Megatransect (http://ultrahike.com) 2013 is in the books. 28 miles of insane trails spread across the mountains, rivers and rocks of Bald Eagle Creek. This year was another brilliant day with glorious weather and tonnes of eye candy. What a day! It’s so hard to capture the feeling from an event like this but I will try to hit a few points.
I ran again with my brothers-in-law, Michael, Chris and Brad. We drove the 3hours down the night before with a fantastic sunset leading the way. Packet pickup/check-in was simple …

Last year the Ultra-Mega-Transect (it’s really called this) kicked my proverbial. 28 miles or so took 7hrs 45min, we covered 6,000 feet of elevation change including a 3/4mile uphill rock climb and I was sore for a week afterward. It was awesome but this year I resolved to prepare a bit better.
I’ve been “doing stuff” all year – what some would call training but it’s really too ad-hoc for that. I’ll document what I’ve done in the hopes that next year I’ll re-read this and actually get an idea …

This post will show you how to build an MPEG-DASH video player using Javascript.
tl;dr? Skip to the demo (chrome only) http://francisshanahan.com/demos/mpeg-dash.
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) enables streaming of media content delivered from conventional HTTP web servers. Fragments served are static pieces of media so no server-side component required. This is very similar to HLS but unlike HLS MPEG-DASH is the first adaptive bit-rate HTTP-based streaming solution that is an international standard. Reference [LINK]
The recent Build conference announced Netflix’s plan for Playready DRM+HTML5 in the browser without plugins, …

There has been a lot of hype recently about Netflix “dumping” Silverlight in favour of HTML5.
A quick Google reveals multiple articles rotating the same sound-bytes [LINK], [LINK] or [LINK].
So what’s the truth? Is the sky really falling? In my opinion there are some inaccuracies or rather inflated truths here which are being bounced around the “lite” tech echo chambers of Gizmodo, CNET and the like.
I will offer here my opinion on what is really going on.
Is Netflix moving away from Silverlight? Yes. In fact ALL streaming media providers …

In a recent article Adam Popescu asks if Coding is the essential job skill of the future? [LINK]. As a technologist I’m always happy to read anything that espouses the virtues of programming but I have a slightly different view. In my opinion Coding is not an essential job skill anymore than Excel or Word. And what is “coding” anyway?
In my opinion the essential job-skill for the future is…Learning. Or rather re-learning. Learning how to learn.
In my parent’s time it was sufficient to learn a skill in your …

Entrepreneur, academic and prolific writer Vivek Wadhwa has written an article on LinkedIn as part of the “Influencer” blogs. The Tech Industry’s Darkest Secret: It’s All About Age
I’m a fan of Vivek but this time around I felt he missed the point. There are too many counter-points and corrections to put in a simple comment so here now are my thoughts on his article.
Here’s my tl;dr – If you want job security, be good at what you do.

Vivek (paraphrasing) – “Information Technology is “an “up or out” profession”
fs: News …

I love-hate drawing. Growing up my brother was always drawing and was really good at it. He used to draw massive murals of dinosaurs on old wallpaper rolls my father brought home. Imagine huge, 40-50 foot long rolls of paper with a single coherent scene of a pre-historic world.
My brother also used to buy the excellent comic “2000AD” which had the amazing art of Carlos Ezquerra, Mike McMahon and many others. For a simple cheap magazine this thing really packed a punch in terms of the high quality line …

I was looking for an easy way to document a REST API built in Spring MVC. I came across two options – Swagger and JSONDoc.
Swagger – https://developers.helloreverb.com/swagger/ expands on the ideas of WADL and JAX-RS – it’s billed as “language-agnostic. But since a spec without a usable implementation has limited immediate value, Wordnik has released Swagger implementations in Scala, Java, and HTML5. Client generators are currently available for Scala, Java, Javascript, Ruby, PHP, and Actionscript 3.”
I looked at the nascent Spring MVC implementation of Swagger from Marty Pitt https://github.com/martypitt/swagger-springmvc. …

The main thing I use pens for these days is poking an air hole in the top of my coffee cup. #weirdintrospection #
I wish I had an Optimum Prime outfit here at the Mega Transact #
Is "coded until the battery ran out on my laptop" the geek equivalent of "played it 'till my fingers bled" ? #geeklife #
EVERYTHING came from space, or stars more precisely. Including the atoms which makeup Jesus Diaz. #fail #crapheadline http://t.co/NjKaG585 #
. @mikepetrucci @GORUCKChallenge I never knew that. Is it possible I need a training course …

In his book “The Believing Brain” Michael Shermer describes Agenticity as “the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents”.
We impart a personality into inanimate objects. We invent reasons for things being the way they are. Experiments have indicated our capacity to do this is dependent on our ability as humans to develop a theory of mind. When you impart beliefs or motivations to others that’s theory of mind. In part this is related to our ability to empathize with others. Imagining how they might …