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Monday Links from the Jury Inn Conference Room vol. CCLXIV

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    Monday Links from the Jury Inn Conference Room vol. CCLXIV

    In a training session on Chef. Pity me
    • Why Perl Didn't Win - "The early days of the (public) Internet felt like living in the science fiction world of a Bruce Sterling or William Gibson, whether finally being able to download a web browser with image support (Slipknot?) or realizing that you were logged into a machine in Australia from the middle of farm country USA and it was responding to your FTP commands… Like almost everyone in the late '90s during the Internet boom, your author learned Perl.” A look at the history of server-side web development, exploring why Perl mattered, then didn’t, and now probably can’t ever again.

    • Why Do All Records Sound the Same? - Tom Whitwell article, originally published in 2008, explaining how technology and market forces combine to homogenise music: ”When you turn on the radio, you might think music all sounds the same these days, then wonder if you’re just getting old. But you’re right, it does all sound the same. Every element of the recording process, from the first takes to the final tweaks, has been evolved with one simple aim: control. And that control often lies in the hands of a record company desperate to get their song on the radio.”

    • The Candid Camera of the Edwardian Tabloids - "Tabloid intrusion into the lives of the famous via the photo lens was a feature of Edwardian, as well as contemporary, Britain, as Nicholas Hiley here intriguingly reveals."

    • The Case for Slow Programming - Jeffrey Ventrella on the problems with the rapid development approach espoused by many young whippersnappers: ”Programming slowly was a problem for me when I recently worked on a project with some young coders who believe in making really fast, small iterative changes to the code. At the job, we were encouraged to work in the same codebase, as if it were a big cauldron of soup, and if we all just kept stirring it continuously and vigorously, a fully-formed thing of wonder would emerge. It didn’t.”

    • History seen in 300 years of paint - Paint researcher Patrick Baty, who I’ve linked to previously in connection with front doors and Holborn Viaduct, on a chip of paint from a house in Queen Anne’s Gate: ”While sampling in the 1705 house a workman brought me a lump of paint that he had prised off the external timber cornice. At first I thought that it was a piece of china, such was the weight and shape. However, it was immediately clear from the traces of the characteristic early eighteenth century red oxide primer at the bottom to the bright white final layers at the top that I was holding three hundred years of the buildings decorative history… Once the sample had been set in a clear embedding resin; cut; polished and examined under the microscope I could see that the exterior had been painted an astonishing 71 times.”

    • Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses - Great collection, with examples, of reasons why your code to handle addresses is probably doomed to failure: a worthy companion to the pages (by other people) that he links to making the same points about names, time, and geography. ”jzwinck points out Singapore is a city-state, leading to addresses like Singapore, Singapore - or even Singapore, Singapore, Singapore if you demand a city, county and country.” (Idiotic over-specification of address data structures, usually reflecting an assumption made by a database designer on the basis of their own home address and maybe their Nan’s, is one of my pet hates.)

    • Glitches in Spacetime, Frozen into the Built Environment - Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley visited the HQ of the GPS system: ”He specifically mentioned the risk of space weather affecting the accuracy of GPS—that is, things like solar flares and other solar magnetic events. These can throw-off the artificial stars of the GPS constellation, leading to temporarily inaccurate location data… these tiny errors created by space weather risk becoming permanently inscribed into the built environment—or fossilized there, in a sense, due to the reliance of today's construction equipment on these fragile signals from space.”

    • Evil Sponge Bob and Satan: Inside a Guantanamo Bay Prison Riot - "After serving in the military for much of his adult life, former Marine Joseph Hickman re-enlisted in the Army National Guard after 9/11. The staff sergeant expected to be deployed to Iraq, but instead his company was sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2006 to guard detainees being held there as part of the global war on terror."

    • They Were the First, and the Last, to Hear from Huygens - From 2005, Emily Lakdawalla on a special project to analyse the radio signal sent back to Earth from Europa by the Huygens probe: ”Thanks to great strides made in the science of radio astronomy over the past decade, they hoped to get a sneak preview of the signal from Huygens. In order to do that, they would first have to receive and record a radio signal that was not strong to begin with, only 3.5 Watts, attenuated by its travel across the 1,200 million kilometers (750 million miles) of empty space that lay between Titan and the Earth. They would have to employ specially designed radio receivers that could sift through the data -- recorded at 500 Megabits per second (that's almost 4,000 times as much data as is present in a typical mp3 music file) -- and detect this faint signal in real time.”

    • Zeroes After Zeroes: The World's Highest Currencies - "Throughout the history of paper money, there have been instances of bills printed that go into the millions, billions, trillions, and even the quintillions. Some are historical relics worth much mainly to collectors, while others are still in use today." For example, here we see DimPrawn’s monthly dividend:



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Perl - My first contract was writing a CGI in Perl, happy days but I am so glad Perl died. You could write the most unreadable rubbish in Perl and nothing ever worked quickly.
    I'm not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful. [Christopher Hitchens]

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by GlenW View Post
      Perl - My first contract was writing a CGI in Perl, happy days but I am so glad Perl died. You could write the most unreadable rubbish in Perl and nothing ever worked quickly.
      Perl was great in its day. But you really had to use the cluehammer on those who really knew the language. Yes you can write that in one line but I can't read it so could you replace it with the 50 line readable version instead.
      merely at clientco for the entertainment

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by eek View Post
        Perl was great in its day. But you really had to use the cluehammer on those who really knew the language. Yes you can write that in one line but I can't read it so could you replace it with the 50 line readable version instead.
        Larry Wall, its inventor, once said something like "Perl is good because it reflects the way programmers think about programming." I think what he should have said is that it reflected the way he thought about programming, and attracted others who thought the same way. Forth had the same characteristics, but at least Chuck Moore encouraged people to use the language's flexibility to make their code as readable as possible, rather than as "succinct" (== unintelligible) as possible, which always seemed to be a primary goal of the Perl community.

        Comment

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