Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Sunday, June 27th, 2010
Great post from Joey deVilla about the hundreds of millions of dollars that flow each year from high tech companies to the ugliest warlords in the world. Don't you just wish people at the G8/G20 in Toronto (the suits and the scufflers) had been talking about this? And don't you ...
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Sunday, June 20th, 2010
I'm partway through Bill Karwin's new book SQL Antipatterns [1] and all I can say is, "Damn, this is good." Important material, crisp writing, well-chosen examples---it's exactly what a technical book should be, and I hope a lot of people read it.
[1] Fair disclosure: I've done two books with Pragmatic, ...
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Thursday, June 17th, 2010
How did I miss this? George Orwell's diary entries are being reposted on this blog in step with the original events. Very cool, particularly now that the French have surrendered :-)
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Friday, June 11th, 2010
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Monday, June 7th, 2010
One of the many things that impressed me about Michael Nygard's Release It! and Robert Hanmer's Patterns for Fault Tolerant Software was their use of concept diagrams to show how the ideas they were discussing fit together. Our second attempt to do this for the Software Carpentry course is now ...
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Friday, June 4th, 2010
Andrew Trusty (a grad student at U of T) has just finished his Master's degree, and as part of that he built a tool called ALOE that helps people learn a foreign language by selectively translating parts of web pages into that language as they read. Neat!
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Saturday, May 29th, 2010
I don't agree with everything he says, but I do agree with this:
...what really matters in programming...is not...solving puzzles and being the brightest kid in the class. It is...realizing that the complexity of software dwarfs even the most brilliant human; that cleverness cannot win. The only weapons ...
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Thursday, May 27th, 2010
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Thursday, May 27th, 2010
This post from Darryl Cunningham is a damning summary of the harm done by Andrew Wakefield, who was paid to "prove" that vaccines cause autism. Children have died, and will continue to die, because of what he did; if a big pharma company had acted exactly the same way, there ...
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Thursday, May 27th, 2010
Google recently announced a Prediction API:
he Prediction API enables access to Google's machine learning algorithms to analyze your historic data and predict likely future outcomes. Upload your data..., then use the Prediction API to make real-time decisions in your applications.
Interesting, and possibly very useful, but is Google ...
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