A blog of rants, screeds, and other nonsense

Replaced by https://www.yesthatblog.com/post/0068-go-off-by-one/

Thoughts about “Do The Right Thing” (no spoilers)

Go’s range operator (for x = range foo) has eliminated the most common trap where I make off-by-one errors. The next largest category of off-by-one errors would be eliminated if there was a way to specify the last item in an array. It would also improve a developer’s ability to convey intent.

Q: I heard that the Google Captchas are used to train their neural networks so they can identify things like traffic lights, etc. How does this work since our thought process is in our brain?

Original question

You know what I want in the world? I want people that are on the other side of political issues to change their mind. I want them to “see the light”.

In my previous blog post I explained a trick for setting bash env variables when you run a script. In this post I discuss how to write bash scripts that handle such variables properly.

If you want to set an env variable in bash for only 1 command, here’s some bad ways to do it:

A poem I wrote earlier this year.

• “Who Builds The H-Bomb?”
• Mark Levy, December ‘81

I have a theory that 3 things lead to Obama’s win. He surprised the GOP three ways.

Dear Google Meets,

We need to talk about your product.

Most of my company works remote, and with C-19 we are now all working remotely.

Wouldn’t it make more sense if the early primary states were picked from the battleground states of the previous election instead of being a fixed set of states? For example, the top 5 battleground states go first.

There’s a small controversy brewing behind the scenes at conferences because of this trend to require speakers to rehearse their talk via video conference prior to the event.

Clayton Christensen died on Jan 23, 2020 at the age of 67.

You may know him from his 1997 best selling book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.”

He was incredibly influential, well beyond the typical author.

I wrote this in Oct 1999. I’ve fixed up some typos but otherwise this is unchanged.

My Martin Luther King, Jr. day tradition is to listen to the speech he made at my alma mater, Drew University, in Madison, New Jersey, on Feb 5, 1964 (nearly a quarter century before I attend).

This is a sad day for our country. Impeachment is a “last resort”. The fact that it has come to this shows what a sorry state our democracy has become.

With the 9th and finalchapter of Star Wars arriving, here’s a memory from when I saw the premier of Star Wars: Episode I, the Phantom Menace.

Do you know about The Osborne Effect?

The human brain reacts differently to lists of different sizes. When we align what we say with what the human brain expects, we are more effective communicators.

One cool trick to get an audience to ask more questions: Silence inspires questions.

When you ask “Any questions?” be silent for least 10 seconds for someone to speak up. 15 seconds is better.

When the two-dozen GOP senators disrupted Laura Cooper’s deposition, they didn’t just create a publicity stunt… they created a security hole that every spy agency in the world could take advantage of.

Comcast’s #1 concern is that if they can’t fuck you hard enough.

Or, as Vice reported it, Comcast Is Lobbying Against Encryption That Could Prevent it From Learning Your Browsing History.

These opinions have been developed from 3 decades of attending and organizing conferences. This advice applies whether a conference non-profit or for-profit, all-volunteer or professionally run, community-driven or commercial.

Time is precious. A bad conference wastes people’s time. As as conference organizers you owe it to the attendees to make sure their time was well-spent.

(Are you a speaker? Read this instead.)

The single biggest thing you can do to improve your conference’s content is to require all speakers rehearse their presentation two weeks prior to the conference, via video conference, with someone that has not seen the talk before. Everything else is spinning your wheels.

Dave Cheney started a Twitter discussion about when a unit test is not a unit test.

When I was in 8th grade I got a job working for a small company that was a reseller of electronic drilling and measuring equipment. I was just the office boy… mostly doing paperwork, shipping, and occasional data-entry.