Part of the interviewing process for a software development job is "coding on the whiteboard." Some simple-enough-to-understand problem (such as "FizzBuzz") that shows whether you grok coding or whether you're wasting everyone's time.

The first threshold is understanding that it's foolish to memorize specific "interview code problems," which is, pitifully …

I have to admit that I think about this every time the subject of shark attacks and SCUBA diving comes up:

xkcd: Conditional Risk.

Entropy always increases: Visualising sorting algorithms.

Lovely way of visualizing sorting. I especially like the visualization of the "divide and conquer" algorithm:

If you are interested in high-performance programming on Windows, you know the name Joe Duffy, whose book Concurrent Programming On Windows is absolutely top-notch.

Today he posted an intriguing notice on his blog "We are hiring." Check out some of the things he says:

My team's responsibility spans multiple aspects …

Apropos of something I'm not quite ready to talk about, here is an interesting challenge:

How do you optimize your time at the telescope if you have a set of objects that you'd like to observe?

For instance, if you want to see as many Messier objects as you can …

I'm doing some exploration of "Big Data" and data mining (fun!) and came across this interesting presentation:

The following time series is converted to string "acdbbdca":

I read the new book "The Grand Design" by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow yesterday (it's a short book and if you're comfortable with the differences between "the Universe," "the visible Universe," and "the Metaverse" it's easy-enough going). The book is getting a lot of press for its repeated assertion …

The number of 7-bullet-per-slide PowerPoint presentations seems to be declining, but "Steal This Presentation" is a useful source of advice. On the other hand, if you're presenting to developers, please don't hesitate to have the occasionally semantically-precise slide.

The worst thing about developing for the Mac or iOS is Objective C. Obj-C was a heck of a good experiment 20 years ago, but it's just not a good fit for today's mainstream programming mindset. In the wake of Apple's relenting on the use of 3rd party language tools …