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Showing posts from December, 2018

Holiday Borg

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The Borg were a fearsome adversary introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  With a collective hive mind, they assimilated entire worlds, stealing their technology and enslaving the population to serve as drones.  Able to adapt to and neutralize any defense thrown up by their victims, the Borg were relentless. While much has been written about the Borg, here are some little known facts about them. Earth's first Borg was Earnest Borgnine. His name should have given him away, but he looked human and was very likable. A very distant descendant of his was Annika Hansen, better known as Seven of Nine. Earth did eventually succeed in capturing and containing the Borg.  Below is a monument to this achievement. And turning the tables, we see Christmas has assimilated the Borg. Happy Holidays!

The Best Selling Tech Book On Amazon Is ...

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After reviewing some books I considered classics¹, I wondered what tomes were popular nowadays.  I was disappointed to learn the #1 best seller on Amazon, in the category of data structure and algorithms, was Cracking the Coding Interview . Was this a direct result of raising students on "teaching to the test?"  Were companies so confused about hiring, they needed to administer a programming puzzle to find a suitable candidate? The reviews ranked  Cracking the Coding Interview highly, and the contents were substantive, not fluff.  Yet, glancing over to my bookshelf, I would want candidates to be acquainted with titles like these:  More Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley, The Cathedral & The Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond, Algorithms in C by Robert Sedgewick, and a classic-to-be, Joel On Software by Joel Spolsky. When software development was novel (circa 1980), a popular notion was that the skills required for programming were similar to the skills needed in m