I recently came across a blog post proposing a rather novel solution to what it calls "the shortage of technology talent in the United States".

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Some time ago I posted about Go vs. Python with regard to delimiters. I now have another reason to prefer Python to Go: Go's error handling (hat tip: Hacker News).

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Well, it's happened: I have yielded to the temptation to write my own blogging system, and I am now using it to write and publish this blog. It's called simpleblog, and you can find the release version on the Python Package Index here, or look at the bleeding-edge development git repository here.

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I recently came across this from Jamie Zawinski, and one of his gripes with Firefox struck a huge chord with me:

The Firefox UI is a moving target. It is under constant "improvement", which means "change" which means every few months I'm forced to upgrade it and shit has moved around and I need to re-learn how to do a task that I was happily doing before.

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(Note: there is a good discussion of this post and the Knuth-McIlroy exchange on Hacker News.)

The other day I came across a blog post about an interesting exchange between two world-class programmers, Donald Knuth and Doug McIlroy. I talked about McIlroy in my last nerd interlude. To briefly summarize what happened (the article goes into more detail and is worth reading, at least if you're into this sort of thing), Knuth was asked by a computer magazine to write a program that illustrated "literate programming", a technique that Knuth had spent much time developing, and McIlroy was asked to critique what Knuth did.

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A while back I explained why I use Python, not Lisp. However, after reading this review of Go, I realized that I left out something important, something that sets Python apart from pretty much every other language out there, and certainly from every "C-oid" language, which is all that the author of the review seems able to find himself wishing for.

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Cary Sherman, the CEO of the RIAA, is upset. He says those mean and nasty Internet companies shut down SOPA and PIPA by spreading misinformation and claiming it was fact. Well, after reading his recent op-ed in the New York Times, I will certainly concede that Mr. Sherman ought to know about that sort of thing, since he is evidently an expert at it. Just for fun, I thought I would post some examples.

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Eric Raymond has published an Open Letter to Chris Dodd in response to Dodd's recent speech. Any comments from me would be superfluous (and if you've read my previous posts on this subject you'll know where I'm coming from anyway); just read Eric's post. It's worth it.

Many sites on the Internet (including this blog) were "blacked out" yesterday as part of a protest against SOPA/PIPA. Opposition to these bills has been mounting for some time, and a few days ago it appeared that SOPA, at least, had been shelved by the House, but it turned out that it had only been delayed until February. (Even if does eventually get "shelved", the cynical read on that, which would be mine, will be that Congress is simply taking it off the radar, knowing how short the public's attention span is, and will try to slip it in later as an amendment to some other bill that is expected to pass without much scrutiny. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.)

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This is just a quick update to my previous posts on SOPA to collect a few more links of interest.

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