While looking after some information about Creative Commons I happened to drop by the home page of the founding director of the project, Hal Abelson (which by the way is also partly responsible for some other wonderful things like the MIT OpenCourseware) and was pointed out to this 1957 Memorial Lecture by Edwin Land, president of Polaroid Corp, entitled “Generation of Greatness” I want to share it with all of you, as I think it pretty much contains the essence of things many of us think need to change in universities, especially in Technical Schools
Continue reading ‘generation of greatness’
Archive for July, 2005
As part of what is called the “Interns and New Grads Tech Fest” at Microsoft, I had the opportunity of watching Steve Ballmer again giving one of those energetic speeches that have made him famous* (you can check here). Ballmer talked about Microsoft´s relationship with Academia as its main recruiting source since the eighties, about how he thinks now it´s a great moment to be in the software industry because of the many changes that are going on and of course about competition and how Microsoft, being the holistic company it is, has many “battle fronts”, something that no other company has (IBM, Google or Novell are all restricted to a specific market, whereas Microsoft covers from XBOX hardware to SQL Server). Then he took some random questions from the audience, two of them I found very interesting as I’ll comment in a second.
Continue reading ’steve ballmer and testing’
Nope, it’s not that my team’s code is horrible and I’ve decided to wrap up a post to complain. Actually the code in the project I work for is quite good. We’re following Agile metodologies (a mix of UnifiedProcess and Scrum) and this gives great freedom to developers to concentrate in creating good code, plus eliminates part of the meetings we developers hate (I hope to be able to get a good post about the process some point later this summer, after I’ve experienced it a little more)
The post title comes from this link, which has given me 45 minutes of laughing recognizing real-life situations in code. Consider it as the programmer’s version of the BOFH
My favourite excerpt up to now:
Obscure film references
: Use constant names like LancelotsFavouriteColour instead of blue and assign it hex value of 0×0204FB. The color looks identical to pure blue on the screen, and a maintenance programmer would have to work out 0204FB (or use some graphic tool) to know what it looks like. Only someone intimately familiar with Monty Python and the Holy Grail would know that Lancelot’s favorite color was blue. If a maintenance programmer can’t quote entire Monty Python movies from memory, he or she has no business being a programmer.
: Use constant names like LancelotsFavouriteColour instead of blue and assign it hex value of 0×0204FB. The color looks identical to pure blue on the screen, and a maintenance programmer would have to work out 0204FB (or use some graphic tool) to know what it looks like. Only someone intimately familiar with Monty Python and the Holy Grail would know that Lancelot’s favorite color was blue. If a maintenance programmer can’t quote entire Monty Python movies from memory, he or she has no business being a programmer.
