Legislative Software on Netbeans

A short writeup on the LWB Legislative/Parliamentary Software Suite on the Netbeans Developer Zone website.

Leonard Cohen

New song. New album. 'Nuff said.

Another sad loss

My mum used to say that bad news and good news travel around in groups of three...We had Steve Jobs. Then Denis Ritchie, and now, apparently, John McCarthy.

Lisp was one of the great inventions in all of computer science. Its influence on all programming languages - including those that chose to make themselves not-lisp-like, has been immense. If ever a programming language embodied a paradigm - a way of looking at the world - .... that is Lisp.

Emacs, AutoCad, Softquad SGML Author/Editor, Interleaf...

Then of course there was SICP...

Boooookkkkkkksssssssss

Having a soft spot for paper books may seem odd for somebody in my line of work but I absolutely *love* books - paper books.

Join that with an interest in legal publishing and, well, this pic from inside the LoC is like a picture of Disneyland to a child.

I had the great fortune to get a tour of the law library in the LoC a while back and it is absolutely stunning place for a book/law nerd like me to visit. Amazing.

Denis Ritchie RIP

Wow. Today I learned that Denis Ritchie has passed away. Very sad.

I met him once at an Unix conference in London when the Plan 9 operating system was being evangalized as the logical successor to Unix.

I still have my copy of "K and R" - the book properly known as the C programming language book written by Kernighan and Ritchie. A true classic and, as far as I know, the worlds first "hello world" programming example.

Steve Jobs remembered

My first paying job in IT was to implement a stock control system in Visicalc on an Apple ][ running the CP/M operating system. One of these. A bit later I worked on a Lisa and then a Fat Mac.

It was the Mac that started my love affair with text processing thanks to the Apple ImageWriter printer and then the amazing Apple LaserWriter.

One of my final year projects in Computer Science in Trinity College Dublin (1987) was a 3D wireframe teapot. I created it by sending postscript directly to an Apple Laserwriter over its printer cable, using an Apple 2c as a terminal.

From the Apple II to the iPad. What an amazing progression.

RIP Steve Jobs

A coming epidemic of disabled programmers?

I am very glad to see that RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) is the subject of a talk at PyCon Ireland.

The world is full of programmers in the 20-30 year old range, regularly pulling 18 hour coding sessions without giving it a second thought. Only taking breaks for restroom use, eating at their desks...

You can do that in your twenties and thirties but chances are, when you get into your forties, your hands and arms are going to start complaining.

As the saying goes, "I was that soldier". But, at least in my case I was mostly working with desktop machines and large-ish keyboards in my crazy coder days.

Compare today's high-octane coders. Weapon of choice is a laptop, often rested on the knees or propped precariously on a table along with 12 other laptops, hunched shoulders, knotted brows, bad light...

Not good. It *will* catch up with you. Speaking from personal experience, there is nothing more depressing that wanting to code and not being able to because you hands/arms are screaming at you. At one stage, I was reduced to tapping keys with the eraser tip of a pencil in order to get my e-mail.

Don't do what I did. Pay attention to RSI risks in your twenties/thirties and with luck you will never be visited with any problems.