tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88751962012-01-11T20:07:08.218-08:00Programming, psychology, and "stuff".Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.comBlogger261100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-65643545778568536232011-04-01T23:17:00.000-07:002011-04-02T09:35:06.194-07:00

"education is an industry" says Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal. That's not the title of his op-ed, or even the point of his op-ed. In fact, that's just an unimportant introductory phrase of a sentence in a paragraph casually criticizing education in the U.S. And that's why it's the most interesting part of his whole piece. He doesn't argue that education is an industry, but treats it as

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-59861233395618216222010-12-27T09:02:00.000-08:002010-12-27T09:24:33.584-08:00

December brought overtime. Lots and lots of overtime. As usual, old man Scrooge (a large software company in the NorthWest) wheeled and dealed with Paula to avoid the threat that she would actually use her vacation to avoid losing any in the usual year-end accounting-based theft of employee time. "Trust me," the miserable old miser said, "It'll be off the books, but you can just take some extra

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-39547057408858893862010-12-18T23:02:00.000-08:002010-12-18T23:09:03.094-08:00

Since the original Cash Cow Disease post got ycombinatored and a bit daringfireballed, I thought I would post a few collective thoughts about the feedback. You're an Idiot Indeed, a hidden recorder could have picked up my voice saying "I'm an idiot" scant hours ago, as I realized I had just taken a load of dirty dishes out of the dishwasher and carefully put them all back in the cupboards. Of

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-24892927993301947062010-08-12T17:09:00.000-07:002010-12-17T09:53:34.880-08:00

Watching the recent product retraction of Google Wave convinced me that Google is fully infected with the same protracted, end-stage wasting disease that has consumed Microsoft for years: cash cow disease. Cash cow disease arises when a public company has a small number of products that generate the lion's share of profits, but lacks the discipline to return those profits to the shareholders.

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com73tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-25049578399493675462010-04-09T09:29:00.000-07:002010-04-09T09:43:11.439-07:00

Maybe it's just me (it's not), but it seems like spelling words correctly is no longer viewed as a requirement for writing. Of course, with average citizens publishing their every thought and deed, nobody could be surprised that incorrect spelling and grammar would be the least of the problems with the daily content spew. This is just a blog, for example. I have no copyeditor to check my work

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-76763858926416532972010-03-13T15:19:00.000-08:002010-04-22T08:08:58.465-07:00

One of the first programming books I ever bought was Software Tools, by Kernighan and Plauger (which cost me a hefty $11.95 back in 1980). Part design instruction, part anthropology, it was an amazing exercise -- expert programmers presenting actual code to do something useful, and walking you through their thought processes. Software tools let us bootstrap ourselves up to solving more complex

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-70186649642459506242010-03-10T23:21:00.000-08:002010-03-10T23:21:00.369-08:00

As part of reading the book Technopoly, I'm listening to the old author interview from Booknotes on C-SPAN. Because Neil Postman (before his death in 2003) provided a convenient anti-thesis to Ray Kurzweil's Snoopy-like dance of technological elation, I am sympathetic, looking for things to agree with, stretching to find common ground. But then he had to go and bring up Mozart. Poor dead Mozart

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-82884157566762846932010-01-07T10:33:00.000-08:002010-01-07T10:41:52.659-08:00

Since my last post was about the cloud, why not another? I was reading the blog of Nicholas Carr (whose "Does IT Matter" currently holds a place of honor in the introduction to my book-in-progress), as he noted approvingly the attempt by Amazon to create a spot market for computing cycles. After failing to get my comments on that thought posted there (ain't technology grand?), I thought "Hey, I

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-51473067310347041822009-12-02T22:13:00.000-08:002009-12-06T12:32:23.792-08:00

note: this entry reprinted with permission as a guest post at TechFlash.I have nothing against "the cloud". Hey, when I was in college, the mainframe was "the cloud" to me. Since I never went off campus to speak of, my data was available "everywhere", no matter what CRT console I logged in from. Cool.Well, not always cool, of course. The lessons of centralized computing versus decentralized

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-68625733755294692702009-12-01T15:52:00.001-08:002009-12-01T16:24:59.009-08:00

Finally got off my butt and set up a Google Group to function as an announce-only mailing list for my upcoming book "The Pop Psychology of Programming". You can go sign up here (to my amusement, cutting and pasting a Google Groups signup box here in Blogger just produces glitchy non-functionality). I've been working with renewed vigor since viewing the movie "2012" since, obviously, I want to

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-13093106633021659722009-10-30T08:48:00.000-07:002009-10-30T09:18:18.789-07:00

The nice folks at Ignite Seattle! are going to let me speak again! If you're in the Seattle area December 1 (a Tuesday), come on down to the King Cat Theatre. It's free, it's fun, and drinks will be served (but drinks aren't free)!This will be an interesting experiment for me. My last talk video "went viral", and I want to see if that's reproducible or mostly luck. That talk had the advantage of

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-64426998067658142192009-10-03T09:53:00.000-07:002009-10-03T10:25:56.979-07:00

Privacy resurged to the forefront of public debate after 9/11, and one of the more chilling examples was reports of the FBI trying to strong-arm libraries into handing over people's library records without a warrant. This was kinda dumb, since warrants are handed out like candy, and the Patriot Act forbids anyone getting such a warrant from making that fact public. It was even more dumb if you

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-65419593394971143842009-09-28T22:24:00.000-07:002009-09-28T23:14:45.907-07:00

Comma usage drifts over time. Comma cutbacks were in effect by Dickens time, but his usage would be deemed liberal by today's standards. It seems to me that even in the span of my reading lifetime (five decades), comma usage has become even more sparing.Something bothers me about this development that I've never nailed down, like a movement flickering at the edge of vision. Today, while reading

