ronburk.blogspot.com
Ron Burk: December 2009
http://ronburk.blogspot.com/2009_12_01_archive.html
Programming, psychology, and "stuff". Wednesday, December 02, 2009. 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. Really Don't Know Clouds At All. My bogosity meter immediately pegged and I sat through the rest of his talk enumerating just how wrong t...
smittenkitchen.com
zucchini and ricotta galette – smitten kitchen
https://smittenkitchen.com/2010/06/zucchini-and-ricotta-galette
Previous post: strawberry-rhubarb pie, improved. Next post: not all salts are created equally. Zucchini and ricotta galette. June 29, 2010. July 15, 2016. Jump to recipe,. I realized this week that it has been way, way too long since I made a galette. I remember being infatuated with them when I launched this site, uh, wow, hey, did you know this site is almost four years old? When did that happen? I was absolutely not paying attention. It’s kind of like when I was hanging out with the baby. I might be t...
ronburk.blogspot.com
Ron Burk: March 2010
http://ronburk.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html
Programming, psychology, and "stuff". Saturday, March 13, 2010. Software Tools For Buggier Bloated Software. One of the first programming books I ever bought was Software Tools. So what does a few decades of technological acceleration do to the realm of software tools? The developments are not all happy ones, I would say. At least not in the area I want to talk about: parser generator tools. (Warning: basic understanding of yacc and language theory required.). The Bad Old Days. As Aycock points out, this...
ronburk.blogspot.com
Ron Burk: April 2011
http://ronburk.blogspot.com/2011_04_01_archive.html
Programming, psychology, and "stuff". Friday, April 01, 2011. Education is an Industry. 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. And nothing really to do with human beings. But education is an industry. Where we meas...
ronburk.blogspot.com
Ron Burk: Anti-Fragility
http://ronburk.blogspot.com/2013/02/anti-fragility.html
Programming, psychology, and "stuff". Friday, February 22, 2013. As I read and listen to Nicholas Nassim Taleb. On the topic of his coined word, anti-fragility. I struggle to keep an open mind but I increasingly begin to feel he's jumped the shark. He claims to be defining something that is not resilience, because an anti-fragile system is one that actually gains. From disorder/stressors/events. But when he gives examples, each one makes me immediately think "But.". Of course, statistically. Since glass ...
ronburk.blogspot.com
Ron Burk: March 2009
http://ronburk.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html
Programming, psychology, and "stuff". Sunday, March 01, 2009. The Evolutionary View of Software. 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. Software as Evolutionary Candidate. The most obvious proof is that when, on a daily basis across...
ronburk.blogspot.com
Ron Burk: April 2010
http://ronburk.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html
Programming, psychology, and "stuff". Friday, April 09, 2010. Why Johnny Journalist Can't Spell. Of course, The Daily Show makes regular sport of the absurdities that appear in "the crawl" beneath the never-ending news channels. But that's like shooting fish in a barrel. As correctly pointed out by yet another comedy show (30 Rock),. It's a 24-hour news channel, we don't have time to do it right anymore. But what the hell happened to print journalists? This is a big clue. OK, so dumb old news media can't...
ronburk.blogspot.com
Ron Burk: December 2010
http://ronburk.blogspot.com/2010_12_01_archive.html
Programming, psychology, and "stuff". Monday, December 27, 2010. 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 weeks later! I punctuated with stabby points o...
ronburk.blogspot.com
Ron Burk: June 2008
http://ronburk.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html
Programming, psychology, and "stuff". Tuesday, June 03, 2008. 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. But all along the way, there's always been this book (remember seeing the word "p...
ronburk.blogspot.com
Ron Burk: August 2010
http://ronburk.blogspot.com/2010_08_01_archive.html
Programming, psychology, and "stuff". Thursday, August 12, 2010. Cash Cow Disease: The Cognitive Decline of Microsoft and Google. 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 costs stockholders untold (sometimes actively buried in accounting maneuvers) dollars. Consider Xbox, which consumed billions (that's with a 'b') before...
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