I had wanted to go to the recent Mountain West Ruby Conference. My schedule sunk that idea. A great consolation prize is the Mountain West Ruby Conference 2009 online movies. This weekend I did get to go to the Boise Code Camp & Tech Fest 2009. To be honest, I didn’t expect little old Boise Code Camp to be much of a competitor to MWRC. I was wrong!
As I stood outside with the dog last night, a large satellite went over the house. I stood and watched it transit. A quick visit to the NASA site confirmed it was the International Space Station. I thought Charles Simonyi must be up there settling in to his second visit. Apparently no, but he’ll be there by Saturday.
Charles is best known by us programmers as being the creator of the (cough) Hungarian Notation. Anyone who has done Windows programming has been exposed to the obnoxious noise. However, to paper Charles with the blame is a mistake. The Windows API was the obnoxious part, Hungarian was just a good coping mechanism.
There is an old adage: “Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection. But that usually will create another problem.” The resulting equation would be: problem + level of indirection = solution + problem. I propose that the average programmer can fix this issue with a small modification to the formula, like so: problem + caffeine + sugar = solution.
I couldn’t stand the whole positive thinking thing of the 80′s. Like most urbanites, I cherished my cynicism and criticism. Ronbo was the man, and if you didn’t agree, The Sex Pistols was the best possible outlet, not est. In the 90′s I avoided The Forum (do they serve coffee before locking the bathrooms?) I had softened by then, but years of negativity had given me gray, as opposed to rose, colored glasses.
Recently I was very generously offered a mint Mac G4 notebook. When I tried to log into my new account, the password would not work. The owner (my best friend) then informed me that the keyboard layout was Dvorak. So “cupcake” needed to be typed in as “ifriavd”. Despite my friend’s generosity, I (mistakenly) took a swipe at him:
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