Spam just gets weirder. I guess this is more realistic than Robert Mugabe’s second-step-nephew wanting to wire me $10,000,000. I almost want to reply and see what “Mr Rinaggio”’s scam really is. Surely it can’t be as straightforward as getting me to pay for a dog then not delivering it to my “nearest airport”?

From a link on Hacker News (the occasionally interesting “Reddit for Erlang, Lisp and Haskell using proto-entrepreneurs”), this 2006 ACM Ubiquity article:

Every programmer with a few years' experience or education has heard the phrase “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” [...] Unfortunately, as with many ideas that grow to legendary status, the original meaning of this statement has been all but lost”

I would not agree with all the proposed solutions to the problem, but I do agree with most of the observations.

One of the most frustrating things I found when working on performance ...

There is a fair amount of complaining on The Internets at the moment about Objective-C and Apple’s choice to use it for the iPhone. Many newcomers to the ‘platform’ (if I can apply a singular name to Mac and iPhone development) are finding the language - and the Cocoa frameworks based on it - very confusing. Just how can a language with sooooo many square brackets! be at-all easy to use, after all?

This provoked some deja-vu. Hadn’t, my vague memories asked me, this complaining been done before? I seemed to remember some talk of an “alternate syntax” for Objective-C ...

This weekend, I cleaned out the ex-belongings of the previous residents of our flat that had been sitting in the sort-of-corridor-area outside our door since we moved in (if you’ve been in our flat, you’ll know what I mean). Amongst the waitressing clothes, semi-broken electronics and Christmas ornaments was this mysterious and highly dubious looking CD. With curiosity (and a healthy dose of trepidation), I played it today. I was mightily surprised.

It turns out that the clue to what’s on it is in the title, not so much the imagery.

For your listening pleasure: eMusic, iTunes (UK), ...

“Which one accurately depicts the way your software treats the user in the event of an emergency?”

From Jeff Atwood’s www.codinghorror.com. I am not sure I agree with the article completely, but I love the imagery.