while ( suffering >= joy ) {
    meditate();
}

*meditate() function not included.

Ever since I started writing software professionally, I've noticed this bizarre but very widespread tendency to invert strategy and tactics when looking for a developer. What I mean is starting a software development project not by discussing the goals of the software, what is to be invented or how it will make a current task faster, cheaper and/or easier. Instead, the person running the project, often with little or no personal experience with software development, skims the surface of the software development periodicals and Web sites, learning little more than buzzwords and acronyms.

It seems that only a minority of programmers are functionally multilingual, in other words capable of writing useful software in more than one modern language. Most programmers work exclusively with a single language until nobody wants to hire developers specializing in that language any more.

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MANIPADMEHUMOMMANIPADMEHUMOMMANIPADMEHUMOMMANIPADMEHUMOMMANIPADMEHUMOMMA  

I work for a company whose primary software product is a Web-based content management system. It's very easy to use for a Web app, so easy that most of our users are secretaries and marketing people. And if you've ever worked on Web content as part of your job, you'll know that's not a disparaging remark. Most software for creating Web content requires understanding of HTML at a minimum, ours just requires some basic familiarity with the Web, like what a URL should look like so you can create links.

I've been interested in calendars and their histories for quite a while, but only recently discovered the Tranquility calendar, which is centered on the first moon landing. I thought it was a fun concept and found an equivalent to the *nix date command written by Scott M Harrison. Here's a perl port of his C implementation: Download tranquility.pl.

Watching the election results tonight, I keep thinking about the differences between Clinton and Obama's policy proposals for space exploration and how they relate to cautionary words from Stephen Hawking. First, here is Hawking's argument:

It's an almost trite expression now, but still true. Blogs are, for the most part, a ghetto for nutballs.

But how else can I expect to persuade anyone that some of my views might be helpful to consider? Nobody would be doing themselves a favor by putting me on television or radio. Newspapers only reach boomers and older, magazines are dying, and the personal risks I would invite by becoming a politician and espousing uncommon beliefs are just foolish now that I've got a kid.

But then there's that ancient Plato quote: