Edward G Nilges's blog

A reaction to two stories on opposite sides of the world...

Not only has Microsoft refused to come to the aid of a Russian teacher who's being threatened with (Russian!) jail for having unlicensed Microsoft software, despite appeals by Mikhail Gorbachev and even Putin, I had a horrible experience last night trying to upgrade from Open Office to MS Office.

I'm reading Banker to the Poor, by this Bengali entrepreneur...he is the former economics professor who became founded the successful Grameen bank, to lend money to poor women and even beggars so these people could generate an income.

I was walking home from work last night when I saw a Vista promotion projected on the floor of the MTR (subway in Hong Kong)...

Nonetheless, I will buy and install this frigging operating system, I suppose. Or maybe wait until I upgrade my hardware.

Stanley Fish is a college administrator and public intellectual who's done a lot of work on interpretation. I got into his work on interpretation as part of research on what we do when we "interpret" requirements documents and the "needs of the user".

I conclude that many programmers, more than they admit, do add extra features which may be unnecessary in order to postpone blowing their brains out, and I think it's time to admit, as I try to show in my short story "Who Is My Friend?," that our interests diverge without resolution, even as Tom has a self-interest in using Inheritance and Hungarian while Bill needs to be Bill.

Tom looked out the window at the parking lot. The executive's cars gleamed in the afternoon sunlight. Beyond them, California cypresses looked like their own idea in the way that California things look, as if even the cypresses have come to California to get jobs as cypresses...

A written offer letter, in the absence of words in the letter "disclaiming" a contract, constitutes in American, and mostly G-8, business law an enforceable contract: even verbal promises do so under many circumstances.

Shortly after completing my first computer class, I found that the old Chicago bookstore chain Kroch's and Brentano's main store on Van Buren Street had set up a computer book section. I found Saul Rosen's PROGRAMMING SYSTEMS AND LANGUAGES, a collection of historical papers from 1950 to 1968...

The ever-reflective Chris Morris writes "being very competent at a defined task is not enough in a situation of flux". The problem is that managers are forever asking programmers to be "competent" at undefined tasks, where you can only be "competent" at a defined task...

Cf. this post, Chris M now has to "deal" as a project manager with a human-created, iatrogenetic, and unnecessary problem created by a coder who (1) promised to deliver, (2) failed to deliver, and (3) blamed Chris' team's "lack of support". Now, Chris has got to explain how he did give the support and get off the hook...