Happy New Year
The fireworks over the Sydney Harbour Bridge were, as usual, fantastic. →
December 2005
Christmas in Sydney
Nick and Megan visited Sydney for Christmas. →
Wikipedia vs Britannica. Apples vs Oranges.
The biggest lesson of the information age is that all media is to be taken with a critical eye, and that no information is valuable until you also understand its source. (One reason for the success of blogs: the information and the source are intimately related, so you always know where you are.) →
Atlassian Christmas Party
This year, the Atlassian Christmas party was held on a boat. As is traditional at these events, quite a lot of alcohol was consumed, and we found an outlet for our competitive streaks by shooting infra-red guns at flying reflective plastic targets. →
Humane Interfaces
Having two otherwise equivalent ways to perform the same operation is bad user-interface design, and it's bad library interface design, because the existence of the synonyms actually adds to the cognitive load of the person trying to use the interface. →
Good Java Developer vs Excellent Perl Hacker?
Ideally, I'd hire the great Python programmer and have them pair-program with a competent Java developer. The Java developer could provide expertise on concrete things like the minutiae of the Collections classes, and the probably-frequent-at-first "no, in Java you do it this way", moments. The Python nerd could chip in with "what about this case?" and "why don't you do it this way?", and the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts. →
December 3rd, 1975
Happy birthday to me. →
Definitions
When an engineer says something is “non-trivial,” it’s the equivalent of an airline pilot calmly telling you that you might encounter “just a bit of turbulence” as he flies you into a cat 5 hurricane. →