Mycelium (plural mycelia) is the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like hyphae. Hyphae are any of the threadlike filaments forming the mycelium of a fungus. And YES I had to look both of those up.
Typically they travel and branch along a source of nutrients, following the source. I came across this awesome work of Ryan Alexander [LINK] whilst messing around with Processing one evening. Ryan used Processing which is similar to Java. Processing is a great sketch-language which makes whipping up graphical wonders …

On April 9th 2011 together with my brothers in-law Dave and Chris, I ran the Tough Mudder PA course in beautiful Bear Creek. Together we raised $3,120 for the Colon Cancer Alliance [LINK]. Here’s a post-mortem for anyone interested in doing a TM event.
Short answer: I highly recommend Tough Mudder. It was the absolute most fun I’ve had in a long time. I came away with a wide variety of scrapes, a mild sunburn and an adrenaline high that lasted well into mid-week.
Long answer: We had a 10AM …

Here’s a rundown of everything I ran into when hacking my way through android development.
Setup Eclipse, run the Android SDK installer, install the correct USB drivers and finally check your device setup with “adb devices”. Your device should be listed.
If you don’t have an android device, be prepared for the emulator to be extremely slow especially during startup/shutdown. Be sure to mark your emulator as “Snapshot” (accessible from the ADB/AVD SDK Manager-> Start button). Also, don’t connect your device whilst the emulator is running. Adb gets confused.
I had …

I’m a big fan of cross-pollinating disciplines, taking two silos which rarely interact and swapping best practices. In the field of medicine before prescribing any treatment there has to be a quantitative benefit demonstrated which outweighs the risks associated to that treatment. In many cases this is black and white: You broke your arm? Let me fix it with a cast. In cases of long-term illness such as cancer the lines get blurred: You have 15 tumors in multiple locations? Yes I can arrest their growth with chemotherapy but I …

On April 9th “Team Mandelbaum” will be running the Pennsylvania Tough Mudder Challenge [LINK] to raise money for the Colon Cancer Association. So far we have raised $1,885 which is a tremendous amount but I would go a step further: If we raise over $3,000 I will shave my head before the race.
Send in your donations through Razoo: http://www.razoo.com/story/Tough-Mudders-For-Colon-Cancer. All money goes directly to the CCA (does not pass through my hands at all) and Razoo accepts all forms of payments.
What is Tough Mudder?
Tough Mudder is not …

If you are using AsciiDoc (and A2X) to convert documentation to ePub you’ll probably have run into a problem where a2x runs xsltproc and fails trying to locate the ePub docbook xsl style sheet.

This post shows you how to fix it.

A good architect stays current with technology to better enable their team’s productivity. One often overlooked area is that of CSS, there have been many improvements. In this post I record the steps taken to successfully setup SASS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) with Sencha Touch on Windows.
If you’re building a website with a non-trivial CSS file (aren’t we all),  SASS  makes managing the CSS a lot simpler.
“Sass is a meta-language on top of CSS that’s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than …

In my post on Software Agents I described some of the scenarios in which a Software Agent might be useful. Josef Betancourt [LINK] pointed me to his excellent article with some interesting ideas of his own and I particularly like his mind map [LINK]. Getting pragmatic I’ve been thinking about how to go about building these and will put down my thoughts in an attempt to move the conversation forward.
Let’s start with few design principles:

Agents should be flexible; We should be able to mix and match their functionality to …

The otherwise excellent Kindle 3 doesn’t natively let you subscribe to RSS feeds. To me this is a major failing but we can write a simple service to aggregate feeds into an HTML file. If you email this file to @free.amazon.com Amazon will convert (for free) into an AZW file and deliver to your Kindle. Presto, free feed aggregation. This is essentially what http://kindlefeeder.com does and I recommend this service if you don’t feel like writing your own.
Since switching to WordPress I hadn’t looked at RSS in a …

To date, I have met only two people who actually “get” cloud computing and why it will be so transformational (Jeff Barr and Marc Mercuri). The term “cloud” is so overloaded as to become useless. What does Cloud Computing mean to you? Storing data in the “cloud”? Yawn, boring. Storing infrastructure in a data center? Sorry, we already do it. To me, one of the most compelling areas, which I have not seen in the media is…Software Agents. (warning, some blue-sky-what-if-out-of-the-box-dreaming ahead).
Software agents exist today but most are …