MAC SOFTWARE
Posted by on under stock decline, image sensor, swings, technologies inc | 
Image sensor maker OmniVision Technologies Inc. on Tuesday posted a loss for its fiscal second quarter, reversing a year-ago profit, after booking a big charge related to its stock decline.Posted by on under piano maker, knicknacks, piano repair, private collector, tool chest, studley, tool kits, works of art, carpenter, 20th century, job |
Sometimes, things as mundane as tool kits can look like great works of art. This piano repair box, perfected by Henry Studley, does a great job of fixing up instruments, but it's careful placement of knicknacks also makes it beautiful.
Studley was an organ and piano maker, as well as a carpenter and mason, who worked for the Smith Organ Co. at the turn of the 20th century. His tool chest was loaned by his grandson to an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, until a private collector bought it.
When closed, it's dimensions are roughly 39-inches x 20-inches x 9-inches. When opened though, it widens out to 40 x 40. [acriacao]
Posted by on under cornell university professor, william strunk jr, james devlin, strunk and white, timeless book, editis, elements of style, essential books, unnecessary words, simy, e b white, professor william, writing programs, millis, tenney, brevity, wikipedia, great |
In The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White, James Devlin does a typically excellent job of examining something I've been noticing myself over the last five years:
The unexpected relationship between writing code and writing.
There is perhaps no greater single reference on the topic of writing than Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. It's one of those essential books you discover in high school or college, and then spend the rest of your life wondering why other textbooks waste your time with all those unnecessary words to get their point across. Like all truly great books, it permanently changes the way you view the world, just a little.
Wikipedia provides a bit of history and context for this timeless book:
[The Elements of Style] was originally written in 1918 and privately published by Cornell University professor William Strunk, Jr., and was first revised with the help of Edward A. Tenney in 1935. In 1957, it came to the attention of E. B. White at The New Yorker. White had studied under Strunk in 1919 but had since forgotten the "little book" which he called a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English."
A few weeks later, White wrote a piece for The New Yorker lauding Professor Strunk and his devotion to "lucid" English prose. The book's author having died in 1946, Macmillan and Company commissioned White to recast a new edition of The Elements of Style, published in 1959. In this revision, White independently expanded and modernized the 1918 work, creating the handbook now known to millions of writers and students as, simply, "Strunk and White". White's first edition sold some two million copies, with total sales of three editions surpassing ten million copies over a span of four decades.
This is all well and good if you plan to become a writer, but what's the connection between this timeless little book and writing a computer program?
Writing programs that the computer can understand is challenging, to be sure. That's why so few people, in the big scheme of things, become competent programmers. But writing paragraphs and sentences that your fellow humans can understand -- well, that's even more difficult. The longer you write programs and the older you get, eventually you come to realize that in order to truly succeed, you have to write programs that can be understood by both the computer and your fellow programmers.
Of all the cruel tricks in software engineering, this has to be the cruelest. Most of us entered this field because the machines are so much more logical than people. And yet, even when you're writing code explicitly intended for the machine, you're still writing. For other people. Fallible, flawed, distracted human beings just like you. And that's the truly difficult part.
I think that's what Knuth was getting at with his concept of Literate Programming (pdf).
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of variables carefully and explains what each variable means. He or she strives for a program that is comprehensible because its concepts have been introduced in an order that is best for human understanding, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that reinforce each other.
This is, of course, much easier said than done. Most of us spend our entire lives learning how to write effectively. A book like The Elements of Style can provide helpful guideposts that translate almost wholesale to the process of coding. I want to highlight the one rule from Elements of Style that I keep coming back to, over and over, since originally discovering the book so many years ago.
13. Omit needless words.Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
What does this say to you about your writing? About your code?
Coding, after all, is just writing. How hard can it be?
| [advertisement] Peer Code Review. No meetings. No busy-work. Customizable workflows and reports. Try Jolt Award-winning Code Collaborator. |
Tagi: cornell university professor, william strunk jr, james devlin, strunk and white, timeless book, editis, elements of style, essential books, unnecessary words, simy, e b white, professor william, writing programs, millis, tenney, brevity, wikipedia, great
Posted by Jonathan Schwartz on under open source projects, network choices, open source communities, interesting words, technology usage, proprietary technologies, overwhelming number, s market, compas, market opportunity, energy management, solving problems, software licensing, oversight, p |
I was with a customer last week, who leads technology and operations for one of the world's largest companies. We were talking through his priorities for the upcoming year, and on a page filled with various traditional priorities (consolidation, energy management, disaster recovery, regulatory compliance) were two interesting words.
"Open Source."
I asked what that meant, why it was there. He said they'd done an audit of the firm's development activities, and found an overwhelming number ("hundreds") of open source 
projects that had been completed behind the scenes, beyond management's oversight. The projects were designed to solve problems deemed too expensive or difficult to solve with proprietary technologies - from meeting a tough budget, to automating a new process. And rather than fight the trend, they figured it was delivering real benefit, something to explore more fully. And they were asking for Sun's help.
Now, is unprescribed technology usage all that unusual in the workplace? I don't think so - it's similar to choosing your favorite search engine or social network, choices we all make (even CIO's) without purchase orders, that definitely bear on workplace productivity. Most progressive CIO's are trying to embrace this trend rather than fight it, figuring out how they can mandate as little as possible, not as much as possible - selecting only the most critical policies and standards to drive efficiency or compliance.
The invisible hand of open source adoption is definitely changing IT, and it's changing Sun's market opportunity - in software, servers and storage systems. Before Sun acquired them, MySQL had already established themselves among the world's open source communities, and invisibly penetrated an enormous breadth of companies across the world. From where I sit, the acquisition changed MySQL's standing not so much among developers, but among traditional technology decision makers - by bridging the divide that separated them. A well adopted product became a safe choice for enterprise deployment. The acquisition opened new doors and business dialog - we've seen a substantive increase in sales and download activity since it was announced. We've also seen a fair number of CIO's, as above, asking their teams - "where are we using MySQL?" The answers are always interesting.
As those conversations transition to sales cycles for MySQL Enterprise subscriptions (for those seeking mission crtiical support, eg), the number one question I get asked by traditional customers has become... "...but does MySQL scale?"
And there's no better way of putting that question to rest than citing the global businesses powered by MySQL - at least one of which is often used by the very individual asking the question: LinkedIn. Click here to read how Sun and LinkedIn are working together to serve one of the world's largest, most valuable, and fastest growing social networks - at truly global scale.
At the pace LinkedIn is growing, they will be managing services to far more accounts than most of the world's banks... and building exceptional value along the way. (And if you haven't signed up yet, you really ought to...)
Posted by Jonathan Schwartz on under open source projects, network choices, open source communities, interesting words, technology usage, proprietary technologies, overwhelming number, s market, compas, market opportunity, energy management, solving problems, software licensing, oversight, p |
I was with a customer last week, who leads technology and operations for one of the world's largest companies. We were talking through his priorities for the upcoming year, and on a page filled with various traditional priorities (consolidation, energy management, disaster recovery, regulatory compliance) were two interesting words.
"Open Source."
I asked what that meant, why it was there. He said they'd done an audit of the firm's development activities, and found an overwhelming number ("hundreds") of open source
projects that had been completed behind the scenes, beyond management's oversight. The projects were designed to solve problems deemed too expensive or difficult to solve with proprietary technologies - from meeting a tough budget, to automating a new process. And rather than fight the trend, they figured it was delivering real benefit, something to explore more fully. And they were asking for Sun's help.
Now, is unprescribed technology usage all that unusual in the workplace? I don't think so - it's similar to choosing your favorite search engine or social network, choices we all make (even CIO's) without purchase orders, that definitely bear on workplace productivity. Most progressive CIO's are trying to embrace this trend rather than fight it, figuring out how they can mandate as little as possible, not as much as possible - selecting only the most critical policies and standards to drive efficiency or compliance.
The invisible hand of open source adoption is definitely changing IT, and it's changing Sun's market opportunity - in software, servers and storage systems. Before Sun acquired them, MySQL had already established themselves among the world's open source communities, and invisibly penetrated an enormous breadth of companies across the world. From where I sit, the acquisition changed MySQL's standing not so much among developers, but among traditional technology decision makers - by bridging the divide that separated them. A well adopted product became a safe choice for enterprise deployment. The acquisition opened new doors and business dialog - we've seen a substantive increase in sales and download activity since it was announced. We've also seen a fair number of CIO's, as above, asking their teams - "where are we using MySQL?" The answers are always interesting.
As those conversations transition to sales cycles for MySQL Enterprise subscriptions (for those seeking mission crtiical support, eg), the number one question I get asked by traditional customers has become... "...but does MySQL scale?"
And there's no better way of putting that question to rest than citing the global businesses powered by MySQL - at least one of which is often used by the very individual asking the question: LinkedIn. Click here to read how Sun and LinkedIn are working together to serve one of the world's largest, most valuable, and fastest growing social networks - at truly global scale.
At the pace LinkedIn is growing, they will be managing services to far more accounts than most of the world's banks... and building exceptional value along the way. (And if you haven't signed up yet, you really ought to...)
