The Register: The Google Underpants Winners are...

"Last week we invited you to submit the best Usenet posting you'd never seen.

Thanks to Barry and David at Google, who've send us some fresh pairs of undies, we can announce not one, but four winners of our Google Usenet Underwear Competition."

Now this is the sort of awards that I like. I especially appreciated the Usnet posting that purportedly was made by Bill Gates. I suspect it was a forgery though ;-)

Mactopia: Download: Internet Explorer 5.1 Macintosh Edition

My first post using Mac IE 5.1

Rather ironically this post is also another milestone - the 2000th message on DJ. Part of me wishes that a Microsoft product wasn't the topic. I was hoping that some of my readers in other TZs would have posted something overnight and claimed the 'prize'. But time and weblogs await no man ;-)

xmlhack: Five challenges for XML

"James Clark, the first recipient of the IDEAlliance XML Cup Award and opening keynote speaker at XML 2001, gave a lively description of the five challenges facing the XML community..."

James Clark's The Design of RELAX NG:

"RELAX NG is a new schema language for XML. This paper discusses various aspects of the design of RELAX NG including the treatment of attributes, datatyping, mixed content, unordered content namespaces, cross-references and modularity...."

OSNews.com - Exploring the Future of Computing - Tales of a BeOS Refugee:

The story of how a BeOS refugee (and not just everyone, but the author of the 'BeOS Bible' book) lost faith in the future of computing, resigned himself to Windows but found himself bored silly, tore out half his hair at the helm of a Linux box, then rediscovered the joy of computing in MacOSX.

I have a mountain of assignments to mark. This means one of two things:

• That due to displacement activity there'll be lots of updates to DJ today, or
• I'll buckle down and concentrate and marking which means that there'll be little activity here!

  You be the judge ;-)

Design for Community: Essay: Seven sites doing it right by Derek M. Powaze

"The funny thing about having a book out about virtual community is that people begin to ask you which sites are doing it really well. When I get asked that question, my mind gets all fuzzy as all the sites I looked at while researching the book come flooding back. It's enough to make a guy dizzy.

It's hard to talk about sites that are successful in using community features without talking about how, exactly, they're successful. So when I got asked the question again recently, I made a list of some of the sites I admire, and placed them into categories where they specifically excelled.

So here's my list. It's far from exhaustive, and I'm sure I'll kick myself tomorrow for forgetting another seven amazing sites. But if you're just starting out and want to see a wide range of sites doing interesting things with community features, I think this is a pretty great sampling."

Right now I'm listening to Mike & The Mechanics - Lyrics - The Living Years. Thought I'd share them with you:

" Every generation
Blames the one before
And all of their frustrations
Come beating on your door

I know that I'm a prisoner
To all my Father held so dear
I know that I'm a hostage
To all his hopes and fears
I just wish I could have told him in the living years

Crumpled bits of paper
Filled with imperfect thought
Stilted conversations
I'm afraid that's all we've got

You say you just don't see it
He says it's perfect sense
You just can't get agreement
In this present tense
We all talk a different language
Talking in defense

Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
It's too late when we die
To admit we don't see eye to eye

So we open up a quarrel
Between the present and the past
We only sacrifice the future
It's the bitterness that lasts

So Don't yield to the fortunes
You sometimes see as fate
It may have a new perspective
On a different date
And if you don't give up, and don't give in
You may just be O.K.

Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
It's too late when we die
To admit we don't see eye to eye

I wasn't there that morning
When my Father passed away
I didn't get to tell him
All the things I had to say

I think I caught his spirit
Later that same year
I'm sure I heard his echo
In my baby's new born tears
I just wish I could have told him in the living years

Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
It's too late when we die
To admit we don't see eye to eye:

ROFL! I just had to link to CamWorld: CamRants: The I Have a Big Dick Awards!!

John Robb's Singularity weblog started 8th September, 2001:

Singularity News. All the news I can find on the progress of the Singularity. Contributions welcome.

via Scripting News - Mac OS X is the Death of Linux on the Desktop

A blast from the past (courtesy of a link from a student - thanks Martin!) - Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal:

"The easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by the programming language he (or she) uses. Real Programmers use Fortran. Quiche Eaters use Pascal. Nicklaus Wirth, the designer of Pascal, gave a talk once at which he was asked, "How do you pronounce your name?". He replied, "You can either call me by name, pronouncing it 'Veert', or call me by value, 'Worth'." One can tell immediately by this comment that Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater. The only parameter passing mechanism endorsed by Real Programmers is call-by-value-return, as implemented in the IBM/370 Fortran G and H compilers. Real Programmers don't need all these abstract concepts to get their jobs done-- they are perfectly happy with a keypunch, a Fortran IV compiler, and a beer."

Today is the 98th anniversary of Orville Wright's first recorded flight in a heavier-than-air powered aircraft. He managed to stay aloft for 12 seconds, at a height of between 8 and 12 feet.

In his Joel on Software - Back to Basics piece, Joel concludes with:

"...my view of teaching is that first year CS students need to start at the basics, using C - and building their way up from the CPU. I am actually physically disgusted that so many computer science programs think that Java is a good introductory language, because it's "easy" and you don't get confused with all that boring string/malloc stuff but you can learn cool OOP stuff which will make your big programs ever so modular. This is a pedagogical disaster waiting to happen. Generations of graduates are descending on us and creating Shlemiel The Painter algorithms right and left and they don't even realize it, since they fundamentally have no idea that strings are, at a very deep level, difficult, even if you can't quite see that in your perl script. If you want to teach somebody something well, you have to start at the very lowest level. It's like Karate Kid. Wax On, Wax Off. Wax On, Wax Off. Do that for three weeks. Then Knocking The Other Kid's Head off is easy."

Dave McCusker agrees in his response to Joel's article:

"Many junior coders today are simply awful, from ignorance. Learning exclusively from high level language is bad for you. I'm afraid you also need a really good hazing in bits and bytes.

I say hazing like it's both unnecessary and a joke, but it's not. Low level basics are hard to learn without serious sweating. If it doesn't feel like hazing, you don't learn enough lessons. Today's slow and bloated software is often due to two reasons. These are bad usage of strings, and bad memory management."

As someone who teaches both low-level programming and computer architecture and who has a great respect for Joel and Dave's opinions, I agree wholeheartedly. To be sure there will be some quiche-eaters that won't ;-)