When I was perusing http://www.speedofart.com/ (Speedo Fart? what were they thinking? Still better than

 ”Pen Island” at  www.penisland.net or 

“Therapist Finder” at www.therapistfinder.com)

I saw a link to the cost of war site (with some javascript I have cut and pasted - hey now I’m a web programmer!)

Cost of the War in Iraq

$470,523,520,678

To see more details, click here.

inc_totals_at_rate(1000); It seems pretty scary even if you’re not a US citizen.

The script was working - now it isn’t - oh well maybe I’m not a web programmer

click here instead…

http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182

Over at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2016415,00.asp#talkback they are (were!) discussing which languages a programmer should learn. They back it up with how many jobs are available in each language which sounds like a pretty good test. What might be better is how many people are employed in each language - maybe there are 2000 jobs in Perl because it’s crap to use and everyone knows they’ll be no jobs in 2 years so why learn it?

My money would be on C/C++ for development, PHP for the web and Python for scripting and to get experience with as many different environments and IDE’s as possible.

Intelligence is not a matter of how quickly you learn but how quickly you re-learn.

Flexibility = employment  - as the contortionist said to the bishop (or was that the other way round?).

Why are writable CD’s called CDR’s? That’s R for Riteable is it? Except re-writables are called RW’s (Wre-Riteables?).

CDR should be CD “Readable” but all CD’s are readable (in theory, you do get non readable disks but they are called “coffee mats”).

It’s as bad as RAM. Just about all memory these days is Random Access - ie accessible in any order as opposed to tapes which are only accessed sequentialy. Certainly ROM, PROM and EPROM chips are all random access - ie RAM. It’s just that RAM has come to mean read write memory RWM (or WRM) doesn’t sound so good though. Writeable and readable memory would have been OK but WARM chips sound like they are overheating or something that come with fish. RAM is just a macho name - people (er men?) like a machine with lots of RAM.

My problem is with my internal memory - ie my brain. More and more of it seems to be becoming WOM - Write Only Memory. It all goes in but nothing comes out again - now what was I doing? erm…

That Apple lot maybe great innovators but they don’t seem to have much originality with names. Firstly “Apple” belongs to The Beatles - The Steves et al can use it as long as it isn’t associated with music. That caused a few problems with iTunes then.

Now “iPhone” - Cisco not only own the name but have a product (a phone surprisingly). Apparently they were “in negotiations” but didn’t settle before Apple’s release of their iPhone. I would have thought Cisco had them over a barrel and even more so now.

For the darlings of the arty folk they seem to play fast and loose with copyright…

If only Isaac Asimov had missed his shift key his estate would be waiting on a fortune when Apple launched their cybernetics division - grab a copyright on iRobot anyone?

No he doesn’t (as far as I know) but Ruth Kelly is sending her son to private (wasn’t that public once? have we changed names because it confused the Americans?) school.