All kinds of tasty geek reading in today’s edition of The Farm, the blog that I’m actually paid to write!
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Author: Joey deVilla
Tomorrow (Saturday, March 27th), Cory Doctorow is having his last book signing in Toronto for the forseeable future at his old employer’s: Bakka Books.
Bakka Books is at 598 Yonge Street, near Wellesley and specializes in science fiction and fantasy. The store derives its name from Dune; Bakka is the weeper for all humankind in Fremen legend.
When he worked at Bakka, it was located in my neighbourhood, the Queen West area, on Queen Street between Soho and Beverley. I remember going there back in 1992 and having some geek heartily recommend Snow Crash (“You’re in computer science? You’ve got to read this Stephenson book — he’ll be required reading for programmers someday!”). I have no idea if it was Cory or not, but it’s pretty likely.
It’ll be a don’t-miss-it geek event. Be there and be square!
I’m flyign down next Thursday to see my special lady and drink beer with the Boston crew. I’ll probably be dropping by the Berkman Center Thursday Night meeting (if there is one next week) and having some kind of gathering at some Beantown watering hole to be determined. If you’re in the Boston/People’s Republic of Cambridge area and want to catch up, drop me a line!
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Lovely evening last night
Last night, I stepped out with Eldon and Dave “Dave’s Picks” Polaschek, who came here all the way from Minneapolis for a little vacation. We took him to Smokeless Joe’s, tried to get into The Drake for a Vice Magazine karaoke party (some karaoke fans put me on the guest list), hit the Gladstone instead and wound up the night at the Cadillac Lounge. It was an evening of drinking, mild geekery, waiting in line, more drinking, conversation and the requisite women-fondling-my-accordion thing.
Details to follow. Gotta work.
(This article also appears in The Farm, but I gave it a more clever title here.)
[ via java.blogs via
Time ] The late great computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra’s
contributions to the field are many. Among the best known are his
solution to the Shortest
Path Problem, his invention of the Dining
Philosophers Problem and semaphores,
and his classic paper, Go To Statement Considered
Harmful.
As a computer science student, I’ve read many of his papers, but here’s
a little-known one that he wrote in 1995 — by hand,
no less — called Why American Computing Science Seems
Incurable. It’s
available as a PDF file contaning scans of handwritten sheets. Here’s a
sample:
In the essay, Dijkstra argues that the pressures that the high-tech
industry is adversely affecting academic research. He says that
industry pressure is causing the definition of being a good programmer
to change from someone who is “able to design more effective and
trustworthy programs” and who knows “how to do it efficiently” to
somewho who thinks of “‘industrial acceptance’ as quality criterion”
and writes programs such that “its main feature [is] that one could
apply it unthinkingly.” Programming, he says is becoming less a branch
of applied math and more a branch of keeping the high-tech industry
afloat, a problem aggravated by “a total lack of faith in [America’s]
educational system and a deep-rooted mistrust of
intellectuals.”
It’s a fascinating read, and it just might send you running to the
bookstore to buy all those Knuth
volumes and start brushing up on your algorithms.
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Blogrolling + Blogware
On the Blogware site, I cover how to integrate Blogrolling.com blogrolls into your Blogware blogs.
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"Bring Back Kirk"
It’s every Star Trek geek’s wish-fulfillment fantasy: a movie in which all the Treks: The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise, united to finally stop the temporal cold war introduced in Enterprise.
With a mix of clips from the TV series, movies and games and homemade
3D animation to fill in the gaps, a group of fans have created a
nine-minute trailer for a proposed film called Bring Back Kirk. The film isn’t likely to be made, but the trailer makes for an entertaining nine minutes if you’re a fan of the series.