O’Reilly just published Beautiful Code. I was invited to contribute, but I just could not go along with the premise. I disagree that beauty is a guiding principle of programming. Here is how I responded.
Alarming Development, Jonathan Edwards — Read the comments too.
I’ve been hoping to avoid this, but ETags seem to be popping up more and more often recently. For whatever reason, people latch onto them as a litmus test for RESTfulness, as the defining factor of HTTP’s caching model, and much more.
So, let me counter: they’re not all that. In fact, there are a number of pitfalls you need to be wary of if you use them.
mnot's Web log
Though it seems obvious, I’m guessing there are billions of business cards printed each year with blank backs. They represent countless numbers of intelligent business people who are surrendering half the real estate, on what is often their most widely circulated print piece, all for the want of a better idea.
Graphic Define Magazine
I do not believe that other languages can catch up with Erlang anytime soon. It will be easy for them to add language features to be like Erlang. It will take a long time for them to build such a high-quality VM and the mature libraries for concurrency and reliability. So, Erlang is poised for success. If you want to build a multicore application in the next few years, you should look at Erlang.
Ralph Johnson — Interesting comments on Lamda the Ultimate
I’ve been using Mercurial for a few weeks now. … Verifying local and remote repositories revealed that my home directory repository was totally borked on the server … The very worst part is that there had been no error messages to indicate that anything had gone wrong. In fact, running an hg push in my home directory appeared to complete successfully.
It’s hard to imagine a worse sort of error than that in a version control system.
Norm Walsh — This problem is addressed in the post. Worth thinking about.
Best of July 2007 | Best of the Month
Every month we take a look around and select some of the most interesting web-development-related web-sites. We read articles, check out tools, analyze the advantages of new resources. Below you’ll find useful references, tutorials, services, tools, techniques and articles we’ve found over the last 30 days - an overview of web-sites you shouldn’t have missed in July 2007.
Smashing Magazine
Open Source Clustering For Java
Scalability and Availability for the JVM
Might be useful for somebody.
Tripoli - a CSS standard for HTML rendering
Tripoli is a generic CSS standard for HTML rendering. By resetting and rebuilding browser standards, Tripoli forms a stable, cross-browser rendering foundation for your web projects.
Takes a step beyond the idea of a CSS reset to ‘rebuild’… I guess that’s pretty much what the quote says.
Sunk cost fallacy for architects
Let’s say you’ve bought a movie ticket but then realise from Rotten Tomatoes that the movie stinks. Assuming you can’t sucker one of your friends to buy the ticket, you have a couple choices…
Jason Yip, You'd think with all my video game experience that I'd be more prepared for this — I’ve lived this… more than once.
OASIS forms six committees to simplify SOA
In what might seem like a contradiction, OASIS said Thursday it has formed six different technical committees to simplify SOA application development. … At first glance, forming six committees might sound like OASIS is adding complexity and not offering simplicity. But the move makes sense, according to OASIS representative Carol Geyer.
InfoWorld, by Paul Krill — OASIS is the bunch that complexified SOA beyond all recognition… what exactly did you expect them to do when trying to simplify it? I’m surprised it’s only six committees. I’m also surprised they’re trying to simplify it.
User Guide Tutorial - How to write a successful user guide.
User Guides are written to explain in layman’s terms how to use software. Generally they accompany other documentation, such as System Administration guides and other related material. They are generally the first ‘port of call’ when something needs to be read. People read them in a hurry, usually when they are frustrated and losing patience with the software. It’s important to keep this fact in mind when you write your guides.
Ivan Walsh (I think) — Looks useful.
People remember 10%, 20%...Oh Really?
People do NOT remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they see, 30% of what they hear, etc. That information, and similar pronouncements are fraudulent. Moreover, general statements on the effectiveness of learning methods are not credible—learning results depend on too many variables to enable such precision. Unfortunately, this bogus information has been floating around our field for decades, crafted by many different authors and presented in many different configurations, including bastardizations of Dale’s Cone.
Will at Work Learning — Read this, and try to remember how many times you’ve heard this (and if you have kids, try to imagine how this might be affecting their education).
'Terrible lizards' were terrific runners
… Donovan Bailey hit a top speed of 43 km/h while setting a world record in the 100 metres at the 1996 summer Olympics. … Results showed T. Rex capable of speeds up to 28.9 km/hour. For the sake of comparison, the researchers also entered data for a 70-kilogram human with the muscle and bone structure structure of a professional soccer player. The soccer player reached a top speed of 28.4 km/h.
