Wherewithin, Wikipedia is a seemingly infinite source of hilarity from an unsurpassed synthesis of inanity and insanity.
Celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy causes an existential crisis by quoting a hoax author.
There was only one language that everyone in the Tower of Babel spoke... that of money.
Innovation means a new way of doing something. At least, it used to mean that. Now, it apparently means a different way of doing something.
Dog Bites Man Month. Or does it? The criticism is sharp, but I'm not sure how deep it cuts. Anecdotal evidence is no less valid than statistical reasoning if it is widely understood to be advice that…
Somehow, I've managed to destroy two hard-drives recently, and in the process lost a small but significant collection of writing, mostly stuff that I was planning to publish here. As things fell…
Ruby programs can be written in unicode, meaning that you can label a real lambda. Once, when working on a school assignment to build a simple regular expression interpreter, I had a similar flash…
Advice from the hacked (via). The raging reality of having your GMail account stolen: What matters more for your immediate concerns, entropy is out to get you and entropy is going to win.…
Well I went to upload some new writing and just snapped - I couldn't write here until I was happy with the way it was presented. So I tore down all the styles and javascripts, leaving just a structural…
The last few days I've been locked into a frustrating negative and consuming frame of mind where writing and programming clash together, which unfortunately caused a few headaches. Just one of those…
Positive life changes can only happen when I am able to choose when and how I work, what I work on, and who I work with.
It’s hard to explain the collision of forces and events that has occurred over the past several months.
“Every time we went down the ‘wrong’ path, we learned something concrete — if not about software than at least about people”
Software development is hard. A lot of people like the idea of couching this difficulty in a form of explanation by analogy. The most common comparisons are generally the most facile and glib, and…
The meme of PHP's deeper language problems and possible extinction has bubbled to the surface again from various recent discussions, but my views on this are very different to what they used to be.…
So I've started another website, a kind of ongoing accident, with the idea echoing so intensely during Webstock as I culled together my 8x5 presentation, it just seemed to burst out of my brain and…
Check out this footage of my old mate Bryce in the ring with Shane Cameron, shot not long before the brutal fight in Auckland where Cameron ended up ahead on points but had his forehead beaten to…
Since Ali posted 20 things I learned at FullCodePress, I thought I'd chime in with my own observations from the perspective of being programmer for the Code Blacks.
I think someone is trying to tell me something... I've been noticing requests for http://maetl.coretxt.net.nz/http popping up in the logs, which is probably a sign that I should be fixing a few…
Or I'm a complete and total dumbarse... Uploaded some random experiments via FTP, and accidentally overwrote some of the core libraries without realising it. The good thing is that it forced me…
“The only thing that everyone seems to agree upon is how stupid all the other programmers are.”
Twitter as performance; Dean Allen ruminates on the end of an experiment.
Lest we see the fate of the Kennedy family as a singular anomaly, it’s worth contrasting the equally tragic—and most thoroughly American—story of the Von Erich wrestling dynasty.
The world wide web has led to a massive day-to-day proliferation of crap jokes that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago, and the programming culture is no exception. Interestingly enough though,…
Well, we did it... after an incredible series of mishaps (like this) and failures to source essential equipment (like this), things actually started going really well. Our assigned genre was Crime,…
Learning how to forget the properties of programming languages themselves, and think about the context of what is actually written in these languages.
PHP is flawed. Deeply, immensely so. I first discovered this over a year ago, when I made the naive assumption that PHP 5.1 had fixed a lot of the language level failings of its predecessor. Because…
In Hearing without listening, 37Signals screws up, then admits what they did wrong and how they fixed it. In the end, it's just a matter of several weeks downtime before the application is working…
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning…