I'll have the entire day and I'm hoping to visit a company or two and see some of the city.

An account of my first Gathering for Gardner, a conference for recreational mathematicians, magicians, puzzlers, philosophers, and other curious types.

In 2004, I posted "Why salary bonus and other incentives fail to meet their objectives". Here's a great RSA presentation by Dan Pink about WHY that's true.

Abstraction is a question of less over more. But is it also a question of high over low? It turns out that the common way of describing abstractions in terms of high-level and low-level hides a number of assumptions, some of which suggest that we often look at abstraction the wrong way up (or down).

What can you learn from testing? When you look beyond the red and the green, the fail and the pass, you can learn a lot more about the nature of the code and the nature of the problem domain. And there is a lot to learn — software development is called knowledge work for a reason.

If you do any HTML/XML processing, you've probably heard of this powerful and useful package. Download the latest beta and run it on your code to help debug it and make sure it does what you need!

My old computer died and I have replaced it with a System 76 Gazelle Pro laptop running Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot”. In this article I review the hardware & the OS. This is an unsolicited and unpaid review.

What is the largest double that could in theory be produced by Math.random()? In this newsletter, we look at ways to calculate this based on the 48-bit random generator available in standard Java. We also prove why in a single-threaded program, (int)(Random.nextDouble() + 1) can never be rounded up to 2.

I'm test-infected and that's why one of my first exciting Scala discoveries was ScalaTest

Life and complacency took me away from my first 'love'.

I'm not talking about the early adopters writing obscure code here -- that can probably be solved with a suitable style guide. I just debugged my way through an example that should have been trivial but I only figured out because:

In order for HTML5 to become the true user interface technology of the future, servers must be able to transparently push data to clients. People have been trying to do this for a long time, and WebSockets look like they will solve the problem once and for all.

A couple of weeks ago, I sent out a little quiz to my readers of The Java Specialists' Newsletter. No one managed to figure out what the code does without running it. Some managed to explain the result once they had run it. Perfect quiz for weeding out those job applicants you don't like. Especially in the banking industry. Enough hints :-)

My friend James Ward was explaining some of the struggles he had learning Scala, in particular partial functions.

I'm a big Amazon fan, and a Prime account is great when you live in the boonies. I've also become a big Kindle fan -- but I've just discovered that I'm only a fan of the old design: the amazing thin, light, black-and-white book-reader-only kindles.