Black holes, LHC, Star Wars, quantum uncertainty… if it is of general geek interest, but doesn’t fit into one of the other categories, it lands here.
I sometimes hear or experience something that cements my way of thinking. Sort of a “eureka!” moment, I suppose, but on a personal “philosophical” level. I had one of those moments earlier this week.
Someone made a comment, a standard cliche heard in corporate circles all the time: If we aren’t growing, we are dying. Naturally, I’ve heard this comment before. And I’ve had a fundamental disagreement with it, but this time a bunch of thoughts came together at once for me.
Gollum won an award on MTV’s Movie Awards for best CG character…and you have to check out Gollum’s acceptance speech.
My Linux server, the system that this website and several others run on, is hot. I don’t mean that its a really high performance computer (although its not bad): I mean its several degrees too warm.
Earlier today I was deep in thought trying to get a computer system to cooperate here at the home of the Fur Olympics. The doorbell rang, which always irritates me when I have a computer in pieces and its not behaving properly.
In that frame of mind, I opened the door. A white haired gentleman was there, and he immediately began to berate me. Apparently, he and his wife had been walking by our house, and the lawn clippings on our sidewalk offended his sensibilities. He also informed me that he “knew the man who owned this house before…”, as if this would somehow cause me to quiver in my boots.
Apparently, a government office in Oregon is seeking fluent speakers of Klingon in order to serve some of their clients.
I’ve admitted elsewhere to being a geek, but even I have to draw the line somewhere.
Continue reading Klingon speakers required…
I’m a hacker…not a security hacker, not a script kiddy, but an old school, widget-writing code developer. I write code, I don’t theorize about it.
But I’ve always felt guilty. My brief stint in University (I dropped out of Honours Comp. Sci after about six months) made me feel like real computing science was all about mathematics and set theory. Then I found this article by Paul Graham, which really hit a chord with me.
Basically, Paul’s suggestion is that Computing Science is, for many people, not a science. Instead, it is more akin to an art form. Coders like myself don’t write out some mathematical theory for a program, then transcribe it. Instead, we work with materials and theories to create. Some of what we do is sketching, some of it transcends mere sketching and becomes “beautiful”. But it is a far cry from a formal science for many (most?) programmers.
Just like a good artist or architect, good hackers don’t program randomly: we start with a theme or a context (the requirements for an application, a problem that needs to be solved), and create something “organically” that fulfills or perhaps transcends our original intent.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my life feeling guilty, or sometimes angry, regarding the way I code versus the way I had been taught I was *supposed* to code. Paul’s article helped me see this in a different light. In fact, its encouraged me to dig a bit more into theory: not because I feel I have to, but because it might help me be a better coder.
Continue reading Hackers are like painters…
You may recall my story about the amazing stock trader, Andrew Carlssin, who claimed to be from the future.
Well, I was fooled. I didn’t read the fine print regarding where that story came from. It originated on Weekly World News, and was reprinted all over the net. Apparently, the SEC and FBI were flooded by calls from news agencies to verify the story, so at least I wasn’t the only one who got sucked in. Continue reading Okay, so I was fooled
Everyone knows that Microsoft products are the subject of a great deal of hacker attention. Sure, Microsoft hasn’t in the past been very good about securing their products, but with all the script kiddies and coders making them their #1 target, it isn’t too surprising that problems keep cropping up. Continue reading HTML rendering crashes Internet Explorer…
Warning: the following is my current opinion. As my sagely nephew often says, Opinions are like a$$holes…
George W. Bush (“Dubblya” to his friends) said that the American people had to strike against the “axis of evil”. Thousands went to war, and I think the battle went as cleanly and quickly as any of us could have hoped. But what was it about? And what happens now?
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There is a guy currently in jail in New York for the crime of making too much money too quickly on the stock market. He started with $800 and, in two weeks, had a stock portfolio worth over $350 million. He did this on in a mere 126 trades, every single one of them successful.
But that isn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is that he says he’s from the future…