upon "expound"
  thrice.dost_thou do
    speaketh("Hark!")
  verily
  ponder(1..3)
verily

"If we don't change the way ICT is thought about and taught, we're shutting the door on our children's futures." John Naughton on why people shouldn't just be learning programming, but learning why software is so important.

Oliver Burkeman on ifttt and the patterns of normality: 'Our lives are full of sequences we perform automatically… one happy consequence is the hope of reprogramming them for our benefit'.

A great piece from John Naughton in the Observer, hanging off the back of the Eric Schmidt lecture at Edinburgh but (rightly) critiquing too much British computing education as being about learning Word, not learning programming, and highlighting Arduino and the forthcoming Raspberry Pi £15 Linux computer.

A version of the Substrate Processing code to paper, from Papercamp 2 in London.

Tom Insam writes up, in amusing fashion, how he scrapes the World of Warcraft site to extract the achievements of his guild into an RSS feed. For example: "they return an XML document with an XSL stylesheet referenced in the header that transforms the XML into a web page. Why are they doing this? It must be a huge amount of work compared to just serving HTML, I don’t get it. Let’s ignore that."

Yes yes yes. This is what I was trying to get at in my commentary on the link I posted yesterday, but Tom's far more eloquent than I am: you don't need to code, you need to be able to think in terms of data, and how to use that to extract information (to misquote someone at Papercamp).

"You’d be able to knock up something like the Guardian BNP map without a second thought." I'd argue that you don't necessarily need to be able to code, but you do need to be able to use good tools; Excel and DabbleDB spring to mind (but aren't mentioned in the comments). (Note megp asking for Dopplr CSV exports so she can do her own visualisations.) Still, interesting thoughts.

How to use the ReportLab PDF generation library with Google App Engine. Summary: it works out of the box, except it tries to make a file, so stop it doing that and you're good to go.

"You can't learn a language in a year. It can't be done. I've been writing Ruby for three years and I don't really know it." I agree I need short-term goals, but I'm still keen not to knock up new things all the time, so my new year's resolution is slightly different. We'll see how that goes.

"When you build something, and then don’t stick around to maintain it, you are only watching half the movie. You don’t get to see how it ends." I haven't got around to posting about it (too busy!) but my new year's resolution is to revisit old projects rather then just setting them free, and going on to the next new thing. This is part of why that's a good idea.

Richard Dawkins: "Isn't programming useful? In the right hands, yes. But my projects ... could all be done better (and were) by professionals. It was a classic addiction: prolonged frustration, occasionally rewarded by a briefly glowing fix of achievement."

Oh my. This is... really rather good. As someone else said, "the semantic web is here".

"you won't be able get traction with [a language implementation] unless it does direct threading, is register based, has generational GC, does peephole optimizations, does trace-folding, does type-inferenced inline caching, etc"

Ruby interface to Processing. More for other people than me, I suspect, but then I'm half expecting to find they've already all seen it.

"What this boils down to is the difference between programming to a design, and design while programming. Code is a creative medium for me, and the code is where I want my hands to be"

A plaintive tale of robotic misdeeds.

Erlang? Interesting. It does seem very lightweight; not so much a database as a toolkit for storing data and building tools around it.

The Amazon API/service computing juggernaut rumbles on with a RESTian database API. Not sure it makes sense for people already relying on RDBMSes, but it's certainly interesting.

I thought this was worth noting, given it vaguely relates to the Coding Horror on sorting I posted earlier. Reaction to the change seems to be generally hostile.

A good piece on the friendlyness of natural sort vs ascibetical sort. I'm amazed anyone defends the latter, but they do. If EBCDIC had won, would they defend numbers after letters (as opposed to ASCII, which is the other way round)?