Links for 2011-09-04

Programming Isn’t Fun Any More

That’s the story of my professional career. Trying to learn things fast enough to create programs to solve problems that go away by themselves or weren’t worth spending time on in the first place. Sisyphus had more job satisfaction.

InfoQ: Why Program by Hand in Five Days what You Can Spend Five Years of Your Life Automating?

Terence Parr discusses using automation tools including DSLs to automate the software creation process as much as possible in order to increase output, effectiveness, correctness and velocity.

Weak typing - the lost art of the keyboard

The keyboard is still our main interface to the computer and for many reasons we accept the challenge completely unprepared because we just don’t bother to learn the mechanical skill of touch typing. Just think how much more productive you could be if you could simply think your thoughts or your code onto the keyboard as fast as you could think them.

Touch typing is clearly a skill to be valued.

Or is it?

There is a change in the way we interact with computers and it is mostly due to the use of touch screens. You simply cannot touch type on a mobile phone’s virtual keyboard. When presented with such a thing your only option is to use one or at most two fingers. Given the way that the unit is held you also can’t use the full keyboard style for a two finger peck. It seems that the best you can do is use two thumbs. This is perhaps the biggest change to typing since the introduction of touch typing.

Benedict Cumberbatch interview: On the couch with Mr Cumberbatch | Television & radio | The Observer

But he has, he admits, always wanted to play a spy – „any actor worth their salt would jump at the chance”, he says, „because it’s all about mask shifting”. His opportunity finally came thanks to Tomas Alfredson, who cast him in his adaptation of John Le Carré’s celebrated MI6 thriller – a film that is already being talked about in the industry in hushed, Oscar-worthy tones.

The iconic Cold War spymaster George Smiley is played by Gary Oldman – trading in his usual fire-eating performance for a cloak of impassivity – and Cumberbatch is Peter Guillam, his sidekick in all but name, who puts his own integrity on the line to help him uncover a Russian mole at the heart of the secret service. As eyecatching as the film’s 70s aesthetic – gunmetal London skies, stolen documents in buff folders – are the names populating MI6’s HQ: Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds, John Hurt and Tom Hardy. „That’s a call sheet I’m going to frame and keep for ever,” says Cumberbatch.

die holländische Regierung schmeißt Diginotar raus. Sie sind zu dem Schluss gekommen, dass die gesamte Infrastruktur nicht vertrauenswürdig ist - Fefes Blog

Über Eck erfahre ich gerade von ein paar Holländern, dass deren Zertifikate auch zur Absicherung der „Lawful Interception”-Schnittstellen benutzt wurden, also zum Beschnüffeln der Bürger. Ich denke mal, dass das den Ausschlag gegeben haben wird. Das ist ja seit vielen Jahren eine Warnung aus dem CCC bezüglich Lawful Intercept Schnittstellen, dass man da nicht ausschließen kann, dass sich jemand unbefugtes Zugang verschafft.

Jedenfalls ist es beeindruckend, dass die da nicht „too big to fail” gesagt und sich rauszuwieseln versucht haben. Innerhalb von 5 Tagen nach Herauskommen des Problems ist die CA futsch. Keine schlechte Zeit!

Fefes Blog

Wenn man schon weltweit „Terroristen” entführt und mit Charterflugzeugen heimlich zu Folterknästen fliegt, dann zahlt man doch wenigstens fristgemäß und vollständig an die Charterfirma. Sonst kommen da doch die ganzen Details raus, wenn die sich ihr Geld einklagen will!

Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: the kind of Internet primer you want to slide under your boss’s door – Boing Boing

Gutenberg to Zuckerberg fills an important gap in the published literature of the Internet: a fast, thoughtful, thought-provoking read for intelligent people who don’t quite get the Internet. We all know these sorts of people – often powerful and accomplished, but at a disadvantage in that they got their start before the net came along. These people struggle to put the Internet in perspective, buffeted on the one side by colleagues who reassure them by telling them that the transformative nature of the net is overstated; on the other by juniors, analysts and press who tell them that they’re doomed unless they rebuild their lives around the net.

Words and music: should books have soundtracks? | Books | guardian.co.uk

A new company, Booktrack, is devising book-length soundtracks for novels and non-fiction. Is it a good idea? Or do we risk losing the serendipitous soundtracks that already accompany our reading?

Tagged as: delicious, links | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Sonntag, 20110904, 04:05 | permanent link | 0 Kommentar(e)