There have been a number of people who have refused to upgrade - like they got the best of whatever it was and refused to get more. There’s a cult of people who refused to leave MS Office 5.1. It was small, effective, perfect, light. Not many people could say that about Office anymore. Those who refuse to upgrade are called “refuseniks”.

The Leauge sent in an email to see if I had fallen off the edge of the world. Although it appears irony has fallen upon The League, for as I type this, his web site has, in fact, fallen off the edge of the world: Blogger appears to be down. I have not left the gravitational field of this big, blue, glob. There’s a bunch of interesting work stuff going on ( more later ), my mom was in town and I started classes at Austin Community College. I’m taking two classes: Intermediate Algebra and C++. First, this is the kind of mathematics I learned in high school ( or should have learned better ).

Goodmorning. I had a late morning this morning … because I had a late night last night. Last night, per BNR tradition ( and I can say this because of me experiences at the Cocoa camp ), post dinner ( and occasionally a drink or two ) many of the students returned to the classroom to review, invent, create, etc. under the tutelage of our teacher. I basically re-ran all the exercises from Day 2 again, inventing scenarios to make sure that I truly “got it”. In training, it’s very easy to simply nod and do the exercise but, as my math teacher says, when you are working the problem alone, you will get the loneliness.

Hi all, After the lengthy tour of duty yesterday, I’m back in for another lengthy day. I think that Wednesday is really the grinder day. First, you’ve been lectured to for the last 3 days. There are very few minds that can take 8hr. / day lectures without feeling a bit tapioca-ish on the 24th hour. Secondly, you’re listening and then working very hard on something that you just were introduced to. You have these head bashing against a wall sessions and then, suddenly, you’re set free ( because you’re doing something that’s old hat, something you learned, say, that morning ) and then you hit the wall with all that built-up acceleration.

Yesterday’s post looks a little incoherent with a day of rest between it and I. Based on the entreaty of Mr. Graitcer in the comments, I thought that perhaps I could try to characterize what it is to be fatigued in this way. First, let’s just say that it’s not the expectation of the teacher or the class curriculum that you work yourself into fatigue of this type. It’s not necessary or required. Yet in both of the BNR classes I’ve taken, the students worked late into the night on their own projects, or improving the assignments. Therefore, the motivation to work to this level of fatigue is not extrinsic, it is clearly intrinsic.

Thanks for following me across to my new site, note the new .net domain. I’ve not written for so long owing to my fear of having to migrate more data or lose more data should the lost stevengharms.com die that I’ve completely fallen out of the habit of writing. So far the folks at hostgator have meen a dream to work with, I opened 3 different support cases with respect to getting things set up and going and all three were addressed and dealt with between the hourse of 9 and 5. Totally, professional, friendly, and smooth.

Examine the Unicode standard’s code page collection for “Latin small letter a with macron”. Nets U0100.pdf “Latin small letter a with macron” appears on chart as 0101. This is a hexidemial number which points to U+0101 as its code point. Converting 0101 to decimal gets you 257, this is the same as the HTML entity code. Thus one can enter either ā or ā and get the right glyph [ā|ā] Put ā character into a view via Rails that is back-ended by a PostGres database. Using script/console, write the collection of models that contain this accented character to a YAML file.

Once upon a time there was a genius software developer named Hans Reiser. He used to join Linux forums and lambaste other hackers as being foolish, prodigal, indolent, and was generally a bit of an egomaniacal ass. In other words, par for the course in the world of software development. But then he was indicted, and convicted, for the murder of his wife amid a tale of S&M;, Linux development ( intimately linked ), Russian internet-ordered brides, and infidelity. A crucial feature of the trial was, well, that the cops couldn’t find the body. Upon being found guilty, Reiser seems to have copped a plea with the judge such that he could get a lesser sentence in exchange for the victim’s family and, nota bene, his own children being able to lay the body of their daughter / mother to rest.

Introduction On May 14th, I competed at a Hackfest hosted by Podio. Podio is a customizable social networking application delivered as a service (aaS). After 8 hours of coding, I placed first in the competition and won a beautiful Apple Cinema Display. In this post I will cover my hack, how it was done, and lessons learned. Victori pretium it Background Let me first introduce the various companies involved and technologies provided or implemented in the solution. I think of these as the ingredients in the recipe that allowed me to code my offering. Podio In case you haven’t noticed, people are spending phenomenally large amounts of time on social networks.

“The Atlantic” recently published an article entitled: “The Coming Software Apocalypse” by James Somers. It argues convincingly that humans are failing in our ability to create software systems that deal adequately with the most complex systems (nuclear arsenal, aircraft, radiation therapy dosage machines, etc.). “We used to be able to think through all the things it could do, all the states it could get into,” noted Nancy Leveson. We are now quite beyond that recalling a famous programmer saw: “When I wrote this only God and I could understand what it did; now only God knows.” In this post I would like to try to define a collection of vulnerabilities in thinking which contribute to our difficulty creating software that’s sufficiently robust to be trusted in complex situations.