It looks like the O’Reilly folks have finally posted the abstract for my One Year of PHP at Yahoo! talk I’ll be giving this summer in Portland, Oregon. I filled out the speaker registration page today and picked some tutorials to attend. Here’s what I’ll be going to: – Tutorial Session ID: 3959 Title: Introduction […]
Category: Computer Science
Upgrade my servers? Yeah, right.
In software engineering, laziness is a positive attribute. If one can accomplish the same task in 3 lines of code instead of 30, a good engineer opts for the 3-line version. That’s why libraries of code are so popular. Engineers are also risk-averse. Every change you make to the system can possibly de-stabilize it, so […]
Rachel’s a hacker
My friend Rachel who likes rabbits, always wears red, and talks about weird diseases has become a hacker. She’s sportin’ some slick CSS on her blog and kickin’ around some phat SAS. Welcome to the club, Rach. It won’t be long before you’re coding PHP like the rest of us.
I am a grad-school dropout
This makes it official. Today is the first day of the Winter 2003 quarter at UCLA, and I’m not enrolled in any classes. My short career as a part-time graduate student has come to an end. I enrolled in the MSCS program at UCLA last year in part because I was hoping to round out […]
Turing Tests for Humans
Article about Udi Manber in New York Times Science Section: Human or Computer? Take This Test. As chief scientist of the Internet portal Yahoo, Dr. Udi Manber had a problem: how to differentiate human intelligence from that of a machine. By Sara Robinson. The guy is brilliant. Amazon.com is lucky to have him. Yahoo! was […]
Udi Manber: The First 10 Years on the Web
Udi Manber gave the first talk of this year’s Jon Postel Distinguished Lecture Series today at UCLA. It seems fitting that I should have a link to Udi’s book on Amazon.com at the beginning of my review of his talk; he started working for Amazon just about a month ago. While a handful of professors […]
Joe Andrieu: Carpe Diem or Caveat Emptor?
I’m off to UCLA to hear a lecture for my CS239 class. Here’s the abstract: For the prepared and alert entrepreneur, “Opportunity knocks far more than once.” Indeed, as the subtitle implies, the challenge is to erecognize the right opportunity and then stay focused on it. Many factors can lure one into taking the wrong […]
Prime numbers
Last night on the plane ride home I was reading a copy of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, a magazine for programmers (I think I got a free subscription to this when I registered for PHPCon). I came across Michael Swaine’s column and read about a polynomial-time algorithm for testing primes that was discovered this summer. I […]