pancake theorem a tech/life blog

Monthly Archives for July 2011

Most Popular Languages of 2011 According to TIOBE 07.28.2011

Rackspace’s blog had posted this long infographic, originally printed with some major errors that have since been updated. The topic was interesting enough to me, so I looked through their sources to find this TIOBE Programming Community Index for July 2011:

The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third-party vendors. The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

Here is the Index itself:

TIOBE uses a couple of factors in establishing popularity of a (Turing Complete) language, which you can see details of on their definition page, along with a list of the languages that they index. Given a list of “qualified” search engines (Blogger and couture included), they search +”<programming language> programming” to count the number of hits (replacing with the name of the language, of course).

TIOBE also announces a “Language of the Year” based on gained market share. This year’s most popular language, Java, was the winner back in 2005–just a couple of years into my Computer Science degree that worked mainly with the language. Last year’s was Python. No surprise here: Objective-C looks to be the Hall of Fame winner for 2011.

I love indices like this because they help me see how the variety of languages I use compares to the rest of the programming population. By recommendation from my college mentor, I’ve started playing around with 2009′s Language of the Year, GO.

How many of the languages on this list have you worked with, or wish you had the time to work with?

1 note • leave another

Use Gravatar Images in Your Template To Edit Images Later Without Hacking at Code 07.25.2011

Gravatars are “globally recognized avatars” or, as I tell people, user pics that follow your email wherever it’s used to comment. It’s an avatar and profile service that was acquired by Automattic in 2007 and is free and easy to implement. When I rebuilt Baristanet, introducing Gravatars to the commenters seemed to stifle the anger flames of change that came over them (seriously, if you plan relaunching a new site design, read those comments for pre-game training).

Another great use of Gravatars, besides giving commenters a “face,” is to give the blogger a face as well. I had a client that wanted a photo of her in her sidebar (á la Blogger), but she didn’t want to have to use code to change the image down the line. The perfect solution was to code her Gravatar email into the template, and there are a number of ways to do that.

Continue reading →

leave a note

Kevin Slater at TEDGlobal: How algorithms shape our world 07.23.2011

Here is a fascinating talk in which Kevin Slater discusses how algorithms are literally shaping the world and our lives. Whether you’re closing stock market deals within a microsecond or poring through recommendations of movies on Netflix, mathematical algorithms are key to many of those decisions without us even paying mind to it.

I especially like the topic of buttonless elevators and people’s reactions to letting the elevator be more in-control. It’s hard to not feel vulnerable when you do not have a sense of total control, especially with something so technologically common to us as the standard elevator.

(via curiosity counts, which is a must-follow tumblelog)

leave a note

Quick Tip: Sync settings 07.21.2011

I use Chrome on my personal MacBook Pro, and now on the computer at my new job (I’m using a MacBook Pro until my iMac arrives). I never noticed until last week that I can sync Chrome’s settings to my Google Account. Click this post’s title for directions to set yourself up.

Now my bookmarks and extensions follow me to home and work, and that’s ballin’ out of control.

leave a note

Combating "Tech Snobbery" 07.21.2011

I am not an IT professional, but because of my background in Computer Science, I’m the go-to tech grrrl of friends and family. Doing tech support over email is really tasking, especially when PEOPLE HAVE THEIR CAPS LOCK ON ALL OF THE TIME, or they follow questions with more than one question mark. It makes THEM come off as really obnoxious?????!?? so sometimes my responses can come off similarly. It’s not me being a tech snob, I’m just reacting to their communication with me. I actually do not mind helping out at all, otherwise I wouldn’t be putting myself out there in the first place.

In Angela Watson’s post, Stop the Tech Snobbery, she calls out for a stop to shaming (who I call) the computer illiterati:

You can’t shame educators into using technology any more than you can shame kids into behaving. Does it work? Yeah, sometimes. But it also breeds resentment, bitterness, and fear which make learning twice as hard.

I’m sure there are a lot of Nick Burns types out there, but every career out there has that type–even education. Is it wrong to talk with colleagues about other folks who seem to constantly fight what you’re trying to teach, be it history or technology? Of course not. But it is counterproductive and über-jerky to use shame-tactics against those who know less than you, regardless of what field you and they work in.

In a perfect world, everyone would be happy and positive. Students would do their homework and study regularly. Teachers would adopt new technologies to make sure their students do not fall behind the rest of the world. IT professionals would serve with a smile. I would have delicious sandwiches made for me every day. These things are not impossible.

1 note • leave another

"Laptop Thief Ordered to Pay $47,000 to Professor for Lost Files" 07.19.2011

“…the Court of Appeals of Utah decided in favor of the art professor and wrote that ‘the proposed restitution to Stewart represented the 350 hours he had spent renaming and reorganizing the recovered files, as well as 600 hours spent recreating the unrecoverable PowerPoint presentations.’”

It’s easy to say “Oh, well he should have backed up his stuff” because, yeah, he should have backed up his stuff. When you steal a computer, though, you’re doing much more than just taking away the tangible components. You’re taking software licenses, documents, important work, media, memories, etc. One might as well put their entire home and office on a truck and drive off with it, these days. I’m glad the law is at least trying to catch up with it all.

leave a note

"Is it time to kill the liberal arts degree?" 07.18.2011

“I was not the most serious student,” she admits. “But I do wonder, why was I allowed to decide on a major without ever sitting down with my advisor and talking about what I might do with that major after graduating? I mean, I had to write out a plan for how I’d fit all my required courses into my schedule, but no one seemed to care if I had a plan once I left there. I graduated not knowing how to use Excel, write out a business plan, do basic accounting. With room and board and tuition, my time there cost $120,000.

I graduated in 2007 and had to struggle as a freelancer to make ends meet because the job market sucked (it still does, and I only started real full-time work a couple of weeks ago). But I’m so tired of this students-are-victims movement, especially when the topic of student loans come up. Where does this “everyone except me is responsible for me” mentality come from?

Adults do not ask “Why was I allowed…” after the fact. They ask “What do I need to do…” before it.

leave a note