Or, how to cultivate a computational state of mind.
Many professions require some form of computer programming. Accountants program spreadsheets and word processors; photographers program photo editors; musicians program synthesizers; and professional programmers instruct plain computers. Programming has become a required skill.
Yet programming is more than just a vocational skill. Indeed, good programming is a fun activity, a creative outlet, and a way to express abstract ideas in a tangible form. And designing programs teaches a variety of skills that are important in all kinds of professions: critical reading, analytical thinking, creative synthesis, and attention to detail.
We therefore believe that the study of program design deserves the same central role in general education as mathematics and English. Or, put more succinctly,
This book is the first book on programming as the core subject of a liberal arts education. Its main focus is the design process that leads from problem statements to well-organized solutions; it deemphasizes the study of programming language details, algorithmic minutiae, and specific application domains.
From the archive:
Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than “skilled manual labor,” Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman’s work. Craftsmanship names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, says the author, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. In this thought-provoking book, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world.
The Craftsman engages the many dimensions of skill—from the technical demands to the obsessive energy required to do good work. Craftsmanship leads Sennett across time and space, from ancient Roman brickmakers to Renaissance goldsmiths to the printing presses of Enlightenment Paris and the factories of industrial London; in the modern world he explores what experiences of good work are shared by computer programmers, nurses and doctors, musicians, glassblowers, and cooks. Unique in the scope of his thinking, Sennett expands previous notions of crafts and craftsmen and apprises us of the surprising extent to which we can learn about ourselves through the labor of making physical things.
Hackers Publish German Minister's Fingerprint | Threat Level from Wired.com
Topic: Technology
8:22 pm EDT, Apr 1, 2008
To demonstrate why using fingerprints to secure passports is a bad idea, the German hacker group Chaos Computer Club has published what it says is the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's interior minister.
According to CCC, the print of Schauble's index finger was lifted from a water glass that he used during a panel discussion that he participated in last year at a German university. CCC published the print on a piece of plastic inside 4,000 copies of its magazine Die Datenschleuder that readers can use to impersonate the minister to biometric readers.
Database management systems are 20 years out of date and should be completely rewritten to reflect modern use of computers.
Oracle and SQL Server come from an age when online transaction processing dominated and required techniques such as multi-threading and transaction locking.
Persistent storage is unnecessary ...
Abandon SQL; use Ruby.
Note that the paper under review here is actually from last September. It has become "news" again because of the authors' recent criticism of Google (and MapReduce, specifically).
When you use a system often, you tend to fall into set usage patterns. Sometimes, you do not start the habit of doing things in the best possible way. Sometimes, you even pick up bad practices that lead to clutter and clumsiness. One of the best ways to correct such inadequacies is to conscientiously pick up good habits that counteract them. This article suggests 10 UNIX command-line habits worth picking up -- good habits that help you break many common usage foibles and make you more productive at the command line in the process. Each habit is described in more detail following the list of good habits.
Dial-Tone Phreak: Joybubbles | The Lives They Lived
Topic: Technology
9:44 am EST, Dec 30, 2007
NYT pays tribute to Joybubbles.
The boy decided to talk back to the phone. Not to other people, not right away: to the phone line itself, and in its own language. At 7, with his perfectly pitched ear, he heard through the receiver the tone that controlled long-distance connections, 2,600 cycles per second. “I started whistling along with it,” he said, “and all of a sudden the circuit cut off, and I did it again, and it cut off again. And gradually . . . I figured out — back in the mid-’50s — just how to do it.”
Jason Epstein, co-founder of the New York Review of Books:
"Try to read a serious book on that," he said of the Kindle. "You won't be able to, I don't think."
This is true.
...
"The real things that will be lost will be the discoveries that can be made in a bookstore, that wonderful wandering where you find precisely what you didn't know you were looking for."
Walter Kirn: "I think that what people who are mourning the book are really mourning is reading. They see the book as a totem of their melancholy over the disappearance of solid reading culture.
