Via Sue Schmitz comes the sad word that Alex, the amazing Gray Parrot whose cognitive abilities were literally incredible, has died. Supposedly (there I go with the doubt), he had a vocabulary of 150 words, could count recognize quantities up to 6, could identify 50 objects, understood concepts such as …

Is this a strictly true statement? 

"One can freely download command-line compilers for all Microsoft languages and never use Visual Studio."

Specifically, don't you need VS to develop for Smartphones and / or Windows Mobile?

With the release to public beta of Popfly, Microsoft's mashup editor, I'll reiterate my theory that mashups are the UNIX shell of the Internet. The corollary is that we need a suite of command equivalents:

Command Mashup Alternative cd, mkdir, rmdir facilities for manipulating "current URI"; REST principles, etc. mailx …

I'm tempted to label as "shocking" the announcement that F# will become a product fully integrated into Visual Studio, but I suppose it would be hard for anyone to ignore stuff as compelling as this. F# is a derivative of OCaml and is a functional programming language. Those who delve …

I know I should qualify this with "of course, it's terribly irresponsible. If someone had died, what kind of possible excuse..." etc.

But he didn't kill anyone, so I'll just point to the link:

http://www.wired.com/cars/coolwheels/magazine/15-11/ff_cannonballrun?currentPage=all

This must have been bitter-sweet. Sure, you want to get your rocket back, but talk about going out in a blaze of glory...

A well-written \<a href="http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/SoftwareIsHard.html"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">reiteration of the premise that complexity is an essential, not accidental, aspect of software construction. [via links for 2007-10-03 Bill de h?ra ]

[C]omputer-science grads saw their average starting salary offers grow by 4.5 percent last year alone. The new average salary for a job right out of college is now \$53,051. That's the highest amount this decade.

Starting salaries surge for computer science grads [Ars Technica]

Interesting. I still …

The only thing that's worse than ignoring a cause is doing something absolutely trivial and patting yourself on the back about it. Apparently if you blog about the environment today, you've done your part. I think there was a day last week when you were supposed to alter your CSS …

Philosophy Bites

\<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">In Our Time I would say that these have nothing to do with software development, but there was actually a great "Philosophy Bites" on vagueness that touched directly on fuzzy logic …