ruby (already cool) into ice-cold cool territory.

http://rufy.com/starfish/doc/

It’s used to make distributed programming ridiculously easy (thanks Rails!) for those of you who need to massively parallel process something. Sounds like what we’re doing for Solo Structures right now.

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Social software in the enterprise,
originally uploaded by Larsz.

Another good one from Larsz. This mindmap is from the Collaborative Technologies Conference held in Boston this past June. It’s a breakdown or structure of how social web-applications are altering enterprise dynamics.

Yes…this is the real geek stuff

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Joshua Schachter: Del.icio.us - Things we’ve learned,
originally uploaded by Larsz.

This is a great overview of all the things that have to be considered when building a company with a Web-hosted application as it’s main interface to the customer.

The guys at Delicious have done a great job and these are their notes.

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Shaun Inman, Mint: 10 Reasons Why You Need to Build an API,
originally uploaded by Larsz.

Everyone (and by this I mean software-types, MBAs or CAD users) knows APIs are important. I’m trying to work with Vertex in Finland and they apparently do not. Here’s a good summary of why they are that I found on Flickr…

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For those of you meeting me at BU, here’s a campus map. The SMG Building (School of Management) is near Kenmore square. It’s building number 37 on the map. To orient you - the big blue thing is the Charles River.

The favorite hangout during orientation appears to be Cornwalls. It’s a bar located at the top of the T-stop steps on the north side of Kenmore Square. There are also a huge number of, er, “reputable establishments” two blocks up around Fenway Park.

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If you’re a student (like me ) then here’s [what looks like] a good link to find academic software…including Revit and Revit Series.

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After all the pain with comment spam and viruses on Windows, I’ve moved the blog to the Mac. Unfortunately, the old comments were lost in the process.

Other than that, it is working famously well on OSX 10.4. I got translation to work, and everything else I tried worked too. OK - time to start posting again. I avoided it this summer because of the mess on the Windows box. Mess No More!

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O’Reilly [love those guys] had an interesting article on a better way to develop web applications.

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If you have a tablet PC, here is where you can download the free upgrade to XP Tablet 2005 from Microsoft.

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