Month: April 2010
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Container Models
A long time ago a friend of mine pointed out a sign of trouble in any program: defining a new container model. If you are working in a language that provides containers in the standard library, then use them. If you need a container with specific behaviour, then make it look like the standard containers.…
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Elder Con
A friend (I’ll call him John) recently told me about a con that was run on his parents. The con artist called his parents home and pretended to be John. This was apparently done with a little social engineering: “Hello?” “Hi, Mom?” “Is this John?” “Yes, it’s John.” The caller excused the fact that he…
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Goldman
I have no idea whether the recent SEC lawsuit against Goldman Sachs will prevail in the courts. Goldman’s defense sounds pretty good to me: the investors were presumed to be sophisticated, and they should have been able to figure out what was going on. What ought to collapse, though, is Goldman’s reputation for putting their…
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Software Paradigms
In my youth there was a lot of support for object oriented programming. It was generally agreed that we had a software productivity problem: it was too hard to write programs. The solution was supposedly to adopt object oriented programming techniques. This was expressed in its purest form in Smalltalk, and was brought to the…
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Oklahoma bombing
Today is the 15th anniversary of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, the second worst terrorist attack in U.S. history to date. 168 people died. I’ve tried to write something about what happened and the government response, but it keeps getting more political than I really want, so I’ve given up. Terrorists are…