Hearing the OMB Director talk about the new budget proposal is an insight into the minds of this Administration. On 28% cut to State Dept. and most of it are supposed to go to the foreign aid budget. Q James Bays from Al Jazeera. The United Nations said the world is currently facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II – 20 million people in just four countries facing starvation or famine. more »
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Reading the book, I couldn’t help but feel for the family of Hoenikkers. For their talents and for their dysfunctions. Further, dysfunction is on display when we moved to the island of San Lorenzo. The description of a banana republic supported by a fake outlawed religion worshiping untruths (“foma”) is quite fantastic. Are Earl McCabe and Bokonon evil geniuses for outlawing Bokononism and maintaining control over the residents of San Lorenzo or are they just trying to make the best out of a poor and restless island country? more »
Trump addressed the congress tonight. Relative to his other speeches, this is one of the better ones. He even gave a half-hearted, one sentence mentioning of the Jewish community center bomb threats and Olathe, Kansas hate crime shooting of 2 Indians. Crazy moment of the night - formation of a new office VOICE (Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement). So are immigration crimes worse than other crimes? Over the last few days, here is a quick list of what happened: more »
Continuing from Part One Patterns - Behavior First pattern Kent mentioned is Composed Method, this basically explain the “Extract Method” refactoring action that’s implemented in all IDEs now. Then, he described useful patterns that are more commonly known as “Copy Constructor”, “Getters/Setters” One pattern that really stood out to me is Method Object. In this pattern, you have a complex method with many shared variables and parameters. Instead of refactoring directly in this class, create a new class named after the method. more »
Anyone can pick up a book on Object Oriented Programming and learn all about encapsulation, inheritance, composition, polymorphism, and other typical OO concepts. Learning the concepts doesn’t make you a good OO designer/programmer. You can spend years reading other people’s code and gleam a few nuggets of knowledge. Over a career, you finally feel that you get OO programming and feel competent in it. Or, you can just read Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck and get a jump start on that. more »
The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung Really interesting novel (the speculative fiction aspect is very light). I can see how it can be a hard read for people without any modern Chinese (post-1949) background. If you enjoy or can slog through the political commentaries in the book, the book rewards you with a look at a potential China in the next decade or so. Outside the core story, there are more »
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman Very quick read/listen (I listened to the audiobook). I didn’t know what to expect when I got this book - complete impulse buy. In this case the audiobook was performed by the author and it’s immensely helpful to hear the names pronounced for you and Neil does a great job narrating. I already have a good familiarity with most of the stories. The way Neil told them - he made his telling sound just like the source material with his sensibility added to it. more »