On Wednesday I posted a blog about getting TortoiseCVS working on Windows Vista. Out of curiosity, I googled for it the next day using the search term “TortoisePlink has stopped working” and it was at number two. On Friday it was at number one. Today (Saturday) google doesn’t appear to have heard about it - no matter what search terms I use, Google returns everything but. I even tried “TortoisePlink has stopped working +site:dereksorensen.com”. Very strange. I’m not really bothered about it, just wondering how this can be.
I notice some porn site (going by the name of Lord Matt) has copied the first line of the post and is now number one in Windows Live Search; I wonder if this is related?
Sometimes I think the internet is such a snake pit, we were better off without it.
Derek
E. W. Djisktra Diskjtra Diskra Dijkstra
According to Dijkstra, he was the first professional Computer Programmer in Holland (PDF), although at the time of his marriage he wasn’t allowed to call himself a programmer, and hence his marriage certificate read “Theoretical Physicist”.
In programming circles - particularly among geeky, pretentious programmers like me - Dijkstra is almost - but not quite - as well quoted as Knuth. In this blog, I will share some of my favourite and not so favourite Dijkstra quotes, and offer my own interpretation of them. I don’t know if this will be boring for anyone who isn’t a programmer, or even for those who are, but hey - you run it up the flagpole in the hope that someone salutes, right?
On the off-chance that there are some people reading who aren’t turned off by it, I’d welcome any comments - positive and negative - of my interpretation of the Great Man’s words. Ok, here goes.
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Isn’t it frustrating when you copy and paste someone else’s writing into your blog, only to have some interfering busybody point out that you aren’t the original author. They might even go so far as to email the *real* author to tell them you have copied their work. And all you were doing was quite innocently trying to pretend you had some knowledge you didn’t have. How unsporting of them. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
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I hold some conflicting opinions about GM. On the one hand, I can see that GM has the potential to offer much that is good to humanity. On the other, I think it’s a dangerous technology which needs extreme care, and I’m not convinced that enough care is being taken now that it’s become such big business.
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In the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz we discover at the end that the events of the story are a dream from which Dorothy eventually wakes (this is different from the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum upon which the film was based.) We can empathise with Dorothy - when we look back on our dreams in the minutes after waking we are often amused at how ridiculous they are in retrospect but during the dream it all seemed perfectly logical.
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