No, we are not entering the time of Atlas Shrugged. No, Obama’s plan to deal with the economic melt down is not the same thing as the various acts passed during Atlas Shrugged. No, we are no about to enter a world dominated by socialism.
If you feel the need to drop out of society and move to a valley in Colorado, please feel free to do so. I will be understandably jealous.
Godel, Escher, Bach is one of those books I had heard about forever. I am not sure if I would have had the tenacity to complete it if I hadn’t already had a grounding in Computer Science. Having had courses in Computer Theory made the book go from a treatise on computer science, to a narrative that tied together many ideas into a more cohesive whole.
For years, our distance from other countries provided us with security. We were an Island Nation. Once our manifest destiny was completed, there was no significant threat left in our hemisphere, and we were too far from the nations of the old world for them to threaten us. Even the attack on Pearl Harbor was far away: Hawaii was not a state, just an island protectorate in the middle of the Pacific. Since WWII, we have grown more and more used to the concept of global threat. We were in a staring contest with Russia, half a world away. The threat of ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads made the end of the world seem plausible, but it was abstract. Mutually Assured Destruction was the word of the day: If they try to take us out, they will take themselves out, and they are not going to do that. We fought proxy wars and ran tank maneuvers at NTC and in Germany.
A friend of mine stated recently that, while she wouldn’t be pulling the lever for the McCain/Palin ticket, it was mainly due to Palin. She wasn’t excited about Obama, and asked if I could say something to change that. I’ve been ruminating about it all day, not because I didn’t have anything to say, but because I have so much, and I want to say it well.
In the book Glory Road, Robert Heinlein has his protagonist cut lose his adopted son who doesn’t understand that “the world doesn’t owe him a living.” Dan Miessler recently published a joke whose punchline was basically that individual responsibility was the hallmark of the republican party.
My previous article talking about dependency injection had the dependencies registered via an explicit function called from main. This may give the wrong Idea about how to register dependencies. Here is a much better approach, but with a solution that is compiler specific.
One goal of object oriented programming is to encapsulate functionality within a class. If one class requires another in order to collaborate on a larger process, the programmer must deal with the wiring up of the two classes. Much has been written about the correct way to do this in various object oriented languages. The term “Inversion of Control” and the related concept of “Dependency Injection” have become part of the common language of software development, at least in the Java world, due to projects like Pico/Nano container, The Spring framework, and earlier efforts inside J2EE and ATG Dynamo. These frameworks make use of the introspection mechanisms in Java to create instances of classes based on demand criteria.
Updated: links and using the code formatter. Changed Class from Single Letter to full names to be clearer and to not conflict with HTML tags.
Massachusetts has one of the best public school systems in the country. It has been top in the country before, and was rated fourth last I checked. California, which has one of the largest economies in the world, is ranked in the bottom quintile. I was lucky that my parents moved from California back to Massachusetts before I was born. My wife and I made the same decision shortly after our son was born. Education, and public education are important to us.
Synagogue would be a hell of a lot more fun if more people heckled the Rabbi.
Ayn Rand seems to appeal to men in their mid twenties.
Martin Fowler is responsible for popularizing some of the most important ideas in software design.
There is an amazing power in large combinations of simple things. The universe is defined by a very small number of rules repeated a lot of times.
Even if we accept that there should be a categorical imperative, how can we determine which aspect of our action should be the generalizable part and which is the part that is adapted to our present situation?
Considering how much information is stored on me in computers, I still have to fill out my address an excessive number of times. Shouldn’t we be at the point that my address is be pre-filled in a web form?
High fiber cereal does not make a good dinner.
Wrestling and rock climbing a very complimentary sports. Both require a sense of balance in your body. Rock climbing develops hand grip strength that is a benefit to wrestling. Both require and develop a strong core.
Binary search is the primary tool of debugging anything.
The build-execute-change cycle is the key to productivity in software. Building high performance software usually kills you in the build step.
We wasted too much time on Drill and Ceremony at West Point. If Napoleon Bonaparte ever invades, the United States Corps of Cadets will be ready.
No drug can be more addictive than the sound of your own child’s laughter.