Brent's inessential.com: Weblog

"I sometimes get email asking me about how I learned to be a Mac developer. Here's a list of books that have been most important to me...."

I was interested to read the emphasis Brent placed on C. An opinion I completely agree with BTW.

via one of my students: Chris - Software Bugs - Software Glitches

A nice collection of links to software-related disasters.

Thanks Chris

Today's the last day of teaching in this academic year. The exams start in a week's time. Looks like I'll be busy with coursework assessments until mid-May. The marks from these courseworks count towards the overall result. Then a two-week gap before my students sit the exams for my classes on May 30 and June 6. The exam marks are due in mid-June which doesn't leave a lot of time for me to mark more than 250 exam scripts - approximately 1000 individual exam questions. Which means that the the first two weeks in June are going to be hectic too. I promised myself that I'd tidy out my office too. I have junk in there that's decades old - as anyine who's visited me in my office can attest ;-)

Murphy's Law indicates that all sorts of interesting other things will crop up to coincide with these periods of intense activity. I really must plan my time carefully for the next 6 weeks so that I don't burn-out. Must also give some thought to vacation plans.

Also via Chris - The Register: Storage benchmarkers push the envelope

The preliminary results of the storage industry's first-ever benchmark tests show that suppliers are treating them just like any other benchmark - a contest in which vendors play the rules to the limit in order to squeeze out maximum performance, resulting in a standard benchmark test being completed on a very non-standard spread of hardware configurations...

As Chris points out, this is very germane to the David Patterson "Terabytes >> Teraflops (Or Why Work on Processors When I/O Is Where the Action Is?)" video-tape presentation that I used in the lecture last week.

[UVC (http://www.uvc.com) seem to have been assimilated into the Computer History Museum site but a judicious Google search found it.]

Assorted gaming statistics

This page contains a selection of statistics concerning video games and gaming consoles. References are given where possible; many other statistics are available via searching on systems such as Google. A few statistics are contradictory, but the overall picture is blatantly obvious: games are very popular, and a main part of contemporary culture...

The Register: MS' MIT prof witness gets toasted over KDE, GNOME

Some reports today suggest that Microsoft witness Stuart E Madnick, a computer science professor at MIT, might have made desperate claims in court that KDE and GNOME were operating systems. This, fortunately for the good prof's career, is not true, but he most certainly had a desperate and unsuccessful struggle with States' attorney Kevin Hodges, and it's worth reporting in some detail...

As Jim [hbwt] comments, it's entertaining stuff.

Interesting news - The Register: AMD Licenses 64-bit MIPS architecture. MIPS is my favourite architecture and one which I use in my 1st and 2nd year computer organisation/architecture classes.

Disinfotainment(tm) makes an interesting read at the moment.

via vfth - Brainstorms and Raves, web log, blog, weblog about web design, development, typography, Web, Internet, music, by Shirley Kaiser, SKDesigns, WebsiteTips.com.

Tuesday's Why Do Some Beautiful Fonts in Print Look Horrible on the Web? is particularly good.

Radio Poster Home

Radio Poster is a tool for posting messages to a weblog. Radio Poster currently supports Radio UserLand weblogs (http://radio.userland.com), Movable Type weblogs (http://movabletype.org), and Blogger weblogs (http://blogger.com).

It should also work with Conversant. When I get the time I'll give it a shot.