New Year's Eve is not special

I promised a friend to be at his place for New Year because he and others think it is important holiday. I asked my this is so important and made the point that years, weeks, different names of days etc. are just constructions and so nothing particular happens when they come. Still many people here ask questions like "What will the year 2007 be like".

That is of course nonsensical and should be protested against, but I can understand the question as meaning if there will be special new developments. It feels strange to make guesses like this but I will try:

First of all web development is still just stupid Web 2 and all that ilk. The other day I walked around in bookstore when I saw a book called "JavaScript recipes". It contained Ajax, CSS and other abhorrent inventions. As for programming languages the main branches are still things like C# which is just interpreted C-like procedural language with a bit garbage collection. It is slow and for my part under criticism.

In political developments it is just like now or badder. Saddam Hussayn's death was hailed by some colleages as the "greatest thing in years" but I told them to not say such things or not speak. The reason is that now some other leader will just do similar violent and unintelligent measures. Iraq should instead get a system like USA but they do not because of too little smart people there.

Unfortunately I think there will be more stupid "authorities" to write on the web.

Joel Spolsky is an idiot

Joel Spolsky is a "software developer" residing in the New York area who have lot of readers for his blog. However, he only writes stupid things or day-to-day doodling. In one of the latest posts he lambasts simplicity and says everyone wants features. Yes users are often clueless but this is no idea to include stupid things nobody really needs. Joel, let me ask you something. When you sell a lot and lower the quality of software as a whole, don't you feel ashamed?

Joel should change his mind or not write.

The government should sponsor programming computers

I'm sick and tired. Just now I sat with computer and compiled while everything became sloppy and non-moving. Even though I have new processor from Intel compiling just slows whole system down. However, a colleague came up with a bright idea: one or two extra compiling processors. Since this would be expensive, the government should give money to big companies to produce these computers, and only programmers should buy them. Users don't understand anyway.

It is very important for me to focus on many things at once so I read technical publication on the web when I compile. However, on my Dell machine this just slows down. This is completely unacceptable!

"Losing control" is stupid

A couple of days ago two friends discussed with me. They made point that today's society is more and more open and communicating, and that this is shown by consumerism, dancing, open-structured relationships and what have you. Also, one of them made this absolutely nonsensical remark: "It's always been about control, but now we're losing it and it's great".

Naturally I rebuked this harshly. Our society is built on control. Even, the more control the better. Look around and you will see factories, cars and other technical objects engineered and run in completely, automatic controlled fashion. This is reality. If modern people try to be relaxed and "lose control", they are just not acknoledging true facts of reality, they are being stupid and should be told so.

When saying this I received the answer "but Paig, you're so stiff". One of them also raised concern that I am value conservative and that this is not tenable in modern society. To this I will tell that I am not conservative since that is stupid viewpoint and just want old things, on the other hand I am not modern if that is to "lose control". No, I'm true modern and want a more and more automatic and controlled world. Reading formulas, using computerized systems, seeing big lines of factories and other facilites cooperate makes me happy. This is the future.