Tag: Software

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I Am the Lowest of the Low

I am a fanboy. There are these people on the Internet whose web pages I stalk. I don’t stalk the people themselves, of course. Otherwise I would have been a raging fanboy. And I am not. And never will be. I just read most of the stuff that these people write. And learn things from them.

Here’s the list (in alphabetical order):

Philip Greenspun
site: http://philip.greenspun.com/
for : for creating an amazing company and for clarity of thinking

Tom Jennings
site: http://www.wps.com
for: his amazing art

Tema Lebedev
site: http://www.design.ru http://www.tema.ru
reason : for creating an amazing company and for clarity of thinking

Dan Maynes-Aminzade
site: http://www.monzy.com http://www.monzy.org
reason: being funny

Jesse Reclaw
site: http://www.slowwave.com
reson: for his amazing dream comics

Joel Spolsky
site: http://www.joelonsoftware.com
reason : for creating an amazing company and for clarity of thinking

Matthias Wandel
site: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/index.html
reason : for the gadgets that he made

John C Wright, Esq
site: http://www.sff.net/people/john-c-wright/index.html
reason : for proving that there are still good science fiction authors around

Jamie Zawinski
site: http://www.jwz.org
reason: for brilliant use of hypertext

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Vomitorium

I encounter many lj-users whose posts make me want to vomit in horror. Some just annoy me. Some annoy or horrify me enough to get into a discussion. My belief is that such arguments will better my reasoning skills

I noticed that , , and read certain journals just for this annoyance or horrification factor. And sometimes their posts bait me into getting involved in pointless debates with other lj users.

I think I know how to get a bit better at this loosely sport of arguing. A very intelligent friend of mine recommended this book called “Attacking Faulty Reasoning“. It seems very promising.

Circular reasoning, semantical ambiguity, missing the point, appeal to the gallery, appeal to force or threat, appeal to tradition, distortion, attacking a straw, resort to humor or ridicule. These are just some of the chapters in the book, and I’ve seen most of those in livejournal arguments. Heck, in fact, I am guilty of most of them!

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Book Matters

You know, how come livejournal posts have a “Music:” field but no “Reading:” field? That’s just unfair.

What am I reading now? Two books. “Bad Boy Ballmer: The Man Who Rules Microsoft ” and “The Book on the Bookshelf” (thanks ) . Wait, no three books. I am also reading “Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists”

I’ve just finished “Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure” and “Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside ” (thanks ). Good, good stuff.

“Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire” , “Pour Your Heart into It : How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time” and “Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters: What I Learned in Ten Years As a Microsoft Programmer” are on their way. Mmmmmm.

You know what, I have not even read that much science fiction lately. And I haven’t read anything in Russian lately.

One exception though. The last book in Russian that I’ve read was «ÐšÐ«Ð¡Ð¬» by Tatyana Tolstaya. Ha, it’s translated as “The Slynx“. On preorder. Gotta get it.

Checked today what’s new in NESFA press – they republish good old science fiction. “Dimensions of Sheckley:The Short Novels of Robert Sheckley”. Still no Kuttner anthology. Too bad.

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Nobbin or Boffin? Scratching My Noggin.

“Microsoft MCSEs are bogus boffins, say Canadian engineers”.
I like the word “boffin”. I learned it from “Junkyard Wars” (which wacky Brits call “Scrapheap Challenge”). Heh heh. Boffin. At first I thought it was of those monsters from an old game “Digger”. But no, they were called Nobbin and Hobbin.

Kind of like Pacman ghosts are called Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde.

Oh yeah, did you know that Hoser engineers are really, really cool? They even have this special iron ring which they get in a so called Kipling Ceremony or The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer. I can see how they can get pissed of at the E in MCSE.

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Microsoft Tabula Rasa.

Chairman Bill is launching Tablet PC right now.
He got fatter since the last time I have seen him.
Looks like they’ve learned everything the could from the failures of Grid, Pen Windows, Newton, Palm, Softbook and Nuvomedia. Maybe this is it, the tablet is here.. I am getting one.

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Untitled

Holy crap!
I just realized: Livejournal is basically a “push” technology!

Quote from CNN: “The push era was ushered in by PointCast, a screensaver that also delivered news and advertising and which somehow managed to be even less useful than the World Wide Web. “

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The Legend of Mavis Beacon

I was thinking of what typing software to get for my wife’s parents. I learned typing with “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing”. Looks like I’ve become much more inquisitive since then, because the question of “Who the hell is/was Mavis?” immediately came into my mind.

The history section of mavisbeacon.com was suspiciously “under construction”, so I started my search elsewhere.

Here is some great useless information that I dug up:

  • She does not age, but her hair style and skin color changes in different software versions.

  • She might fight terrorism.
  • This post is way off base, Captn Crunch is very, very real.
  • She has a competitor, one Mavis Bacon.
  • Mavis Bacon can perform feats of space management.
  • Seems like this New York Times article solved the problem, but I am too lazy to go through their payment screens.

So she was not real after all…

By the way, does anyone know of a program that would check grammar an punctuation as well as spelling?

Damn, it’s almost 3:30 AM.