Author: Oliver Roup

  • Japan 2017

    Japan 2017

    Japan A few notes I took on a recent trip. Before you go Follow Tokyo Fixer on Instagram. At minimum he will get you excited. If he inspires you, he has the time and you have the budget, apparently he’ll take you to all the secret cool spots in the city for a “mere” $780…

  • Quote

    Quote

    The simple truth is, not all of us become the men we once hoped we might be. But we are all God’s creatures. If there are those among us who thought ill of Mr. Hollom, or spoke ill of him, or failed him in respect of fellowship… then we ask for your forgiveness, Lord. And…

  • The Reverse Turing Test

    I’m always fascinated by the subtle ways in which our otherwise insightful predictions about the future are nonetheless totally wrong. The famous Turing Test is paraphrased as “can you tell it’s a robot?” In the ad tech business (and many others) we spend much more time on the problem of “Can you tell it’s not…

  • Setting up a new mac

    Setting up a new mac

    I bought a new iMac recently and figured it would be worthwhile to write down everything I did to get it to where I wanted it. Install bootstraps: Chrome – Preferred browser Iterm2 – Terminal Homebrew – The missing package manager Atom – Text editor for code Install brew packages and ruby brew install mysql git ruby-build rbenv powder rbenv…

  • Computational Fluid Dynamics take a leap

    Computational Fluid Dynamics take a leap

    People ask me all the time what work is being done that I find exciting. Honestly it’s a little harder than it used to be. The simultaneous emergence of cloud infrastructure providers and mobile hardware created a cambrian explosion of innovation that now feels like it’s settling out. The work done in this video is…

  • Unevenly spaced time series analysis

    Unevenly spaced time series analysis

    A number of years ago I bought a Withings connected scale. It’s great. You get on every morning, it logs your weight and uploads it to the internet where it can be analyzed. Recently, I decided to use the Withing API to build a plot that I could include on my homepage to keep an…

  • Tesla, Autopilot and Data Collection

    Tesla, Autopilot and Data Collection

    f I were going to build a self-driving car, I’d want to have a large corpus of field data. What situations come up most commonly? How do humans handle them? How might our computer react in a similar situation? Google’s self-driving car efforts are well known and they’ve spoken publicly about how all the miles…

  • Bitcasa, snake oil, etc

    I’ve watched with some amusement the controversy between CrunchFund and TechCrunch and whether Mike Arrington can successfully / fairly cover the startups that he writes about / promotes. On the general question, I have no idea, and I do think Mike has unfairly taken the brunt of the firestorm here when lots of other publications…

  • Apple + OnLive?

    Big software companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple and even Facebook have a ton of cash on their balance sheet. Whenever investors start pressuring them to dividend some of that cash to shareholders, the ready answer is always that they’re hanging on to it to facilitate major acquisitions. Steve Jobs said recently justified his $51B cash…

  • Keyboard modified clicks

    In case you’re ever wondering, here is a full list of the “key modified clicks” that the major browsers look for: (Note that on Windows, “cmd” is “ctrl”) Chrome, Firefox: shift: new active window cmd: new tab cmd-shift: new active tab Safari: cmd: new tab cmd-shift: new active tab cmd-opt: new window cmd-opt-shift: new active window IE:…