Mathematica is one of the most impressive pieces of software I’ve ever used. I use it any time I can find an excuse, which is unfortunately not that often (it’s surprising how rarely math intrudes upon the actual day-to-day life of the software developer).

In line with its …

My latest column for SD Times argues that Python is “your best bet for easy access to arbitrary values of interesting.”

Paul Vick nails it:

[W]riting a new language, domain-specific or not, is a lot like opening a restaurant: everyone thinks they can do it because they’ve eaten at one and it looks like fun.

via DSLs: Definitely a bad idea! .

He's getting some heat in the comments for …

Pretty much every link on my site was rewritten by Das Blog for logging purposes. The conversion to Word Press has broken all of those. I am going to have to write a utility to convert them and I won't be able to get to that for several days at …

My just-purchased SV102ED is my first "real" telescope and is a purchase I've put off for decades (ever since I realized what a huge \$ gap there was between a mall-store telescope and a decent one). After a lot of research, I went for the SV102ED "clearance special" with the M1 …

I am in the process of converting my blogging engine from das Blog to Word Press. During the transition, please feel free to ignore such things as the "about" page, my blogroll, etc.

This from a reader of a newsletter sent out by one of my publishers:

First, quit being political by having garbage like this:

\<QUOTE FROM NEWSLETTER>
In the spirit of new U.S. President Barack Obama's call for service 
in our communities, we offer up this e-mail from SPTechReport reader …

I have a brand new 4" refractor which is my first "real" telescope (as a kid I had a let's-say-3" Newtonian, your typical shopping-mall refractor, and I've had some decent binos and spotting scopes since then).

The world of amateur astronomy has vastly changed since I was a kid. Alan …

I'm as thankful as anyone that everyone got off the plane that went down in the Hudson, but I'm kind of ticked that all the news sites are calling it "The Miracle on the Hudson," or "Miracle Landing." That cheapens the tens of thousands of hours the pilot spent flying …

For much of the past week, I've been doing a bunch of accounting stuff. I am incorporating (as "Faster Programmer LLC" ? as in "Faster can mean both higher productivity and higher performance," but actually as in "Faster, Programmer! Code! Code!") and trying to get monetary things (new bank account, credit …