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-61080426342963287522009-06-15T10:34:00.000-07:002009-06-15T12:26:55.799-07:00

Of all the programming books you've never read that I've read more than once, The Limits of Software by Robert Britcher is my favorite. I say you've never read it with some confidence because a) few programmers read books and b) this book was doomed to a narrow audience by its very nature.The first audience-limiting feature of the book is its style. As Robert Glass says in the Foreword, "It's

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-38458909587772250942009-06-10T19:36:00.000-07:002009-06-10T21:16:59.160-07:00

The latest installment of the sad, long-running serial "Programmer, Meet the Book Business" is supplied by Raymond Chen. He writes The Old New Thing, a blog full of highly useful technical information for those dinosaurs (like me) who still interact directly with the Win32 API (rather than relying solely on one of Microsoft's 15 bloated, incompatible frameworks designed to make programmer's lives

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-81117121314715041212009-06-01T08:04:00.000-07:002009-06-01T08:37:33.675-07:00

All the videos from talks at the 4/29/2009 Ignite Seattle! have made it up to YouTube now. Some links: Ignite Seattle! home page Their YouTube "channel" video of my talk I actually only heard about the videos arriving from a friend of a friend who saw it go by on some RSS feed. By that time, there were already 47,000 views, so apparently it got posted on one or more popular sites. I tried

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-11166564452030407882009-04-29T08:54:00.000-07:002009-04-29T09:34:04.499-07:00

Tonight is Ignite Seattle 6, the latest in a series of collections of short talks by varied speakers on topics at least vaguely of interest to geeks. I am slated to give a talk on "The Psychology of Incompetence". This has turned out to be basically an extended humorous rant on unrecognized incompetence embedded in the software industry. It'll be interesting to see how well I can perform it and

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-80840469517236512382009-03-01T09:53:00.000-08:002009-03-01T11:54:10.320-08:00

Evolution, as Daniel Dennett explains, is at heart a simple algorithm. 1) Replicate new copies with variations. 2) Select according to some criteria. 3) Repeat. As a pure algorithm, evolution applies to not just biology, but any entities that can provide the required replication-with-variation and selection steps.The non-intuitive thing about the evolutionary algorithm is that such a simple set

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-90869461204931460762009-02-21T14:56:00.000-08:002009-02-21T21:40:28.794-08:00

In every one's life, there comes that day we all dread but must accept. I'm talking, of course, about the day you can no longer dodge jury duty. On the one hand, my civil duty meme says it's good to pitch in and play my part for society. On the other hand, my cynical gene says there's no way any prosecutor is going to put me on a jury, and every day I sit in district court is another day the

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-61458027695595847712009-02-17T10:44:00.000-08:002009-02-17T12:58:15.415-08:00

Of all things, the influenza pandemic of 1918 has provided a number of interesting little psychological examples in various parts of my book -- everything from demonstrating that we manage "information workers" the same as ditch diggers to showing that much of the personality testing field is little better than astrology. Events of massive death are always going to produce lots of psychological

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-32456359174089828932009-02-13T08:26:00.000-08:002009-02-14T07:55:57.775-08:00

That's the title of a book based on some lectures physicist Erwin Schrödinger gave back in February of 1943. Imagine this. Fermi had just got his atomic reactor going in Chicago a couple of months earlier, Britain's been devastated by bombing, America has entered the war but it still looks like Hitler just might end up ruling the world, and in the midst of this chaos, Erwin Schrödinger is

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-62458775980657974162009-02-11T04:00:00.000-08:002009-02-11T04:00:01.256-08:00

I long ago decided that my (not yet finished) book ("The Pop Psychology of Programming", if you're paying attention) had to include a brief history of psychology. The reason is, people have lots of stereotypes and misconceptions of psychology, but what those might be depends a bit upon when you learnt anything about psychology. If most of your psych-ed came from watching 60's TV, then you're

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-45355506368232987782009-02-10T18:46:00.000-08:002009-02-10T21:58:10.668-08:00

In my book, I point out that one problem with writing clear code is variable name rot (inspired by Ward Cunningham's discussion of variable names in his 2004 OOPSLA talk). You named a variable something like AccountBalance, but then later had to change the code so that contents of the variable are rounded to the nearest dollar. Someone else then, reading your code as they modify it, fails to

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-82245486525463401552009-02-06T14:33:00.001-08:002009-02-06T15:15:02.438-08:00

Old age has made me tend to see the big picture in everything, a world where everything's related to everything else. Today's headline is the failure of imaging (using X-rays, CT, and/or MRI) to improve outcomes in patients with back pain. Which, to me, has much in common with programming methodologies. Have patience; I can connect them.Back pain has been a snake pit of medicine for years now

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-60429031579931651432009-02-05T10:37:00.000-08:002009-02-11T21:22:13.693-08:00

The book on top of my desk recently is The Halo Effect, by Philip Rosenzweig. After you've been doing heavy research for some years on a book, you start to see all the threads are cross-connected in ever more complex ways. So, Nassim Taleb provides a cover blurb for The Halo Effect,, and I already lean on Taleb's The Black Swan in my introduction (a grand sweeping attempt to re-view programming

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8875196.post-81555584869652345482008-06-03T20:16:00.000-07:002008-06-16T16:56:24.232-07:00

And so the blog begins. I haven't had much use for blogs, but now I'm working on a book and will (one of these days, I sure hope) have something to promote, and voila -- I now have a use for blogs! My name is Ron Burk. I was the editor of the magazine Tech Specialist, which turned into Windows/DOS Developer's Journal, which turned into Windows Developer's Journal (gee, it's been so long, I'm

Ron Burkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01502981410880210349noreply@blogger.com5