larry o'brien refines his comment that computational power doesn't add much to programmer performance. the argument made to him is that testing and debugging require much more power than the actual programming and that often the tools associated with development (think "Next Eclipse of the Sun Before I Start") require lots of cycles to work effective. he concedes that this is for the most part true but questions how many people actually test and debug at all (and I would add to that, how many test/debug on their workstations, i develop server stuff that i test on test servers) and also questions how much productivity can really be gain by going from 500MHz to 2GHz. As a note, until about 2 months ago I was working on a 166mhz machine doing all my development although now I have 600mhz. No real difference considering I use a minimalist setup, use vi, and don't test/debug on my workstation. (read larry's resume and look at what he says about his screen writer career, hah!)#

you can now ping technorati when you update. werd.#

andrew birkett was thinking about how there would be a better future if there were to be better tools available for programming. his main point is tangential off kent beck's "if X is good, let's do X all the time", specifically in the case of objects. he thinks that using objects at the software creation level (meta-objects such as loop, method, etc) will make it easier to reason and talk about the software in a way that is useful. his example of usefulness is visualizing interactions and having a convenient place to put profiling information and then look at it. the tunes project hopes to fulfill this vision in the HLL (High Level Language) project. the principle of HLL that andrew is concerned with is Reflection and Metaprogramming. the bit at the end of andrew's post is very thoughtful: "C++ is a pain to parse and it has complicated semantics, so creating tools which process it is hard. There seems to be many more tools for Java these days, and Smalltalk and Lisp have had pretty good tools for decades." (via smalltalk blog)#

hunting the muse makes a very convincing observation that most 'conspiracies' are explainable as bigotry of some quality. what a useful way of thinking about it. also about racism is something gene expression linked and summarizes as "In a nutshell, racism is a crutch for failure."#

tony pierce writes about writing and briefly disses paul frank: "...i was tryng to forget about her. trying to because she likes paul frank and the last girl who blew me off likes paul frank and its going to have to take a definite change in the universe for me not to flinch anytime i see that filthy monkey on dainty pair of unmentionables." - hah.#

ted leung thinks some more about the whole software tool problem and relates something interesting stories about his past experiences with tools. he says, "At every company that I've ever worked at, one of the first things I did after I got hired was to ask my management for the best tools that money could buy, both software and hardware. In some cases I got them, and in other cases I didn't. Not all of my co-workers did that." - it seems like a good idea to do this, although it doesn't really occur to you to start asking for stuff no one else has but then again if you think about it, good practices have to start somewhere right?#

article at kuro5hin about aerobics for regular guys. there's a lot to it, you wouldn't think so though because i'm a bigot and think people who are tough are idiots.#

an interview with linus: "I enjoyed that IBM started porting Linux to the S390, found that hugely amusing. I thought, OK, somebody has done a few too many drugs." (via lockergnome)#

the open government information awareness project (article via lockergnome): is very clever and will hopefully be very useful.#

article from kpaul at kuro5hin about why people litter and what you can do about it. what concerns me a lot about litter is not only that it exists, but what happens to refuse in general after it's put in a trash bin. garbage islands and non-ubiquitous recycling don't seem like a good idea to me. even though it's extremely common i don't like the idea of things that made to be thrown away: bottles, plastic bags, etc. such a waste.#

the scenesters flash movie is funny. the classic how to dress emo. how to dance punk is bad. #