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Space
No science fiction writer ever predicted what actually happened when we went to the Moon: we came home and never went back. Why did that happen? It happened because 1) going to the Moon is expensive and dangerous; and 2) after we got there once, there was nothing to gain by going there again. There…
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Public Development
Although it hasn’t been my habit to track other blogs closely, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote an interesting post about Programmer Insecurity. The gist of the post is that programmers need to share code early in the development process. They should not develop code in their own cave, and then unleash it on an unsuspecting world. This…
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Fast Development
I recall a Microsoft magazine ad from the mid-1980’s, back when Microsoft was best known for the compiler. The ad was four pages long. The first page said that their new development environment had the three things every programmer wanted. I didn’t use Microsoft tools in any case, but when I looked at that page,…
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Insane Architecture
It is generally believed that anybody who sees the lost city of R’lyeh goes insane. My personal observation is that the towns of Silicon Valley make me feel insane. It seems therefore plausible that Silicon Valley is in some way associated with Cthulhu. Of course there are many people who live in Silicon Valley, but…
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Jackie Chan
Watching The Forbidden Kingdom the other day reminded me of Jackie Chan’s glory days, the string of movies from Project A to Drunken Master II or perhaps Rumble in the Bronx. It is unfortunately hard to see those movies in theaters these days; they used to be shown regularly in Hong Kong film retrospectives. In…