Edward G Nilges's blog

...would be the key to the practical implementation of the simulation of multiple platforms. It would accept the description of the targeted machine in a formal notation similar, perhaps, to yacc, which would define word size, bigendian vs smallendian issues, and so forth. A fascinating possibility: to be a true universal simulator generator, the simulator generator runtime might have to be an explicit Turing machine.

Essentially, reification, making a thing out of an action or idea, is linked to alienation, because the thing can be taken away and "marketized". Taken too far it is a corrupting process in programming, where the programmer is so alienated from the creations he fabricates that his "career game" consists of reassuring management that we would never hold on, even for an instance, to anything he fashioned, and would strive to avoid toolbuilding at all costs.

Chiang Mai, Thailand, 8-24-2006: I am such a total nerd that I am using part of a vacation in Thailand to code, in Starbuck's no less. And, I am working on what was intended to be a transliteration of the Visual Basic utilities.DLL source code from Visual Basic .Net to C Sharp .Net. In so doing, and after three years of international travel, I have realized that VB is more different than C Sharp than may appear.

"The user will never need more than n objects of type x". Sometimes this is unavoidable, but it is problematic.

To whom it may concern: I was looking over your excellent Web site and I remarked that you channel funds to organizations working in the Pacific Northwest with "homeless families". I think highly of Bill Gates as a software entrepreneur and now a philanthropist and overall I was very impressed by your Foundation and its web site.

I find that I respond better to new-mode "Web 2.0" pages, and this note is about their aesthetics.

GPU's license change is not counter to the philosophy of open source since a communicative act, such as allowing another person to use software you have written without consideration, demands a quantum of mutual trust and respect. The military needs to reduce the scope of such mutual acts using friend or foe identification and deny the foe the right, prior to a truce, to communicate in this fashion.

Elmer Daniel Klemke was a benevolent teacher and philosopher late of the State University of Iowa who in his lifetime wrote several philosophical books and also edited a series on major 20th century philosophers. His manner was in an unusual way unfailingly polite, especially towards people lower in the "food chain": and upwards he spoke truth to power.

I am also moving to Generics. In a way, we're repeating the history of the notion of the modern mathematical set. Bertrand Russell in England, and Gottlob Frege in Germany, wanted to find a "foundation" for mathematics in something outside mathematics, and the only viable candidate was logic (although other theorists found the foundation in the informal physiology, physics and psychology of perception).

Because the qualified and precise IT people don't realize that when you're asking people for claims information, your REAL purpose is to delay and reject the claim. Whereas a more genuine effort, with sensible defaults and knowledge-based input, MUST be used when it is a question of the CORPORATION being paid! Programmers typically apply an even-handed professional model to MIS applications. They fail to see that in business, the game is to get paid and not pay.

Says it all.

The iTunes interface is the worst! Arrogantly, it is a Mac application written by trolls who don't know thing one about writing a Windows-compliant application. It is completely opaque as to do simple things such as rename "songs" or reorder them.

Shedding chunks of foam as if no-one even bothered to fix the problem that brought Columbia down in 2003, to the accompaniment of nearly senseless remarks by Michael "I have a Master's degree" Griffin, and fortunately crewed neither by teachers nor foreigners (who shouldn't be exposed to a 100% chance of dying), crewed instead by the brave men and women of our armed services, the Space Shuttle has lifted off into the wild blue yonder.

Chrishmorris presents and critiques code in "too much logging". The code does error checking. On failure it writes to an event log. The answer is Throw.

The International Herald Tribune is a sister paper to the New York Times for American expatriates. On Friday they published an article by a representative of the Business Software Alliance which claimed that France was "foolish" in requiring companies to make certain contributions to the community for protection of "intellectual property".