Personal opinion: Python's "usability" and "readability" are marketing hype (2012/12/02)
People love to pitch Python as a language to learn in. I am pretty sure this is because everything you hear about Python is about how easy and intuitive it is, and how people love to pitch it as a good choice for learning.
[read more...]Polls and predictions (2012/10/30)
The election season is fascinating for math geeks, because it’s full of numbers, and numbers about numbers, and numbers about numbers about numbers.
[read more...]Standing room only... (2012/10/24)
I’ve seen one too many news stories about how it’s bad for us to sit all the time. I now have a standing desk. It’s a little wobbly, so I’ll have to add some supports to it, which means a hardware store trip. Planning to add four corner supports to it. Initial feedback, yes my feet hurt, but I feel otherwise quite a lot better. I’ve always liked to pace when thinking, and this gets me some of the benefits of pacing without the difficulty reaching the keyboard.
[read more...]Forced password resets: you're doing it wrong (2012/09/23)
For the most part, I really like Dropbox, but it seems to me that their recent decision to roll out forced password changes is… poorly implemented.
[read more...]A reminder: Overtime is nearly always stupid. (2012/08/12)
In a discussion about a video game, and why the developers should have been working on code rather than taking a break to do some social/promotional stuff, someone wrote:
[read more...]The Secret World: Way, way, better than some reviewers think (2012/08/10)
Inexplicably, TSW reviews sort of poorly. Wait, that’s not inexplicable; it’s totally explicable, it’s just sad. Many of them aren’t even reviews of the retail; they’re from mid-to-late beta. Others are just plain wrong on basic claims about mechanics. But mostly, I think, reviewers tried to play it as though it were a modern-setting WoW, and got disappointed when it wasn’t.
[read more...]Are you sure? (2012/07/17)
One of the recurring themes in user interface design is confirming actions which might be destructive. You tell the computer to do something, and it says “are you sure?”
[read more...]Says it all, really. (2012/07/13)
Build ran forever. Went and looked, and discovered that a program called ecj1 had taken up well over 3 hours of CPU time. I announced that it was probably Java-related based on that alone.
Cisco's new view of how routers work. (2012/07/04)
You may not know what routers are. Routers are devices which transmit information around, so for instance, if you have three computers, and an Internet connection, somewhere in there you probably have a router. The router is what makes sure that all three computers are able to access the Internet, and that your email ends up on your computer while someone else’s videos end up on theirs. They provide some basic control over data flows and such.
[read more...]Surface Review: The Secret World (2012/06/30)
So, a friend of mine has been really interested in Funcom’s The Secret World, which is currently in “early access”, with full launch on June 3rd. This means that, for the next couple of days, “pre-order” bonuses are still available, which may be of interest to some people.
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