A standalone programmer’s editor from Microsoft. And it’s cross-platform.
And apparently it’s built on Google Chrome.
Code from MSFT Visual Studio
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Tag Archives: development
Podcast Publication Date
A couple of weeks (months?) ago, my podcast feed quit including a publication date, and I couldn’t figure it until just the other day. The problem was that my publication tags looked like this:
<pubDate>Sun, 05 Apr 2015 19:18:25 AKDT</pubDate>
but that won’t validate. It never has, but something must have changed in Apple land (either on their servers, or in iTunes) to make the times quit working.
The problem is that AKDT isn’t a RFC-822 compliant time zone. (It assumes that time zones in North America have names that are 3-character strings.) Instead you have to use ‘-0800’. (AKST isn’t compliant either, so you have to use ‘-0900’.)
<pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2015 10:24:15 -0800</pubDate>
Problems with ObamaCare
Quite apart from the wisdom of interfering with great swaths of the economy to create new entitlements, there is the practical matter of making it work. And that’s proving to be a problem for people working on the Obamacare web site at HealthCare.gov:
The better way to do things is a school of software development called Agile — it’s been around since the 1950s, was basically codified in the early 2000s, now has a whole non-profit devoted to it, and is the dominant form of software design in teams. Rather than moving from one static stage to the next, it emphasizes constant iteration and testing, with prototypes building on prototypes so the endpoint is something that works. The only problem, from a government perspective, is that you need to be comfortable with not knowing exactly that they will look like.
Yes. Just because a type of software development got us to the moon (back when 1K of RAM was a lot) doesn’t mean it’s the right approach to use in the 1990s. Or especially the 2010’s.
That’s one lesson from software development. Here are some others:
1) avoid building centralized systems. The mainframe has given way to minicomputers and PCs then a client-server world and now a web of devices, browsers, and various types of service providers. Web 2.0, baby.
Where does a centralized “Five Year Plan” approach to governing fit in a world of decentralized independent actors?
2) have the right type of abstraction. A spinning metal disk has nothing in common with a USB stick nor with an internet connection, but I can save a file on any one of them with the same program. That’s because there is an abstraction called a file system, and my word processor doesn’t really care what the hardware looks like: it can be silicon, magnetic disks, or something in the cloud. Software drivers for each type of hardware present a common interface that makes them all look the same to the word processor.
A centralized approach to governing doesn’t permit there to be appropriate abstractions. A mix of federal, state, and local governments, with large and small commercial and nonprofit organizations, allows you to have abstraction. Each one does what it needs to do and only that.
Intelligence and Disease
Why are some places more blessed with smart people? (Yes, I assume that more smarter people is better for a society, and no, I won’t attempt to convince you.) Some recent studies suggest that disease may be the reason for uneven distribution of intelligence:
In our 2010 study, we not only found a very strong relationship between levels of infectious disease and IQ, but controlling for the effects of education, national wealth, temperature, and distance from sub-Saharan Africa, infectious disease emerged as the best predictor of the bunch. A recent study by Christopher Hassall and Thomas Sherratt repeated our analysis using more sophisticated statistical methods, and concluded that infectious disease may be the only really important predictor of average national IQ.
The researchers wondered if, since infant humans spend as much as 90 percent of their calories building and growing their brains, fighting disease detracts from that important work.
If this finding is correct, then the uneven distribution of intelligence may be a developmental matter rather than genetics or uncontrollable environmental factors like climate.