A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages is the funniest thing I’ve read in months. I actually fell out of my chair laughing. That said, I’m pretty sure you have to be a huge, enormous, mega-nerd computer geek with a decent understanding of the history of programming languages to really get much of any of the humor of it. But if you are a huge, enormous, mega-nerd computer geek with a decent understanding of the history of programming languages, it doesn’t get much better than this. Snip:
1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.
That may be my favorite way for the world to end. Though I would have been content if it just took out New York and went away.
Bonus fun fact – if you look up Skynet on Wikipedia while making a blog post to check if it’s one word or two, and if the N is capitalized if it’s one word, you may notice that the page has location coordinates for Skynet: 37.921, -122.532. If you were to find this location in Google Maps (perhaps the start of Skynet itself), it would show you this.
From the listing, it sounds like our future mechanical overloads really know how to live, … or compute, … or process, or whatever it is they do (emphasis mine):
Listed for lease in Marin County at $6,995, and truly a unique find, this custom-built 5,300 +/- sq ft home* offers gracious style with an expansive layout that makes sense for today’s living.
Built in 1988 and situated in the hills of Corte Madera, the house is close enough to town that you’re just a couple moments from shopping, dining, local farmer’s markets, etc, yet far enough away that you achieve the rare Marin combo of privacy and property.
5bd/4.5ba + office + workout room
Formal entry paved in marble. Formal living room boasts hardwood floors, fireplace and elevated sitting area perfect for piano or other large scale furniture. Formal dining room offers big corner bay views and butler’s entry to kitchen.
The cheerful country kitchen faces east overlooking the bay, offering fresh morning sun. Kitchen includes newer appliances, an open layout, and a wonderful breakfast nook. Kitchen opens to large family room with additional fireplace, and french doors leading to enclosed lawn, gardens and pool.
Four bedrooms all on one level upstairs. Master suite includes spacious walk-in closet and elevated sitting area w/fireplace. Additional 5th bedroom is downstairs – perfect for au-pair or extended stay guests w/separate entrance and mini kitchenette.
Bonuses include:
-formal office or library with built-in bookshelves
-small bonus room overlooking pool – perfect for workout room w/steam shower -elaborate centralized computer system controls almost everything in home from the den: security, lights, temperature and more
Life in Corte Madera includes access to highly-ranked local schools (see www.greatschools.org) and an excellent San Francisco commute. Great central Marin weather will allow you to take full advantage of the pool and yard. Cut over the hill to Mill Valley for great dining, or hop on your bike and be on Marin’s great biking trails right away.
Available this month for 1 year lease. Looking for non-smoking tenants who will care for this custom-designed home in the family since it was built! Owners will include pool and garden maintenance – tenant to cover all utilities including renter’s insurance.
Contact Executive Rental Agent Darcy Alkus Barrow to schedule your private tour: (415) 637-8917
Cheers!
*Sq ft quoted per tax records. Agent has not verified.
Not really my cup of tea, but then again, I suppose I do have a soul and all…
Admittedly, this site doesn’t even follow all of them (I keep meaning to do a redesign, but I barely get enough time to make regular posts, as you may have noticed), but a few thoughts on things that make good websites:
If there is a navigation tree, it should have 3-7 items at each level, no more, no less. Nine may be allowable at the highest level, but is never actually necessary.
No one tool / website / page / area should do more than one thing.
One thing is defined as something you can explain in one sentence without a conjunction.
Never try to impress your users with how complicated something is – they will not be impressed, they will leave.
Give the eye room to breath.
Be consistent everywhere.
Once your user has seen the home page, no other page or behavior should surprise them.
You are not all things to all people, your site can’t be either.
Adam and Jamie from the Mythbusters show the difference between how a CPU and a GPU process graphics, using paintball guns. Generally a good demonstration of serial vs parallel processing. Plus, the last slow motion shot is awesome.
On the slightly more serious side, here‘s a really interesting story from The New York Times about Lego as a company and the changes they’ve made and where they’re heading (via Kottke). As much as I fully realize that things like that have to happen to keep the company afloat, it kind of makes me sick too. I’ve bought Legos for birthdays and Christmas in recent years and each time it seems like they get more and more expensive, with almost no really little sets, and they’re so specialized that it’s hard to build much out of them aside from what’s on the front of the box.
I remember quite fondly Lego sets I had when I was little (okay, I still have some of them) that came with multiple sets of instructions for things to make out of them, and also had things pictured on the box that you could make which there weren’t instructions for, just to get the creative juices flowing a little more.
I sort of credit the old Lego sets with a lot of the way I look at thing (perhaps I had this view before I got Legos, and they just happened to fit in well, who knows). Mostly, putting pieces together, taking things apart and rebuilding them, just seeing how things work, and being willing to mess with them a little. I often explain my interest in computer programming in these terms – programming is Legos for adults. (Legos are Legos for adults too, but we’re going for a metaphor here people.) In programming, especially object oriented programming, you have all these different pieces you have to fit together and line up just right, and when you do, you have built a new toy to play with from the parts you had. And you can combine them in all sorts of ways, and swap out pieces here and there, and build whole new things no one else has thought of yet. And when you’re done, you can reuse it all and not have a mess. And the building that happens is a mix of building with your hands, and planning it out in your head as you go, and adjusting as you run into problems. In an overblown metaphoracal sense, Legos are life.
So, in closing, here’s a great, very simple Lego ad campaign (via Swiss Miss) that’s the way I like to remember them.
Random Fact: Linus Torvalds (the guy who started Linux) and the state of Iowa share a birthday – today, Dec 28th. Linus is 40, Iowa is 163. Happy Birthday to both!!! In other news, I’m pretty sure noticing that makes me a huge dork, but I’m pretty okay with that.
It’s not often at all that I get gadget-lust, but wow, the Nokia N900 looks AWESOME. *drool*
800×480 touch screen
Full keyboard
Wifi
GPS
THIRTY TWO GIGS of internal storage
FIVE mega-pixel camera
and it goes on, and on
So, all of that is awesome in it’s own right, but the real reason this makes me salivates is that it runs a full Linux distribution as it’s operating system, which means it’s totally hackable, instead of the usual locked down cage that most cell phones come in (iphone, cough, iphone). In other words, instead of being a vessel through which you can buy things from your phone carrier, or from a single corporate store – this is a real computer, you can really program. And since it runs Linux, I would tend to guess instead of having an app store to throw money at, there will be a lot more free / open source apps for it so you can actually take advantage of the awesome hardware.