“The Neuroscience of Cracking an Egg”

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Besides the humorous and enlightening marketing lesson, this article points out a mental quirk of our species: the reward you get from something isn’t as important to your happiness as the amount of effort you had to put into getting it.

I have perfectly sound and logical business reasons for always tackling the hardest programming problem I can find: such problems tend to act as barriers to keep other people out, which keeps the competition down. For instance, did you know that there’s no official and freely available C or C++ OAuth library? It’s true, and I’m sure it has kept many people from writing certain types of programs. But it’s also true that I also find those problems much more satisfying to solve.

“Consumers urged to step up wireless security”

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I’m not really sure what these guys are trying to accomplish. Those of us who want wireless network security already use it. Those who don’t use it generally either don’t care or truly don’t want it.

There are a pair of high-rise apartment buildings across the street from one of the stores that my wife shops at. I often take my computer and sit in the car while she shops, working on my programming. My laptop always displays a number of wireless networks when I start it up there, showing the protected status and asking if I want to connect to one (I don’t need to, all my work and reference material is already on my system). For a long time, almost none of them were protected, but all of a sudden a couple years ago, all of them were. I could only speculate why, but it occurred to me that it could be caused by just one bad apple sucking large amounts of bandwidth from any open connection he could find.

I probably wouldn’t turn on wireless security myself, except that letting someone use my wireless network would also let them past my firewall, which isn’t happening. If somebody needs a wireless connection that badly, there’s a library next door and several restaurants within a block or two that will gladly provide it for free.

“The Content Farm”

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I recently stumbled across a very funny parody site called The Content Farm. Extra funny if you’ve run across real content farms (they constantly steal Geek Drivel entries, so I see more than my fair share), but good even without that.

(An as-yet-unidentified content farm, stealing and mangling one of Geek Drivel’s articles, has apparently convinced Forbes, Monster.com, and other sites that “Google, boffinscrackRubik’sCubemystery Geek Drivel” is a publicly-traded company. Pardon me if I find that very funny. 🙂 )

“Lara Croft returns in next-gen Tomb Raider title”

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I thought that the graphics in the Final Fantasy movie, ten years ago, were pretty realistic, and you could tell by the skin tone of some of the characters that it wasn’t real. But take a look at the video on this page… that’s damn realistic!

I don’t know if the gameplay has the same realistic look, or if it’s just the cut-scenes. Either way, it’s impressive.

“Cussing in Commits: Which Programming Language Inspires the Most Swearing?”

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As a rule, I don’t put profanity in code comments. It’s unprofessional, if occasionally tempting in the extreme — especially after spending eight hours trying to work around an API or operating system bug to get your widget working on that last 5% of machines, only to find that it still fails.

Apparently a lot of developers aren’t as professional about it as I am, though.

It turns out that C++ is the king of code-comment profanity. No real surprise there, as a complex low-level language it’s bound to provide developers with many opportunities to swear. What is surprising, to me, is that JavaScript and Ruby are nearly at the same level. I’ve never worked with either language, so I can only speculate why, but I have to point out that neither is a low-level language so they don’t have that excuse.

Python and PHP are the ones at the lowest end of the scale. I’ve only used PHP rarely and for the most rudimentary things, but I’ve gotten a lot of practice with Python, and I can tell you exactly why: it’s a dream to work with once you get used to it. When my nine-year-old nephew wanted to start learning to program a few months ago, I gave him an ancient laptop with Ubuntu Linux on it and started explaining Python — within a couple days, he was writing simple GUI applications via the wxPython toolkit, with little help from me. He’s a smart kid, but the language itself had a lot to do with how fast he could pick it up.

I was a little surprised that C rated only a little more than half the profanity of C++. I’ve done C programming, in the bad old pre-C++ days. It’s a less-complex language, but even more low-level, so I’d have expected more profanity in it. But then, few young or hobby coders work with C these days. The average C coder is generally older than the average C++ one, with a correspondingly higher level of experience and discipline, so while users of C might have more reason to curse, I suspect they keep it out of their code for the same reasons I do.

Anyway, it’s amusing to an old programmer to see the comparison.

Newspapers, Again

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Wow, newspapers are really getting desperate.

I just got another call from a newspaper telemarketer (yes, yet again). When I said that I still wasn’t interested in a newspaper, he asked where I got my news, so I told him from the Internet. So far, no different than every other time these guys have called.

(My answer was automatic, but not completely true. I also get some news from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, sometimes. It’s pretty bad when fake comedy news shows are a better source of information than the real ones, but that’s a different subject.)

This time, he started something new, an obviously scripted spiel that began “reading news online doesn’t give you the whole story…”

Um, hello? I think they’ve got it backward. Reading news online usually gives me more of the story than a newspaper could. I can get multiple articles on any story that interests me, and I can get much more current news too. And it’s a lot more convenient, no newsprint to bleed ink all over my hands and to have to deal with afterward. In any case, my answer was to interrupt with: “I disagree. Thank you,” followed by hanging up on him when he tried to keep talking.

If newspapers started regularly doing real investigative reporting again, instead of just regurgitating AP wire stories that I can read anywhere, I might be convinced to pay — for a digital copy — of them, as yet another source of news. Otherwise they’re an irrelevant dinosaur, and I really wish they’d leave me alone.