Okay, so a few months back, I got tired of waiting for the Android world to get their tablet act together, and bought a refurbished Mark I iPad from the Apple store.
This is the part where I’m supposed to wax eloquent about how this magical device changed my life, right?
Meh.
I use it occasionally. Not nearly as much as I use my Kindle (smaller, lighter, optimized for reading). Safari is my next-to-least-favorite browser (bottom honors go to the big blue ‘E’ of course) and I miss all my Firefox and Chrome extensions. It would be a great platform for little Flash games but, well. And critically, the keyboard, like every other virtual keyboard I’ve ever tried, sucks.
Kindle is a well-crafted specialty device. A laptop is a well-conceived general-purpose device (though in practice, often badly executed). In principle, iPad is also a general-purpose device; but for my purposes, if it doesn’t allow fast and easy note-taking, it’s just not general-purpose enough.
So, there apparently is huge market for tablets out there; but it doesn’t include me.
I would love to have a general-purpose machine about that size, though a physical keyboard is a must-have. Windows is almost a must-not-have, especially not the emasculated version they allow for netbook use. I may be in the market for an ASUS Transformer or a MacBook Air.
In early 1984, I was working in a comic store on the south side of Oklahoma City. A couple of guys came in the shop, talking to each other, and I realized they were discussing a Dungeons and Dragons game. I had been reading some of the gaming books we sold, and asked them about it; and before long, they invitied me to come along to a game that night. Thus began my lifetime of corruption; as did the longest-standing friendship of my life, with one of those two guys: Paul Cherry.
Aside from gaming, we also spent Friday nights watching Doctor Who (Doctor number Four, Tom Baker) and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and making fun of “Jack Horkheimer, Star Hustler!” before OETA went off the air for the night. Paul and his friends were also involved in the Oklahoma City and Norman fan communities, centering around STAR-OKC and NOSFA, the Norman Oklahoma Science Fiction Alliance. We went to OKON in Tulsa, the big regional convention at the time. Later, after OKON died out in a blaze of drama, Paul and the rest of the OKC fan community built SoonerCon into its spiritual successor.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe that I gamed with Paul and his friends for only a year and a half or so, until I moved down to Houston in July 1985. In my mind it seems much longer, at least a decade. But the friendship with Paul, as well as Leonard Bishop and other friends that would come and go, lasted longer still. I made it up to Oklahoma City to visit my parents three times a year, and more often than not, spent the evenings on each trip hanging out with Paul (and Leonard or Ted or Gary), eating Chinese take-out, watching MST3K and monster movies, and playing grandmaster-level Trivial Pursuit.
Paul started to have health problems more recently: first type 2 diabetes, then a melanoma that required surgery and chemotherapy. Earlier this year, it became evident to people who knew him that something more was wrong: he seemed to be sliding into depression, losing the desire or even the ability to care for himself. He was admitted to the hospital with foot-sores aggravated by diabetic damage, and started physical therapy, but instead of improving, his mobility diminished further. An examination discovered nodules in his lungs; a subsequent MRI found the root of the problem: a one-inch diameter tumor in his brain.
He declined quickly — and rallied, and then declined again. His mobility diminished further, to the point it was painful for him even to sit upright. He moved from one medical facility to another, each move draining his energy a little more, as his brother battled heroically against the medical bureaucracy to arrange for his care. Eventually, last week, Paul was moved to Hillcrest Living Center, a nursing home in Moore, attended by hospice professionals from Valir. Organizing, arranging shifts, and passing on news through Facebook, his friends gathered, to stay by his side, to comfort him and each other as they waited for the end. Paul’s bother Tom, and Tom’s wife Charlotte, stayed by his side constantly for the last two days.
Earlier today — the day after his 53rd birthday — Paul left us; taking part of us with him, leaving part of himself with each of us.
Back in the ’80s, in addition to introducing me to D&D, and a lot of good SF and bad movies, Paul turned me on to The Alan Parsons Project — still one of my favorite bands. And that’s why, when driving back to Houston, listening to an old mix CD for a distraction, I almost drove off the road when this song came up in the mix.
I see Haskell as a collaboration between academics and some of the more academically-inclined practicals to attempt to create a truly useful language whose state space encompasses a wide set of useful things while retaining as many of the state-space-reducing properties of their beautiful theories as possible. It is a unique-to-my-knowledge blend of the practical and the academic.
Consequently, the Haskell community is the only community I know that is doing new things in the field of language and API design. The Haskell community is not just shuffling around objects and global state and adding a dash of syntactic sugar and converging on another dialect of CLispScript, they are breaking genuinely new ground. As far as I know they are the first language to take being functional completely seriously and not just provide convenient escape hatches back to imperative-land when they can’t figure out how to do something purely functionally, and still strive to be a practical solution to real programming problems, and therefore they are the first sizable community actually trying to build real, useful systems out of the reduced-state-space tools.
I’m just finishing up the Haskell chapter of Bruce Tate’s “Seven Languages in Seven Weeks”, and I definitely need to drill deeper into Haskell. Clojure looks very interesting too.
Software engineer Jesse Severe says he can pretty much throw a dart on a map and find a job. The 41-year-old from San Diego says he’s contacted by headhunters at least once a month, at times has been able to work from home for half his workweek and makes a comfortable living.
All those factors and others landed software engineer in the No. 1 spot on a newly-released study of the 200 best and worst jobs by CareerCast.com, a career website owned by Adicio Inc. (Until last year, Wall Street Journal owner News Corp. held a minority stake in Adicio.)
The most reassuring part of this article? “The 41-year old…” Age discrimination is a serious worry for my tribe; approaching 50 as I am, it’s good to hear that we’re doing well.
