Monthly Archives: March 2009

God Help Us

March 26, 2009
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I tire of these creationist fools, in all their guises. Without diligence they’ll shove us back thousands of years with their insane takes on science. Even after Judge Jones’ stated that those pushing creationism displays “breathtaking inanity”. That phrase can be applied to a lot of idiocy out there, today. For the curious wishing to be educated — and probably affronted — watch BullShit! by Penn and Teller. The multifronted assaults on Reason must stop. I worry about our future when wishful thinking is even contemplated as being “science”. Why is stupidity and ignorance constantly elevated above intelligence and knowledge? It baffles me. Breathtaking inanity, indeed.

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Why I Find Software Depressing

March 24, 2009
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Each day that goes by I find another reason for my disgruntlement, nay, depression with software. What was a cool thing to do has slowly evolved into a form of archaelogical drudgery wherein one digs around in other people’s crappy code trying to sort out how something works and then attempts to morph an idea into something that isn’t millions of lines of code. I look upon the state of computerdom and feel depressed. We see C++ and Java and their ilk requiring orders of magnitude more code than should be necessary. I watch as projects I’m involved in have demands that require us to use “one language” for the entire project, as if it’s some magical ring from Lord of the Rings. It’s all insane. And today I read this and it only makes me more depressed about the whole of computerdom. God help us if this is where we’re going. What’s the point of a CS degree? I have to ask. And can we save ourselves from the mess we’ve created?

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Book Review: Geeks Bearing Gifts

March 21, 2009
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Book Review: Geeks Bearing Gifts

I’m re-reading a book by Ted Nelson, the guy who created the notion of hypertext back in 67, and fully documented it. You can read about his creation, called Xanadu, on Wikipedia. His new book is more of a rant about the computer industry. It’s a telling book. First for the oddities of the book. It’s self-published via Lulu Press. It’s full of typographical and grammatical errors. It seems to have been written as one long diatribe, in historic form, about how we got into the predicament we’re currently in. And he numbers his chapters from the beginning to end using Unix as the central epoch thereby requiring the pre-Unix history to be provided in chapters denoted by a negative number. Unique, to say the least. Each chapter is short, a few pages at most, and full of personal opinion and historical detail. In a way, the book is partially biographical, at least in terms of his life and opinions and dealings with computers and the computer industry. You can quite literally pick any chapter and find nuggets. One of my favourite chapters is the one on databases, Chapter -20 (yes, minus 20). He goes on about the desire of

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U2: No Line On the Horizon

March 14, 2009
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Those that know me well know I’ve been a fan of U2 since 1979. I first heard a U2 song when a good friend of mine played a tune he’d brought back from Ireland. It was awesome and I was hooked. I believed them to be the future of Rock and Roll. For thirty years — has it been that long? — I’ve enjoyed their music. And just a few days ago U2 released their latest, No Line On the Horizon. What to make of it. I’ll make no bones about the fact I liked their earlier work the best. To me, U2 peaked with the 1st half of Joshua Tree, falling down on the 2nd half. Though In God’s Country is one of my all time favourites and it resides on the 2nd side. Thereafter, they have some impressive songs but the overall albums have been lacking. To be sure, some of my favourite U2 songs came after Joshua Tree, with my all time favourite being Until the End of the World on Achtung Baby. So as news emerged that a new U2 album was in the works and due out in 2009 I both anticipated it and dreaded

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Musings

A blog of my musings. Some folks find it interesting and so I continue. Hopefully it will remain fairly interesting. At worst, it'll keep me writing orthogonally to my day job.

Month at a Glance

March 2009
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