Advice From An Old Programmer — Learn Python The Hard Way, 2nd Edition.

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Programming as a profession....can be a good job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast food …

According to this release, Computer Science majors had the highest percentage of job offers of any major.

I have to admit to being somewhat surprised at this, as I thought the trend toward offshore development was still driving down the market for young developers.

Answer: [[It's a "wireless remote streetlight switch" used by a local amateur astronomer as an amusement (but, of course, never, EVER to actually use!). Apparently, streetlights have a photosensor, and if one has a small laser, a nice spotting telescope, and sufficiently rigid mount, one could (but never, EVER actually …

A good article holding that "Why wasn't I consulted?" is the fundamental mindset on the Web: The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com).

This MSR paper describes an HTML/CSS/JS platform that seems to tie in with Microsoft's recent conspicuously-not-mentioning-.NET talk of Windows 8. This paper is still in a conference proceedings, so it wouldn't seem on the verge of productization, but there are so many questions raised by Microsoft's recent …

I haven't used this, but I talked briefly with the Code Bubbles developers about 18 months ago and thought that debugging would be the perfect fit. Seems like someone at MSR agreed:

Debugger Canvas - Microsoft Research.

Taking my own 15 Exercises to Know A Programming Language as a starting point for my exploration of Scala...

The first set of exercises are right up the alley of a language with pattern-matching and list-processing:

Write a program that takes as its first argument one of the words ‘sum …

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Raising Islands--Hawai'i science and environment: First Hawaiian "golden gooney" chick to fly soon.

How often do you get good environmental news?

I'm a bird geek. Or actually more of a romantic -- I  shed a tear when I …

Clever

Robot with corkscrew legs travels over rough terrain

Australia is considering a plan to make all cigarette packaging generic -- no branding or design on the cigarettes or packages, just the name in a generic font. The cigarette companies are freaking out, obviously.

Interesting

A study seems to show "we …