Why is programming fun? The below is an extract from Fred Brooks' (Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.) book, TheMythical Man-Month. This is one of the best explanations of why programming is sointeresting. It touches on all aspects of the mystique of programming. If you haven't readthe book, go out, buy it,…

“Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.”

is a blog by Tom Taylor In September, F and I cycled from Land’s End to John O’Groats, from tip to tip of the UK. And I’ve been trying to write about it ever since. It felt like something I should write about. I think one of the reasons why I’ve found it hard to find the words is that it seems so…

A deep depression hit me about an hour into my visit to Nepal and lasted for the first two weeks. Nepal, as a travel destination, is nothing short of raved about. “The Himalayan Mountains are majestic and the people are the nicest in the world!” was a common travel tidbit I heard. What I found was a…

"It still has moon-dust on it." Mark Parker sounds like a happy kid as he points to an astronaut manual from the Apollo mission inside his glass-topped desk at Nike's Beaverton, Oregon, headquarters. Over his shoulder, Keith Richards, at least the version of the Rolling Stones guitarist by German…

There’s an iPad market, and the iPad could be classified as a tablet, from a hardware-centric viewpoint. But the market for non-iPad tablets is about as big today as it was before the iPad, which isn’t nothing , but it’s close enough to nothing that Apple doesn’t need to worry about it. How many…

Image credit: Ben Baker/Redux In March 2003, the independent inventor Lonnie Johnson faced a roomful of high-level military scientists at the Office of Naval Research in Arlington, Virginia. Johnson had traveled there from his home in Atlanta, seeking research funding for an advanced heat engine he…

About Projects w Opinion Talks December 28, 2010 URL Design You should take time to design your URL structure. If there’s one thing I hope you remember after reading this article it’s to take time to design your URL structure. Don’t leave it up to your framework. Don’t leave it up to chance. Think…

I have now watched Love Actually two Christmases running. I have no idea why. Last year it was broadcast on Christmas day itself, and I couldn't really move to turn it off. This year, it was Boxing Day, and I actually only watched the middle 45 minutes or so after the cricket highlights, though ITV…

Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . May 2004 (This essay was originally published in Hackers & Painters .) If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your bestbet would be to start or join a startup. That's been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years. The…

"T-minus 31 seconds and we're go for auto-sequence start…" These words have little meaning to those of us not preoccupied with sending a 2000 ton spacecraft 185 miles up into the expanse of blue that only 49 years ago was science fiction—but for the curious, those words mean everything. With 31…

encoding="UTF-8"? Play Audio Download Audio Join Mailing List Dec. 2, 2010: NASA-supported researchers have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. The microorganism, which lives in California's Mono Lake, substitutes arsenic…

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Weather: Sydney 16°C - 21°C . Possible morning shower. Enabling Cookies in Internet Explorer 7, 8 & 9 Open the Internet Browser Click Tools> Internet Options>Privacy>Advanced Check Override automatic cookie handling For First-party Cookies and Third-party Cookies click Accept Click OK and OK…

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Five years ago, we launched a conference based on a simple idea, and that idea grew into a movement. The original Web 2.0 Conference (now the Web 2.0 Summit ) was designed to restore confidence in an industry that had lost its way after the dotcom bust. The Web was far from done, we argued. In fact,…

( Hat tip to [REDACTED] over on LJ for spotting this one ... ) Hansard is the official printed transcript of the proceedings of the houses of parliament — in other words, the working log of the British government. It is an authoritative primary source, and records every speech made in the House of…

Ever wonder how we power the People Who Viewed this Also Viewed… feature? How does Yelp know that people viewing Coit Tower might also be interested in the Filbert Steps and the Parrots of Telegraph Hill? It’s pretty much what you’d expect: we look at a few months of access logs, find sessions where…

I spent the weekend in Dublin among some of the tech world's stars -- Chad Hurley of YouTube; Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square; Niklas Zennstrom of Skype; Michael Birch of Bebo -- plus a hundred or so other tech-firm founders, ranging from London-based Seedcamp winners Editd to the Paris-based…