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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!

(This article also appears in The Farm, but I gave it a more clever title here.)

[ via java.blogs via

Brian’s Waste of

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.

On the Blogware site, I cover how to integrate Blogrolling.com blogrolls into your Blogware blogs.

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.

The geeky goodness over at The Farm: The Tucows Developer Hangout continues! So far today, we have:

• The Lone Coder
• The Macintosh Software Business Yahoo! Group
• A pointer to a useful set of articles for ADO.NET newbies

Be one of the cool coders. Read The Farm.

Inspired by yesterday’s FARK thread, my friend Eldon Brown came up with this treatment of Cory’s novel:

My co-worker James (the “Shaft” of top-level domains) pointed me to the trailer (you’ll need Quicktime) for the Japanese movie Casshern, which according to this article is a live-action version of the Japanese anime Casshan: Robot Hunter. My jaw is still on the floor.