Ramblings & ephemera

Obama, Clinton, Microsoft Excel, and OpenOffice.org

I recently posted this to my local Linux Users Group mailing list:
Thought y’all would find this interesting - from http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/05/26/fundraising_excel/index.html:
“A milestone of sorts was reached earlier this year, when Obama, the Illinois senator whose revolutionary online fundraising has overwhelmed Clinton, filed an electronic fundraising report so large it could not be processed by popular basic [...]

Language & grammar types: inflected, agglutinative, & analytic

From Tim Bray’s “On Search: Squirmy Words” (29 June 2003):
Of course, the way that words twist and turn around is highly language-dependent. English is what’s called an “inflected” language, which is to say words change their form depending on their grammatical role: verb conjugation, singular/plural, and so on. (Interestingly, “inflection” has a common variant spelling: [...]

Differences between Macintosh & Unix programmers

From Eric Steven Raymond’s “Problems in the Environment of Unix” (The Art of Unix Programming: 19 September 2003):
Macintosh programmers are all about the user experience. They’re architects and decorators. They design from the outside in, asking first “What kind of interaction do we want to support?” and then building the application logic behind it to [...]

How conservatives are like communists

From Alan Wolfe’s “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern” (The Washington Monthly: July/August 2006):
Eager to salvage conservatism from the wreckage of conservative rule, right-wing pundits are furiously blaming right-wing politicians for failing to adhere to right-wing convictions. …
Conservative dissidents seem to have done an admirable job of persuading each other of the truth of their claims. [...]

Cultural differences between Unix and Windows

From Joel Spolsky’s “Biculturalism” (Joel on Software: 14 December 2003):
What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to [...]

Unix specs vs. Windows specs

From Peter Seebach’s Standards and specs: Not by UNIX alone (IBM developerWorks: 8 March 2006):
In the past 20 years, developers for “the same” desktop platform (”whatever Microsoft ships”) have been told that the API to target is (in this order):
* DOS
* Win16
* OS/2
* Win32
* WinNT
* WinXP
* and most recently .NET.
Of course, that list is from [...]