jasonrowe.com

If you live in the U.S. it’s much worse than you think.

The U.S. National Debt is 11,406,012,959,882.55 as of 06/16/2009. This doesn’t include the hidden costs of social security and medicare. We spent all our social security money on other debt instead of what it is really for (baby boomers). You can think of it like moving money from one credit card to another or refinancing your house as a simple metaphor.

So what does this number mean? Well, that’s how much money we owe. Like a credit card bill. So what is our income?

You can think of the income as a pay check per year. The government calls this the GDP (gross domestic product).

Our current approximate GDP this year is 14,068,000,000,000. Hey that’s good. We are making more then we are spending. Right?

Yes, but we are living pay check to pay check. As of June 2009 the debt was 82.5 percent of GDP based on current GDP. This level of debt has not been seen since 1951, with the nominal value the largest in recorded history.

Lots of the debt is owned by other countries. Like how the bank actually owns your house. The U.S. in some ways is owned by other countries. For example, In total, lenders from Japan and China held 47% of US debt.

So when that rainy day comes. What are we going to do? We have two choices to prepair for the future. Ether we raise taxes or spend less.

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Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

Alan J. Perlis

“I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.”

Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922-February 7, 1990)

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

Marvin Minsky, “Why Programming Is a Good
Medium for Expressing Poorly-Understood and Sloppily-Formulated Ideas’”

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

We now come to the decisive step of mathematical abstraction: we forget about what the symbols stand for. …[The mathematician] need not be idle; there are many operations which he may carry out with these symbols, without ever having to look at the things they stand for.

Hermann Weyl, The Mathematical Way of Thinking

Like desperate citizens manning a dike in a category 5 storm, we programmers keep piling up these leaky abstractions, shoring up as best we can, desperately attempting to stay ahead of the endlessly rising waters of complexity.

Jeff Atwood, All Abstractions Are Failed Abstractions

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001281.html

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I grabbed the latest version from msysgit project and ran the executable.  After it installed I was relieved to see it comes with a GUI application, I was feeling lazy. There is also a version of TortoiseGit which looks similar to TortoiseSVN.

Before finding out how to start the GUI I browsed over this  cheat sheet and this one. I fumbled around because folders with spaces need to be escaped. For example, to change directory in the git console app use “cd Program\ files”.

Then I started checking out the GUI using this walk through. Once I got to the section on branching I really started to like Git. Things are just blazing fast and I don’t have duplicate copies of files all over my drive. I still haven’t tried pushing and pulling from remote servers.  I’ll leave that for when I am using this in a group development environment.

Linus has some cool comments about git if you want to learn more from the creator.

My most used commands:

get init
git add .
add all files under the current directory to the project

git commit … [-m ]
commit , , etc…, optionally using commit message ,
otherwise opening your editor to let you type a commit message

git commit -a
commit all files changed since your last commit

git revert
reverse commit specified by and commit the result. This does *not* do
the same thing as similarly named commands in other VCS’s such as “svn revert”
or “bzr revert”, see below

git checkout
re-checkout , overwriting any local changes

git checkout .
re-checkout all files, overwriting any local changes. This is most similar to
“svn revert” if you’re used to Subversion commands

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