CBC — Okay, so the T.Rex was though slow because it was compared to a 6 tonne chicken… but it isn’t a 6 tonne chicken. Second, the T.Rex could run down a professional soccer player, not bad. Third, Donovan Bailey is almost 50% faster than a pro soccer player. Wow.
You Know You're an Old Fogey Software Engineer When...
Today, I came to a realization. I’m now officially an Old Fogey Software Engineer. You know, like those narrow-minded, intolerant, old-time veterans of the field I used to look down on when I was but a young Whippersnapper. They were so limited in their view, only being able to do what they have always done, always disagreeing with me, always putting roadblocks in my way, always wiping out my carefully crafted abstractions in favor of in-line code, always throwing out my object-oriented design in favor of procedural, always turning my portable, reusable code into use-once code. I never stopped to think that their objections might have been born from decades of experience and life-long expertise.
J. Timothy King
Content-Aware Image Sizing [EN]YouTube — image re-sizing by removing or adding minimum energy ‘seams’… this is really nice.
Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns
Based on a careful assessment of the most recent survey data available, we find that somewhere between 500,000,000 and 750,000,000 humans currently do not believe in God. Such figures render any suggestion that theism is innate or neurologically based untenable. The nations with the highest degrees of organic atheism (atheism which is not state-enforced through totalitarian regimes but emerges naturally among free societies) include most of the nations of Europe, as well as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel. There also exist high degrees of atheism in Japan, Vietnam, North Korea, and Taiwan. Many former Soviet nations, such as Estonia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus also contain significant levels of atheism. Atheism is virtually non-existent in much of the world, however, especially among the most populated nations of Africa, South America, the Middle East, and much of Asia. High levels of organic atheism are strongly correlated with high levels of societal health, such as low homicide rates, low poverty rates, low infant mortality rates, and low illiteracy rates, as well as high levels of educational attainment, per capita income, and gender equality. Most nations characterized by high degrees of individual and societal security have the highest rates of organic atheism, and conversely, nations characterized by low degrees of individual and societal security have the lowest rates of organic atheism. In some societies, particularly Europe, atheism is growing. However, throughout much of the world – particularly nations with high birth rates – atheism is barely discernable.
That’s the conclusion. Nice Survey. So. When are governments going to recognise this?
Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith
In life, Mother Teresa was an icon — for believers — of God’s work on Earth. Her ministry to the poor of Calcutta was a world-renowned symbol of religious compassion. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
In a rare interview in 1986, Mother Teresa told CBS News she had a calling, based on unquestioned faith.
“They are all children of God, loved and created by the same heart of God,” she said.
But now, it has emerged that Mother Teresa was so doubtful of her own faith that she feared being a hypocrite … In a new book that compiles letters she wrote to friends, superiors and confessors, her doubts are obvious. …
“Where is my faith?” she wrote. “Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness… If there be God — please forgive me.”
“Such deep longing for God… Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal,” she said.
Time — Continuing a theme, I suppose.
(alternatively, actually the first article about this that I happened to see, and where the quote comes from)15 Web Addresses for Wasting Time … View At Your Own Risk!
here’s a lot of articles around about how to make your time more productive. But some days I really don’t want to be productive, and while I should get off my chair and go outside instead I find myself killing time online.
Freelance Switch — Like I needed to see this. Passing it along. No need to thank me :-)
Best Mac freeware and games: A list of 10 Mac freeware lists: thriftmac
Every now and then we find a list of Mac freeware on someone else’s site. Here are 10 that stand out from the past couple of years:
Holy cow! another infinite time sink.
Holding a Program in One's Head
A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he’s working on. Mathematicians don’t answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will.
Paul Graham — One of the best articles Paul Graham’s written I think. The consequences of holding a program in your head.
What's new in Dylan? Is it even OO?
As you know, any time you get six computer scientists together and ask them any question whatsoever, you always get at least half a dozen different answers – unless the question is “What do you think about object-oriented programming,” in which case they all say “It’s the greatest thing ever invented!”
What can this mean?
Actually, what it means is that they’re not all talking about the same thing. Each has taken his or her favorite idea and called it “OOP.”
Brian Harvey on comp.lang.dylan — From 1993. Wow. A fun read.
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti
Vanzetti: “If it had not been for these thing, I might have live out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as we now do by dying. Our words, our lives, our pains – nothing! The taking of our lives – lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler – all! That last moment belongs to us – that agony is our triumph!”
3quarksdaily — 80 years ago
