They’ve sold out but in a rare moment of consumer lust, I want one of those. Perfect for the garden in summer.

Yes, I am a geek, but this is funny.

I came across www.9031.com via boicozine (where Michael describes it much better than I ever could so go read his description).

This article really makes sense for me. Not in terms of what should be taught in American schools, but in terms of why I’m a geek and what that actually means. Once you get past the barrier of what could be described as a formal language system – syntax and vocabulary – programming is all about the fuzzy stuff:
“The majority of his contemporaries apparently claimed that using the logical, left-brain symbols associated with their work was NOT how they did their work. These were simply the tools they used to communicate it. What they used to do the works was much… fuzzier. Intuition. Visualization. Sensation (Einstein talked of a kinesthetic element). Anthropomorphizing. Metaphors.”
Also, from Code like a girl:
“Because caring about things like beauty makes us better programmers and engineers. We make better things. Things that aren’t just functional, but easy to read, elegantly maintainable, easier–and more joyful–to use, and sometimes flat-out sexy. A passion for aesthetics can mean the difference between code that others enjoy working on vs. code that’s stressful to look at.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between good code and bad recently because I’ve been migrating someone else’s codebase to new templates and it’s been a bit of a nightmare. I feel almost tainted by dealing with such dodgy code but in some ways it’s been a good learning experience because it’s reinforced that elegance and the ability to abstract and refactor code is really really important. Though I’m not too sure ‘code like a girl’ works as a generalisation because apart from the gender stereotypes, this ugly code was written by a woman.
I’ve only recently discovered Creating Passionate Users but it’s a joy to read.

I’ve posted about her before, but I think she’s so damn cool it’s worth another post:
“The 100th anniversary of the birth of programming language pioneer Grace Hopper was celebrated on 9 December. Widely credited as being the “mother” of the Cobol computer language her work was hugely influential.
…
Her inspiration was to create a computer language that read more like real English rather than the tortuous machine code used by many other programming languages of the time.” BBC

I came across thedailywtf.com during a search for ‘spaghetti code’. Geeks being mean to other geeks is always tragically amusing. This particularly amused me, probably because I’m working through someone else’s (spaghetti) code at the moment.

This is absolutely humbling: “The delicate workings at the heart of a 2,000-year-old analogue computer have been revealed by scientists.
…
Writing in Nature, the team says that the mechanism was “technically more complex than any known device for at least a millennium afterwards”.” BBC

It’s The Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator. It’s funny cos it’s true.

Getting music off your iPod onto your computer. Cos I’ll need to do this sooner or later.