Last week I got to spend an evening reinstalling my wife’s laptop because she picked up some malware.  She received an email from a friend with a link to a YouTube video that prompted her to install a new codec. Except the codec wasn’t really a codec. The link wasn’t really to YouTube. The email wasn’t really from [...]

The term "computer science" is a laughable misnomer.  Outside of universities and operating system development, there isn’t a lot of computer science involved in the daily grind of computer programming.  There’s some, of course, but not enough that I would call myself a computer scientist.  Not by a long shot. I’ve long thought that Donald Knuth [...]

Think back to some nontrivial piece of code you wrote.  Now mentally crumple it up into a ball, douse it with gasoline, and light that sucker on fire.  That is what some future coder is going to want to do to your code. (Take a moment to let it sink in that Future Coder might very [...]

Once upon a time I wrote a computer program that did not require data.  It was called helloworld.exe and it was awesome.  It was also a wee bit useless.  The essence of useful software is taking input, doing something with it, and spitting something out. There is lots of data out there.  My first professional gig [...]

Remember the game Telephone?  You whisper something in your neighbour’s ear, he whispers to his neighbour, she whispers to her neighbour, and so on all the way down the line.  The last person announces the message she heard and everyone laughs when they discover how mangled the final message is from the original. An eerily [...]