Sun
Mar
2
Machines that behave unpredictably tend to be viewed as malfunctioning, unless we are playing games of chance. Alan Turing, namesake of the infallible, deterministic, Universal machine, recognized (in agreement with Richard Foreman) that true intelligence depends on being able to make mistakes. “If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent,” he argued in 1947, drawing this conclusion as a direct consequence of Kurt Gödel’s 1931 results.
Sun
Feb
17
Source: Stuart Halloway (CEO of Relevance) presentation: Ending Legacy Code in Our Lifetime
Sat
Feb
16
“ Also in Getting Real, which is mainly about web applications. They demonstrate how their products outdo their competition because they are way more simple and therefore easier to use. I think choice is another important factor. As you might have read before, it’s a fact that choice is one of the main psychological contributors of unhappiness. This is well-explained by Barry Schwartz on TEDTalks.
source
Mon
Feb
4
“ I know this is far-fetched, but bear with me here. We may be on the edge of… nothing particularly important… because this is a critical time in the history, only… maybe not. Actually maybe it’s not a critical time in the history. Maybe we happen to be in a rather dull, self-satisfied time of history. And we’re not doing really anything of particular consequence.
Bruce Sterling
Sun
Jan
6
“ A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve an equation, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Robert A. Heinlein
Thu
Jan
3
“ Programmers recently had a major shift in their quality focus with the introduction of best practices from the Agile methodologies and the Capability Maturity Model. These days if you aren’t doing continuous integration, writing solid unit tests, performing personal process improvement, frequently communicating with your team, and automating everything, then you are easily labeled an amateur developer.
Zed Shaw
Mon
Dec
31
“ The human species is often amazingly inventive and industrious but at the same time profoundly lazy. It’s very clear that we humans don’t like to work. This aversion to work is so extreme - and our ingenuity so acute - that we’re eager to devote countless hours designing and building devices that might shave a few minutes off our workday. Few fantasies tickle human pleasure center more than a vision of relaxing in a hammock watching some newfangled contraption we just built mow the lawn.
CODE - Charles Petzold
Tue
Dec
18
“ Here lies a man who knew how to bring into his service men better than he was himself.
the words that Andew Carnegie chose for his tombstone
Sun
Dec
16
“ Cutler never apologized for his impatience or his tantrums. “I thrive on stress,” he boasted. He viewed his team as a community built on common joys, sacrifices, and secrets. He was a stern but caring patriarch; he never asked more of anyone else than of himself. In a society in which excuses were the currency of toleration, he accepted none. “I expect everybody to do their best—all the time,” he said.
Show Stopper (book about Windows NT project)
