I've just finished reading Sophie's World, which is a philosophy primer/novel. It's pretty good, and, as is required from philosophy novels, is thought provoking. Some interesting nuggets from the novel:
The universe is expanding. If it keeps on expanding, that supports the Christian view of the universe, with a single origin/point of creation. If it expands to a certain point then retracts again then expands again, then the Buddhist view of the universe may be the better model. There could in fact, I suppose, have been another me with very similar experiences 500 billion years ago or whatever. This is kind of like the Steven King Dark Tower view of existence.
Sanskrit, Greek and Semitic languages have a common root which, because what we have words for influences how we think, means that cultures derived from these languages have much in common.
To me it seems silly to debate about intelligent design/creationism/evolution. Whatever unimaginable intellect brought about the creation of this universe, or all universes if there are more than one, certainly is not constrained by the mere forces of space and time. This is to say that we all could have come into existence ten minutes ago, with all of our memories and radioactively decaying rocks already in place.
As is noted in Sophie's World, we can no more imagine the dimensions or motivations of God than an amoeba could imagine an aircraft carrier. Our poor little brains just aren't big enough for the task.
As I read Sophie's World, I found myself thinking of:
I'm now on to The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.
So a company that I worked at for ten years is now going through some traumatic times. I left about four years ago. When I joined the company, there were something like 200 employees, and when I left, something like 5,000. For most of the time I was there, the prevailing attitude was unbridled optimism: Anything was possible.
However a couple of days ago around 350 employees were let go. Apparently the atmosphere there now is pretty glum.
My personal feeling is that things will pick up a bit after the election, but a lot will depend on how our next president interacts with other countries. Ole' GW has been preety good at nondiscriminatory alienation. It would be nice if our next President turns the beacon on the hill back on. For the past 8 years it's been a searchlight and I think that's had an impact on the economy.
In my current capacity as sole developer at a mid-sized manufacturing company, I've been working recently to unravel our shop floor application. It's a mess. It was started in some prior version of VB, probably 5, then updated to 6 which is where it is now. There are global variables all over the place and the app uses and reuses four or five adodb.recordset objects.
I've been trying to isolate the parts of the application from each other and to add error handling and reporting wherever possible. It can be difficult because others don't see the value in doing this. When I insist that the application is a mess and needs to be cleaned up, they think I'm being difficult.
I think adding error reporting has helped a lot in this regard because what used to happen is that there would be an unhandled error. An operator out on the shop floor would see the error and might or might not call IT to let someone know (more likely not). IT would seek out and find any data issues caused by the error then roll on.
Now, what happens is that any time an error happens an email is sent, a text log file is updated and a record is posted to a database error table. It's very easy to see that lots and lots of errors are happening.
I guess the moral of the story is that especially for developers it's important to show as well as tell. People need to have hard evidence of where the problem is, whether that problem is errors, or performance, or data integrity, or UI issues or whatever.
Another moral is that VB6 is to dot net what a toddler's tricycle is to a hayabusa.
The universe is expanding. If it keeps on expanding, that supports the Christian view of the universe, with a single origin/point of creation. If it expands to a certain point then retracts again then expands again, then the Buddhist view of the universe may be the better model. There could in fact, I suppose, have been another me with very similar experiences 500 billion years ago or whatever. This is kind of like the Steven King Dark Tower view of existence.
Sanskrit, Greek and Semitic languages have a common root which, because what we have words for influences how we think, means that cultures derived from these languages have much in common.
To me it seems silly to debate about intelligent design/creationism/evolution. Whatever unimaginable intellect brought about the creation of this universe, or all universes if there are more than one, certainly is not constrained by the mere forces of space and time. This is to say that we all could have come into existence ten minutes ago, with all of our memories and radioactively decaying rocks already in place.
As is noted in Sophie's World, we can no more imagine the dimensions or motivations of God than an amoeba could imagine an aircraft carrier. Our poor little brains just aren't big enough for the task.
As I read Sophie's World, I found myself thinking of:
I'm now on to The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.
So a company that I worked at for ten years is now going through some traumatic times. I left about four years ago. When I joined the company, there were something like 200 employees, and when I left, something like 5,000. For most of the time I was there, the prevailing attitude was unbridled optimism: Anything was possible.
However a couple of days ago around 350 employees were let go. Apparently the atmosphere there now is pretty glum.
My personal feeling is that things will pick up a bit after the election, but a lot will depend on how our next president interacts with other countries. Ole' GW has been preety good at nondiscriminatory alienation. It would be nice if our next President turns the beacon on the hill back on. For the past 8 years it's been a searchlight and I think that's had an impact on the economy.
In my current capacity as sole developer at a mid-sized manufacturing company, I've been working recently to unravel our shop floor application. It's a mess. It was started in some prior version of VB, probably 5, then updated to 6 which is where it is now. There are global variables all over the place and the app uses and reuses four or five adodb.recordset objects.
I've been trying to isolate the parts of the application from each other and to add error handling and reporting wherever possible. It can be difficult because others don't see the value in doing this. When I insist that the application is a mess and needs to be cleaned up, they think I'm being difficult.
I think adding error reporting has helped a lot in this regard because what used to happen is that there would be an unhandled error. An operator out on the shop floor would see the error and might or might not call IT to let someone know (more likely not). IT would seek out and find any data issues caused by the error then roll on.
Now, what happens is that any time an error happens an email is sent, a text log file is updated and a record is posted to a database error table. It's very easy to see that lots and lots of errors are happening.
I guess the moral of the story is that especially for developers it's important to show as well as tell. People need to have hard evidence of where the problem is, whether that problem is errors, or performance, or data integrity, or UI issues or whatever.
Another moral is that VB6 is to dot net what a toddler's tricycle is to a hayabusa.
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