Jason's tumbles

14 by 14

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:45:39 -0500

14 by 14: 14 by 14 publishes, online only, fourteen contemporary sonnets per issue, by fourteen different authors.

"What should high schools do to prepare students for university-level software development? When I..."

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:16:29 -0500

“What should high schools do to prepare students for university-level software development? When I entered a Math course as a 1st year student, the department head said something like this in his welcoming lecture: “I don’t care if you know math – we’ll teach you that from scratch – but I hope you know how to work hard and to read & write English, because you’ll need that to keep up.””

- Bjarne Stroustrup on Educating Software Developers

"A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a..."

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 14:54:46 -0500

“A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is. […] Eliot says: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.””

- Jeanette Winerson on the consoling power of poetry as a TS Eliot festival opens in London | Books | The Guardian f
(via Dana)

"Prop 2, which ensures chickens the right to engage in basic life activities such as stretching their..."

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:49:32 -0500

“Prop 2, which ensures chickens the right to engage in basic life activities such as stretching their wings, passed yesterday by an impressive margin. Prop 8, which detracts from human beings’ rights to engage in the basic life activity of falling in love, also passed.”

- The Thin Green Line : Poultry And People

"The lawsuit argued that Prop. 8 would change the California Constitution in such fundamental ways -..."

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:45:32 -0500

“The lawsuit argued that Prop. 8 would change the California Constitution in such fundamental ways - taking important rights away from a minority group - that it amounted to a constitutional revision, which requires approval by the Legislature before being submitted to the voters.”

- Same-sex marriage ban wins; opponents sue to block measure

"I first have to say that in this era of the Internet and distributed development,..."

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 09:10:24 -0400

“I first have to say that in this era of the Internet and distributed development, “official” status means much less than what everybody seems to think [*1*]. It is perfectly fine for people to decide which site they would want to go for git related information for themselves, and direct their friends to.”

- From Junio Hamano about git scm.com and distributed development in general

"In the emerging manycore world, where the number of software developers with expert-level skills is..."

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:43:08 -0400

“In the emerging manycore world, where the number of software developers with expert-level skills is a tiny fraction of the number required, the Excel power users present a user base that is probably at least an order of magnitude bigger than all others combined, one that already has some experience of modeling, intelligence and analytics, and one that has an insatiable appetite for more and more powerful tools that are easy to use.”

- Computing at Scale » Blog Archive » Today’s Business Intelligence: What’s Good About It?

"Political insiders say images of children attending a same-sex wedding play right into the hands of..."

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:27:38 -0400

“Political insiders say images of children attending a same-sex wedding play right into the hands of the proponents of a same-sex marriage ban.”

- Newsom becomes campaign tool for Prop. 8 backers

(ed note: How sick and twisted can these proponents be?!?)

"And the debt clock says, “Time to kiss your future goodbye"

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:43:20 -0400

“And the debt clock says, “Time to kiss your future goodbye””

- And the debt clock says, “Time to kiss your future goodbye” - Flint, Michigan Columns, Letters & Opinion - The Flint Journal

"I want to very briefly praise the probably-underappreciated emacs command just-one-space. It is on..."

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 11:39:42 -0400

“I want to very briefly praise the probably-underappreciated emacs command just-one-space. It is on M-SPC by default, and what it does is replace all the spaces and tabs around point with one space (or prefix-arg number of spaces).”

- Prosthetic Conscience

How horribly accurate… (from CFruhwirth’s Weblog)

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:44:15 -0400

How horribly accurate… (from CFruhwirth’s Weblog)

"Anne Harris is adding her fiddle to the trance-blues of Otis Taylor’s band for selected dates..."

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:38:16 -0400

“Anne Harris is adding her fiddle to the trance-blues of Otis Taylor’s band for selected dates on his international tour. She first performed alongside the legendary innovator at the 25th Annual Chicago Blues Festival in June 2008.”

- Otis Taylor and Anne Harris were my main personal discoveries at the Bristol Rhythm and Roots Reunion. Highly recommended…

"Inventing new programming languages and techniques to get better performance on multicore chips goes..."

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:13:02 -0400

“Inventing new programming languages and techniques to get better performance on multicore chips goes completely in the wrong direction. We should be figuring out how we could improve programming given unbounded performance. Then figure out how to optimize it. I have come to believe that our programming languages and design patterns are all a giant case of premature optimization. So maybe we need multicore, and maybe we need to complicate programming as a result, but it is just digging ourselves deeper into the hole we’re in, and should not be celebrated.”

- Alarming Development : Too many cores, not enough brains

"This page might be most useful to those with some previous experience in programming, who are..."

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:55:50 -0400

“This page might be most useful to those with some previous experience in programming, who are marginally interested in Lisp, and want to better understand some of what makes it so attractive.”

- Features of Common Lisp

"Early GPL enforcement efforts began soon after the GPL was written by Richard Stallman in 1989, and..."

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:08:54 -0400

“Early GPL enforcement efforts began soon after the GPL was written by Richard Stallman in 1989, and consisted of informal community efforts, often in public Usenet discussions. Over the next decade, the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which holds copyrights in many GNU programs, was the only visible entity actively enforcing its GPL’d copyrights on behalf of the community of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FOSS) developers. FSF’s enforcement was generally a private process; the FSF contacted violators confidentially and helped them to comply with the license. Most violations were pursued this way until the early 2000’s.”

- A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance - Software Freedom Law Center

Finally saw the Big Lebowski. Should have seen it sooner. Kinda appropriate on TV with horrible...

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:00:04 -0400

Finally saw the Big Lebowski. Should have seen it sooner. Kinda appropriate on TV with horrible commercials and silly censoring.

Green lacewing eggs: good things!

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:57:53 -0400

Green lacewing eggs: good things!

Actually physics and not the “Sexual Math” in the...

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 13:01:55 -0400

Actually physics and not the “Sexual Math” in the title, but that’s ok (via snowfreak91287)…

"* 20 EC2 instances generating Debian weak RSA keys: $16 * A few thousand SQS operations: $..."

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:15:00 -0400

“* 20 EC2 instances generating Debian weak RSA keys: $16
* A few thousand SQS operations: $ 0.06
[…]
* Having your RSA private key: Priceless.”

- Debian’s Predictable PRNG and Cloud Computing « …And you will know me by the trail of bits

Embarrassing technological statements I've made:

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 23:22:45 -0400

Who ever will need a color laptop?
192 megs of ram? That’s obscene. Who needs that?
Terabytes of disk? Terabytes? Really?

(from someone who currently has two color screens on a laptop, about a TB of disk available, and wishes for 32GiB of core…)