A Blog with No Name

Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice

November 4, 2011 — admin

Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Software.

How sad is this?

Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired.

Whatever happened to the profession of computer programmer/analyst? The guy who understood enough about computers, computability and algorithms to actually save you money by suggesting a better solution (better being faster, cheaper, less consuming of whatever resources cost you a lot of money, etc)?

How many are rolling in their graves today?

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Dennis Ritchie obituary

October 28, 2011 — admin

Dennis Ritchie obituary | Technology | The Guardian.

Ritchie was a huge influence on computers and computer science as I was entering the field. The Unix operating system, the language C, so much.

It’s quite interesting to visit Ritchies home page at Murray Hill. From that page, I love this old picture of Dennis & Ken Thompson

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John McCarthy, AI pioneer, dies at 84

October 28, 2011 — admin

John McCarthy, AI pioneer, dies at 84 — Engadget.

Like Dennis Ritchie, I missed this when it happened. McCarthy pioneered LISP, a language I profoundly hated when I studied it, but it’s influences on computing and AI were profound.

BBC Technology News Obituary

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Supreme Court stands up for the Internet – thestar.com

October 27, 2011 — admin

Supreme Court stands up for the Internet – thestar.com.

The issue before the court was whether links to content should be viewed as republication of that content for the purposes of defamation law.

The decision, essentially, was no. Just linking to content is not republishing content.

There’s more …. liability could still be raised as an issue if the link repeated the defamatory content, included an endorsement of it, or was a deliberate act to make the information more readily available.

The last one sounds a bit weak to me, all links are a deliberate act, and they always make the information more readily available, so I’m a bit puzzled by that one.

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The Rush to Release

July 13, 2011 — admin

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved Firefox. Maybe that’s why I’m so disappointed with the latest release. Part of the attraction of Firefox is that so much good software is written for it or as an add-on or plug-in for it.

So recently, when it asked me to upgrade, I did. What a mistake.

None of my favorite plugins work with it. It disabled them all and as far as I can tell, there’s no update on the horizon for them. It looks for all the world like a beta-test version. Had I wanted to beta-test it (and there are some products I’ve done that for), I would have downloaded the beta test version. But this one looks raw and untested.

Why the rush to get it out the door?

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Cheap Flights (with subtitles)

April 3, 2011 — admin

This link was sent to me by a friend. It’s a wonderful, musical youtube example of TANSTAAFL. It’s a cross between folk singing and Riverdance with the topic being modern so-called “discounted” flights.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPyl2tOaKxM

Check out the subtitles.

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Mindstorms, or teaching our children about computers

July 10, 2010 — admin

Do you remember Professor Seymour Papert and his book Mindstorms? At a time when such things were expensive for adults, he put computers and a remote-control robotic turtle in kids classrooms. Armed with a simple robot programming language, these kids created amazing things and broke many educational paradigms. But have you heard anything of this recently?

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Of software and falability

July 10, 2010 — admin

Last week, the Google toolbar, software I have run for years, upgraded itself. As a result of the upgrade, it started offering to translate pages for me.

It’s a nice feature, except for the small problem that pages it was offering to translate were already in English.

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