Marcel Popescu

(H/T to Dean Wesley Smith ) 1) You must write. 2) You must finish what you write. 3) You must not rewrite unless to editorial demand. 4) You must mail your work to someone who can buy it. 5) You must keep the work in the mail until someone buys it.

I wrote this story a few days ago. I have no idea what to do with it now... so here's the first step: put it on the blog. If anybody gets here, by some amazing coincidence, please leave feedback even if it's only "it sucks" :) The paradox maker Jack ripped the envelope. “Dear Mr. Harroway,” it began, “we are happy to inform you that your application for a study of the local effects of the 2030 Tehran terrorist attacks has been accepted.” “Yes!” he shouted. “Yes, yes, yes!” His work at cultivating important officials had finally paid off. The bribes didn’t hurt either. Jack was a brilliant physicist. Almost forty-five years old – his birthday just last month – he had everything a scientist could want: a great career, the admiration of his peers, even a great family. He did have one obsession though: he wanted to go back in time and kill himself. Why? He probably couldn’t answer, at least not without a great deal of thought, but it was mostly because he had been fascina...

Here's something I never thought I'd see in the US (as bad as I believe it has become): Ideas Matter , a pro-IP propaganda site build by Microsoft and others, has the following on their About page: In the words of President Barack Obama: "Our single greatest asset is..." Bear with me while I'm freaking out here. I grew up in communist Romania until I was 18. Any time you wanted to write something - including in school essays - we would have to quote the beloved president. Freaking programming books, few as they were, would have something that the president said in their introduction. What the hell???

From http://freedomtwentyfive.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/why-im-leaving/ But, you ask, what about the glorious pursuit of knowledge? Won’t you be dedicating your life to advancing the state of human knowledge? If you’re asking that, I guess you’ve never actually been inside a Western University: They are cesspools of mediocrity and ideological cant. The contemporary university is quite possibly the worst place in the world to actually think freely and come up with new ideas. As a career academic, you will frequently have to choose between honesty and your career. And remember, if you aren’t willing to make the “right” choice, there are a thousand others lined up behind you who will.

Just got bit by a... I can't call it "bug", but at least surprising behavior, in Excel 2007 (though I believe it is the same even in other versions). I had a column of text (file names) in a csv document which was opened in Excel and re-saved as a regular Excel files. The recipient of that document asked me while some of the file names were in scientific notation :) It puzzled me for a bit, until I realized that a lot of the file names had the form 12E12345 . When the part after the "E" was small enough (I didn't bother searching for the limit, but I'd make a wild guess and say below 300), Excel would interpret that string as a number in scientific notation - so 01E00212 became 1E+212. The program I used to generate these csv documents knew to prefix strings made up of only digits and starting with zeroes with an apostrophe - like '00123 . This one, however, caught me unprepared :)

In one of the Miles Vorkosigan books, the main character has a device installed in his brain and a remote that can trigger a seizure - he needs that because otherwise he would get uncontrolled seizures, usually at moments of high stress (when that's the last thing he needs). One of his problems is having that remote triggered accidentally, so the doctors assure him they coded the connection - no random signal can trigger the seizure, only the remote. What are the possible dangers here? 1) Accidental signals that would match the frequency of the brain device, thus generating a false positive. How does one defend against this possibility? A small code of some sort is usually required for triggering the functionality - like the 4-digit code I have to enter when my Nokia cellphone locks the keys (to prevent me from accidentally dialing out when I keep the phone in my pocket). 2) Intentional signals from would-be hackers who want to trigger the device. In this case, one would need a muc...

Lots of noise on this subject - as far as I know, it started with this article by Patrick Smacchia that has apparently annoyed Ayende, who replied to it (and followed here ). A few days later, Ayende replies to an article by Frans Bouma to explain what he means by maintainability - a definition that goes against what Patrick believes to be true. Now that you're up to date, my opinion :) An analogy from C. S. Lewis helps here. To claim that using toothpaste is good, he said, does not mean that if you find someone with bad teeth, but who uses toothpaste all the time, and someone who never used it, but has great teeth, you have disproved the statement. What matters is: given the same person, is he going to be better off by using toothpaste or not? To apply the analogy: given the same person, whether an average developer from the street or Peter Norvig (or Ayende or Frans or Patrick), which application is he going to find more maintainable: one with - say - hundreds of cyclical ref...