This article has spawned a lot of discussion about the "gender gap" in programming.

What bothers me about the discussion is that nobody ever states a goal. What is the ideal outcome?

I think the ideal reads something like this: "For any person, they will have some degree of happiness with a given job. Society also has some degree of need for a given job. The best job for the person is the one that best balances their happiness with society's need." You need the clause about society to keep the problem grounded; we can't all be Hedonism-Bot, because the societal demand for that just isn't there. The exact balance is, of course, up for debate.

I've been watching some of the television-season DVDs we've collected over the years again, and once again I can't help but notice how much nicer the TV-DVD experience is over real TV.

The only minor complaint is the occasional commercial break that feels forced, but that's not too big a deal compared to the fun. Along with the audio-visual advantages of watching TV on my laptop (at 1650x1050, it's basically an HDTV that fits on my lap), the lack of commercial interruptions and the fact that TV shows have to be written very tightly to work around that means you end up with a very concentrated experience that has to be seen to be believed.

So, if the only valid thing left for modern art to do is hold up a mirror to the viewer, does that make people who spend a lot of time looking at and talking about modern art narcissists?

Bonus: The heuristic works!

(Proximate trigger: This quality art "criticism".)

Well, that was fast.

UPDATE: So far the big announcement is that new Bravia TVs will stream HD content via the Internet, in partnership with Yahoo, AOL, and Grouper. The "Bravia Internet Video Link" will be a small module that will fit to the back of the TV, and connect directly to the Internet without a PC. And the service is free. - Instapundit

Not even two weeks have gone by since I predicted set top boxes would do just that. (It may be quasi-integrated into the TV but it's probably basically a set-top box inside; I can't think of any technical reason why such a box wouldn't work on other televisions. It must be a branding thing.)

I've got a Django review in the pipe, and it's generally positive. It's still cooking both so I can gather more experience, and while some fact-checking occurs.

But there's something still missing that I can't put my finger on. I think cutting away even more of the general cruft of making web apps is bringing it out. I've been programming on the web for nearly ten years now, and something's not right. Despite the fact that I have gotten generally good at programming, and I keep refactoring and refactoring, I keep writing the same web page over and over again: I've got a tree of heterogeneous objects that I need to render, which itself a view of a graph-like structure, I allow the user to manipulate it somehow, and I have to propagate those changes back to the database. And for some damn reason, no matter what I do, there's always something super-special about this form that requires special treatment and requires further extension of the frameworks or libraries I'm using.

(Note this programming post meanders a lot; part of the point is that I don't entirely know where I'm going with this.)

The problem I see with most introduction to closures is they choose examples that can be done easily with a standard for loop, or some other standard construct, leading a student to ask (with great justification!) what the point is and why (s)he should bother. In my opinion, the best place to start understanding them practically is to look at their ability to decouple logic, because there they have benefits that are difficult or even impossible to replicate without them.

So despite the huge amount of verbiage on the net about closures, I thought I'd take another crack at explaining it with examples that actually do something that is much harder to do without closures.

After a bit more thought about my previous post, I'm pretty sure this is going to be a disaster for Microsoft.

Microsoft has two goals here:

1. Become the dominant distributor of video content, and probably eventually leverage that into dethroning iTunes and becoming the dominant distributor of content, period. By that I mean they will own the platform, not necessarily the stores themselves.
2. Destroy open source by making it borderline illegal, if not actually illegal, to have drivers that open source software can use.

I wouldn't even care to guess which is more important to them. I'm sure they really, really want #1, but if they had to choose only one I wouldn't be surprised they'd rather have #2.

But this entire plan is predicated on two very strong assumptions:

• People are so desperate to experience high-quality video on their computers that they are willing to put up with all the other continuous degradation of their computer's performance to do it.
• The Windows monopoly is so entrenched that no matter how they screw with your computer, you have no choice but to buy Windows, and hardware vendors have no choice but to sell hardware for Windows only, completely snubbing Linux and quite possible Macs as well

If either of these fail, Microsoft loses, and both are highly questionable.

In August 2002, I said that then-recent changes to the Windows XP EULA were a declaration that your computer belonged to Microsoft.

It always takes more time to implement these things than initially thought, but the dream of having corporations own your computer lives on now in Vista. This paper documents some of the work that has gone into making Vista "safe" for "protected" content, and made it clear how whenever there was a conflict between the interests of the media companies and your interests, you lost.

Every program of any complexity needs to be configured. The traditional answer is to put this in some sort of text file, or something else that is fundamentally static data that must be read in and parsed. (That is, for the purposes of this discussion the Windows Registry is a static text file.)

If you are programming in a language that can take a program in at run-time, like Python, Ruby, or Perl, and you are targeting an advanced audience, the configuration file should actually be a program. In the degenerate case, the programming language can easily look like a configuration file, but then, if you need the full power of programming, it's sitting right there.

Update Dec. 24th: Similar thoughts w.r.t. build tools. I think declaration-based systems tend towards "demoware"; any arbitrary task can be made to look good in the demo of a declarative system, but it seems inevitable that before you can even blink, you need a scripting language. And ultimately, as with ant vs. rake, it's simpler just to pull in the full scripting language that to fall prey to Greenspun's Tenth Rule in your "simpler" declarative language.

My laptop hard drive is dying.

This may be a world first: My laptop hard drive is dying almost immediately after a full backup.

Most hard drives die immediately before their first full backup.

I've noticed that the quality of hard drives as measured by how long they last has been steadily going down. Having a hard drive last two years is almost a notable event now. But I think they've been getting better about somewhat gracefully failing; while I almost never see a drive last more than a year and a half, it's also been a long time since I heard anybody say their hard drive just died with no warning at all. (I'm sure it happens but it seems to happen less often.)