Giles Thomas makes the case that the Python programming community numbers in the low millions. This seems right to me: that's a large community, but it's not quite at the level of the most popular programming languages. That size is supported by this chart, which has impressed me as "feeling …

Yes, it's worth it.

It's a pity that the phrase "…in their natural habitat," is so boring. The difference between this:

and this:

is the difference between a pixel and the Sistine Chapel.

Deciding to spend the money on this trip was the hardest part of our Alaska trip. My …

The other day I'm doing the bills and I get one of those healthcare "This is not a bill. It describes services." things. You know, the sort of things that 90% of the world throws out without reviewing. But I look at it and check with my wife if she …

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very well written. First-person account of a psychopath or maybe a sociopath living deep inside a metaphor in Scotland. Very unsettling, with a narrator who's clearly unreliable, so one is always wondering if incidents or even entire characters …

How to enable developer settings on Android 4.2 | Android Central.

I just got myself a Nexus 4 for cross-platform development, but it didn't initially appear as a device in Xamarin Studio. Initial Googling and SO'ing indicated a non-existent "Settings->Application->Developer" route to enable debugging on the phone.

Instead …

The Justified finale had a scene that summed up one of it's greatest strengths: Raylan, the putative hero, and Boyd, the putative villain, demonstrate how parallel they are to each other: Raylan points to Boyd's career and sneers at the thought that Boyd imagines himself anything other than "the bad …

Update: this is an April Fool's joke. It's the most incoherent, illogical thing I could think of. It's a bad idea, it wouldn't work, and it misses the point of everything.

Hungarian Monadic Notation: Call Me Maybe()

Update: This was an April Fool's joke. If you are interested in monads …

OK, let's see if this works...

This is the basic structure of the "Hello, World!" program in C#:

using System;

class Hello
{
   <getchunk id="Main"/>
}

where the Main chunk is defined as :

static void Main()
{
   Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
}

C# Command-Line Extraction

And if you clone my Github repository, you …

Spoiler alert.

Not that you care. Scientists at UCSD have shown that people actually prefer stories when they have advance knowledge of the plot twists. Maybe movie companies have figured this out, because the trailer for The Gray has the final two shots of the movie in it. Not, mind …

Lost At Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries by Jon Ronson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Highly recommended. Ronson returns to the form of "Them," and "The Men Who Stare At Goats," in this collection of humorous journalistic essays. His last book, "The Psychopath Test," was a little one-note and …