I'm emotionally reversed

Julie Lerman parsed from an email of mine that I :

  • am "kinda nervous" about Tina's first mammogram since her mastectomy,
  • was "scared" by the 12' tiger shark I saw while diving the other day, and
  • am "terrified" of installing a new hard drive

Apparently, I've got an inverter on my …

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New F# Compiler Released; Thoughts on "Practical OCaml" by Joshua Smith

Microsoft has posted version 1.1.13.8 (whatever the heck that means) of their F# compiler, which gives me an excuse to discuss the book Practical OCaml by Joshua Smith.

Practical OCaml is a new release from APress. My favorite technical book of last year was Practical Common Lisp …

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Measuring the speed of a meme

This post is attempting to measure the speed with which a blog post can propagate across the blogosphere. Feel free to link to it.

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Modified Snapshot Pattern

Here's a good pattern to use when you have a domain object that combines non-varying and time-varying data. Perrin's modified the original pattern to use generics: a good choice. (Why is it a good choice? Because objects that combine these two types of data are usually conceived of in a …

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Altair 8800 Kits For Sale on eBay

If you're looking for the perfect Christmas gift for a geek and your budget is around \$1800, this reproduction of the kit that started it all would be perfect.

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CodeGear and The Blogosphere

A few days ago was launched the biggest, most experienced, development tools company to be created since the dot-com era. A company that's explicitly turning away from managerial buzzwords in order to concentrate on language implementations, libraries, and tool-chains that will cross platforms. The company includes people who developed some …

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Me vs. $540M Government S/W Project

There was a short piece on the news last night about a \$540M travel reservation system developed to aid the Department of Defense manage their travel costs (in peacetime). Apparently, it doesn't work (doesn't deliver low fares) and even if it did work, it would take 20 years of projected …

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SD Times Newsfeed

SD Times has a newsfeed. Huzzah! Subscribed.

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Euphemism: "in a stop sell mode"

A client relying on a 3rd party service which we had been assured was available received an email today that said "[The service] is in a stop sell mode at this time as we are evaluating etc."

I'm going to have to remember that the next time I approach a …

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No New Features

TeX and METAFONT have version numbers that asymptotically approach ? and e. This reflects Don Knuth's decision that it's more important to create consistency with those tools than to add features. I've thought about something similar with programming language design: languages like Java and C# were very "teachable" in their …

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