fplanque: glob

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"A sure sign of my descent into senility is bitchin' and moanin' about "kids these days," and how they won't or can't do anything hard any more."

So goes the intro to Joel's "The Perils of JavaSchools".

Higly relevant and highly recommended, as usual! ;)

"Pointers and recursion require a certain ability to reason, to think in abstractions, and, most importantly, to view a problem at several levels of abstraction simultaneously. And thus, the ability to understand pointers and recursion is directly correlated with the ability to be a great programmer.

[...]

You need training to think of things at multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously, and that kind of thinking is exactly what you need to design great software architecture."

Among other things, Joel talks about how Universities made the mistake of replacing courses on C pointers and recursion with courses on simple Java... and those universities include UPenn... my second most enjoyable experience in the 90ies (the most enjoyable one being the bubble of course! ;D)

Also, Joel talks about how it gets difficult to distinguish the top programmers from the average because you can't ask them about pointers & recursion right out of school any longer... I've got the same issue with database programmers. You can't ask them about concurrent transactions and normalizing databases any longer... Ironically, I learnt most of that at UPenn... back then in the 90ies... :>>

Sometimes you want to be connected to an IRC server all the time, even when you're not.

In that case you need an IRC proxy, or bouncer, that will stay connected to the IRC server(s) all the time.

That's what jBouncer does.

JBouncer is a Java implementation of a simple IRC proxy (sometimes known as an IRC bouncer). It can run on Windows, Unix, Linux, etc.

An IRC proxy is a program that connects to any number of IRC servers. You can then use an IRC client to connect to the proxy and use those servers. When you disconnect your client, the proxy stays connected to the IRC server.

At the PHP Forum in Paris this year, Rasmus Lerdorf (the creator of PHP) wittily explained that SOAP was "intrinsically broken" because it's too complex... "just as anything that takes more than 20 minutes to understand".

I liked the way he put that! ;)

When it comes to webservices, I myself tend to prefer XML-RPC (which goes by the motto: "Does distributed computing have to be any harder than this? I don't think so.")... Sometimes, I also wonder if REST would be a nice alternative...

How do people usually define blogging?

They tend to say that it's about organizing posts by reverse chronological order. That it's about writing in the first person. That's it's about being more personal. That's it's a social thing. That it's about personal sites.

Yeah right. Like we had no news sites before? No forums with personal opinions before? No personal home pages before? No discussion boards before?

To me, the main difference blogging makes is this:

• Before blogging, all kinds of people tended to talk about a specific subject in a specific place (forum, mailing list).
• After blogging, a specific person tends to talk about all kinds of subjects in a specific place (his personal blog).

This central paradigm shift now triggers a series of changes all other the web: we need trackback & aggregators to replace discussion threads & forums. We need new website ranking algorythms based on more complex criterias than inbound links alone. We have new forms of (referer, comment...) spam to cope with...

Then... comes collaborative blogging... where bloggers unite their efforts to publish a multi-authored blog. This then very much looks like an old-school news site or forums. Well it's still clearly different from forums since the authors are limited/selected and the new guy can only post in the comments section.

But as far as news sites are concerned, I'm not sure there really is a difference with what existed before... Maybe it's just easier than before to set up the tools needed for collaborative publishing. (Well, with b2evolution it certainly is! ;D)