Python at MIT

Waaaay up there on the list of downright impressive geeky books sits Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, known also as SICP.

Part of its gravitas (apart from being technically excellent that is) is its association with MIT and all those tenacious electrical engineering students. Think you are a hot shot between the ears? Then learn computer programming by doing *Scheme* as your first language. Pascal, Basic, Java? Thats all just whimpy stuff. Real programmers use Scheme. All programming languages are toys by comparison :-)

Okay so I'm over-stating it a bit. Still, it sure is interesting to see Python in the new curriculum over there.

Joe Gregorio nails it

Joe Gregorio nails it:

"[I]f you don't have control of both ends of the wire then loosely typed documents beat strongly typed data-structure serializations."

So why so much big vendor push for SOAPy goodness and WS-WhereIsThePurchaseOrderForThisStuff? Think about it "*both* ends of the wire". Geddit?

Jython love

Charles Nutter - of JRuby fame - on jython.

Its great to see Charles on the jython lists and great to see some new e-mail addressing popping up as a result of his recent de-lurk.

Ubuntu box

Ubuntu boxes. This is the way forward for mass adoption of Linux. Installation of distros will always be an option for the specialist/enthusiast minority IMO.

Installation of Linux has improved *a lot* in recent years but there are limits to how simple it can ever be made. The hardware landscape and the multimedia nest of vipers that nests on top of it, isn't getting any simpler over time. It is as much as any installation procedure can do to simply keep up.

As and when credible Ubuntu boxes become available near me, in laptop as well as desktop configurations, I'll buy a bunch of them.

There ya go. Real money on the table. Having trouble seeing the money in open source? There is one option.

www.ubuntuboxes.ie. Any takers?

Hmmm. I see there is an ubuntu.ie. It's not what I thought it might be. Oh well :-)

And then came the book

IronPython in Action.

Every country should have a wiki

I've just come across wiki.ie. Every country should have a wiki. Don't you think?

What hope is there for a "domain name wiki + country code" naming convention for these? Probably very slim. Pity.

BTW, from the above cited page you can learn that Ireland is the third largest island in Europe. I never knew that.

Even less well know is that North America is a large island off the west coast of Sligo.

Every blog post (and wiki page) has its own unique POV on the world :-)

Solution spheres and application cubes

"And finally we arrive at the heart of the problem. The better the initial fit between the required solution sphere and the available application cube, the harder it is to round out the latter to fit the former. Sad but true." --Solution spheres and application cubes