Why wasn’t I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.
When it comes to procrastinating, the obvious, salient, commensurate-seeming tradeoff, is between the (assumed) pleasure of reading a random Internet article now, versus the (assumed) pain of doing the work now. But this, as I said above, is not where I think the real tradeoff is; events that are five minutes away are too distant to dominate the thought process of a hyperbolic discounter like a human. Instead our thought processes are dominated by the prospective immediate pain of a thought, a cost that isn’t even salient as something to be traded off. “Working” is an obvious, salient event, and “reading random articles” seems like an event. But “paying a small twinge of pain to make the decision to stop procrastinating now, exerting a bit of frontal override, and not getting to read the next paragraph of this random article” is so map-level that we don’t even focus on it as a manipulable territory, a cost to be traded off; it is a transparent thought.
This is brilliant stuff, but phrased in a very geeky way. that does appear to fit the target audience — I found this article through Hacker News — but as one HN commenter pointed out, this is not just a problem for programmers; it’s true of virtually any kind of creative undertaking or ‘knowledge worker’ task. How could this be stated in a more approachable way?
Yesterday, one of my inter-web buddies IM’d me and asked if I had used Typhoeus before. I said yes, so he asked me if it was possible to follow redirects using it. He said he google’d it and nothing turned up.
I sharply responded, “LOOK AT THECODE!”. We had some banter back and forth and a few minutes later he was automatically following redirects. It seems these days that developers often think if something does not turn up in a google search, it does not exist.
So, I finally signed up for a paid music service: Slacker Radio. I'd been listening to the free version for a few days. It seemed to have the right set of features for my expectations — bunches of genre-specific channels, and a recommendation I can have fun confusing. (It's a game I like to play: stump the recommendation engine. I feed in Steely Dan, Massive Attack, Sarah Vaughan, Frédéric Chopin, Weird Al, and a Gregorian chant or two; and tell it "recommend something, I dare you".) But I got sick of the commercials, so I upgraded. Technically, I'm still on the free trial, but I had to enter my credit card info even for that.
Speaking of manifestations of the terpsichorean muse (and the Firefox spell checker gets a point for knowing how to spell 'terpsichorean'), I've got a persistent earworm: "Something the Boy Said" by Sting has been running through my head for several days now. I don't dislike the song; but it's not my favorite, in fact it's not even my favorite from that album. I have no idea why it's stuck in my head, and has stayed there despite listening to it several times. (That often cures an earworm for me, but no such luck in this case.) On repeated listenings — real and obsessive-imaginary — it does strike me as a very Police-y tune, in the vein of "Wrapped Around Your Finger" or "Tea in the Sahara"; I can easily imagine Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland playing it. (There'd be more flourishes in the drumming, though; I don't know if that would make it better or worse.)
The album that song came off of, Ten Summoner's Tales, is one of my desert island picks, even if the list were as short as five albums; there's a lot of very good material there. (Though as is often the case, the flagship single from the album, "Fields of Gold", leaves me unmoved.) "Seven Days" and "St. Augustine In Hell" are great fun; "Shape of My Heart" is simply sublime; "Love Is Stronger Than Justice (The Munificent Seven)" is … forgivable; and the 'eleventh tale', "Epilogue (Nothing 'Bout Me)" is a nice bouncy finish. It's good enough that I didn't regret the breakup of the Police after that; if that's what it took for Sting to do that kind of music, good for him.
I haven't paid attention to Sting in a while; I was WILL YOU SHUT THAT BLOODY BOUZOUKI UP!
… sorry. Anyway, seeing him listed in the 'soft rock' and 'easy listening' category, along with Celine Dion and Kenny G, left a bad taste in my mouth. It also rubbed me the wrong way to see him doing softer, acoustic remakes of his older works: to me it seems like a way of pleasing crowds and selling discs without covering any new ground musically. Granted I've heard only part of his modern output, but nothing I have heard of his has grabbed me since "We'll Be Together".
But, I've never believed that music comes with an expiration date. I think I'll queue up Synchronicity in Winamp and chill for a bit. See you when I'm back from 1983.
Er, not so much. It’s the rarest of things, a rational, polite discussion of two competing technologies: in this case, Google’s Go programming language, and the independently developed D programming language. From the sound of it, Go has simple goals and meets them admirably; while D — at least the second version of the language, where development is now concentrated — is more ambitious but not yet fully baked; Go and D are apparently designed as successors to C and C++ respectively.
There are plenty of othercontendersout there. There seems to be an idea in the air, that we need a new system programming language. I tend to agree. C++ was meant to be a successor to C, but by forcing all features to be upward-compatible with C, it left behind C’s primary virtue of simplicity. Java was intended as a successor to slash replacement for C++, but it left C even farther behind, adopting a virtual machine and sacrificing the ability to run on bare hardware. The dynamic languages — Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby — saw fair to unseat Java, at least in some domains, but did so at the expense of pure performance.
Meanwhile, those building the infrastructure — operating systems, networking stacks, and compilers and interpreters for all the above languages — continued to use C, whatever its shortcomings, because nothing else quite fit this very large and important problem domain nearly as well. Now people are starting to notice that our critical infrastructure is all in a language designed nearly forty years ago.
It’s no sign of disrespect to Dennis Ritchie and his colleagues to think that maybe we’ve learned a thing or two about programming languages in the last four decades; if nothing else, we know by now what all the pain points are in C. One would hope we could come up with something better by now, as long as we keep our focus on the right problem domain: system programming.
For someone like me, it’s fun to watch something like this unfold; it’s like the Olympics for computer geeks. Without the vuvuzelas.
