'Coding and digital prowess is still niche at a young age, self-taught by the studious. It is often considered a bit nerdy in senior school, where it is not currently taught as a part of the curriculum, although this is changing in senior schools from September 2012. Therefore, generally speaking, those who code have taught themselves. Teaching yourself something that should really be covered as a part of lessons is a bit like doing extra homework – why, ask many teens, would anyone do that? There is no way the majority of hormonally challenged, desperate-to-find-their-place-in-the-world teenage girls would risk ridicule or isolation by doing such a thing – let alone be open and proud about it. (Boys of the same age have different social challenges and do not measure their societal worth so much by peer review.)'

'A tense silence falls between us. The phone call goes unmade. I'll call tomorrow once my comrade regains his senses and is willing to commit to something reasonable.'

'Eclim is less of an application and more of an integration of two great projects. The first, Vim, is arguably one of the best text editors in existence. The second, Eclipse, provides many great tools for development in various languages. Each provides many features that can increase developer productivity, but both still leave something to be desired. Vim lacks native Java support and many of the advanced features available in Eclipse. Eclipse, on the other hand, still requires the use of the mouse for many things, and when compared to Vim, provides a less than ideal interface for editing text. That is where eclim comes into play. Instead of trying to write an IDE in Vim or a Vim editor in Eclipse, eclim provides an Eclipse plug-in that exposes Eclipse features through a server interface, and a set of Vim plug-ins that communicate with Eclipse over that interface. This functionality can be leveraged in three primary ways, as illustrated below.'

a great observation from jgc. 'Lovelace realized that even though a computer was, at its heart, a mathematical machine, it wasn't restricted to doing mathematics. She realized that a computer could be used to process other types of 'information' by having numbers represent anything else. She realized that a computer could handle text, or music, or practically anything. That's Lovelace's Leap.'

OpenPGP's web of trust extending further. 'Everyone who has used a web browser has been interrupted by the "Are you sure you want to connect?" warning message, which occurs when the browser finds the site's certificate unacceptable. But web browser vendors (e.g. Microsoft or Mozilla) should not be responsible for determining whom (or what) the user trusts to certify the authenticity of a website, or the identity of another user online. The user herself should have the final say, and designation of trust should be done on the basis of human interaction. The Monkeysphere project aims to make that possibility a reality.'

'a tool for tunneling SSH through HTTP proxies'. handy

brilliant thread of epic "OMG WHAT HAVE I DONE" stories

'The operation, called "France Brevets" will buy up patents from small operation and put the French government in charge of [...] shaking down companies for money.' I think the word is: incroyable

'Ireland’s tech scene continues to expand in spite of the woeful state of the rest of the economy with a plethora of accelerator programs, seed funds and events like Founders and the IBM smartcamp global finals happening there in the last year or two. '

still fantastic advice, even after 4 years.  I think it's time for a re-read

'Notch’s luck was that he came across the idea of doing a first-person fortress building game. His alignment was that the game that he wanted to make was culturally connected to [he PC gamer] tribe. While the game may appear ugly, and its purchase process etc seem naive to many a gaming professional, all of those decisions that Notch made along the road to releasing his game were from the point of view of a particular perspective of what games are, what matters and what were the things that he could trust the tribe to figure out for themselves.'

'GOATS just stand around during this phase and stare at each other, rolling their eyes frequently at howlers (such as using serialization to SOAP for storage, or databases as RPC mechanisms). It is often useful for GOATS — or anybody, really — to take notes for the monthly BACKSTABBING drill.'

I never really understood how useful a good metrics infrastructure could be for operational visibility until I joined Amazon.  Here's a good demo of Etsy's metrics system (via Netlson)

'a (python) library and a tool to clusterize similar files using fuzzy hashing techniques. This project is inspired by the well known tool ssdeep.' Via Nelson

true -- very difficult to hire good staff in Ireland right now

A high-performance compressor optimized for binary data -- 'designed to transmit data to the processor cache faster than a traditional, non-compressed, direct memory fetch via memcpy()' (via Bill de hOra)

'adapted for Windows by JAM Software' -- cool! Thanks Daniel

Ubuntu have hack-patched Vixie Cron to silently ignore cron files which contain a ".". omgwtf

'Pam Samuelson, one of the co-authors of the report, says that her conclusion from the research is that the world may be better off without software patents; that the biggest beneficiaries of software patents are patent lawyers and patent trolls, not entrepreneurs.' no shit, Sherlock

'Apparently Commodore-Amiga owed $10M for patent infringement. Because of that, the US government wouldn't allow any CD-32's into the USA. And because of that, the Phillippines factory seized all of the CD-32's that had been manufactured to cover unpaid expenses. And that was the end'

'Programming is an embarrassment compared to other fields of engineering and design. Our mainstream culture is one of adolescent self-indulgence. It is like something from Gulliver’s Travels, with the curly-bracketeers vs. the indentationites vs. the parenthesesophiles. The only thing that everyone seems to agree upon is how stupid all the other programmers are. Try googling “stupid programmers”. We have met the enemy, and he is us.' Fantastic post via Jan Lenhardt

via a forum on MacRumors -- blow away the locationd cache. Worked perfectly for me after my GPS crapped out halfway through my holidays :( Requires that the phone be jailbroken first

'the process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anyone except yourself' (via Mozai)

MS internal politics routinely torpedoed cool new projects. surprise, surprise. 'Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed [ClearType] made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The VP for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control.'

discussion thread on the cons of using Turing-complete general-purpose programming languages in places where it's not necessary, such as configuration files

specifically, a port of dessid to the iPhone, recently causing headlines

good overview of this jailbreak app

'A parallel implementation of gzip for modern multi-processor, multi-core machines', by Mark Adler, no less

great blog post on the YAGNI principle. +1

actually quite a good breakdown of software eng skill progression

a story of how a bug in Apollo 11's Lunar Module control software, intended to work around a deficiency of the engine hardware, barely avoided mission-endangering results