RE: Moral Dilemma, advice please
Thank you to everyone for your advice. I have good news...
Yesterday morning my mom told me that my friend's mom reconsidered her decision and told her son about her condition. I didn't get a chance to talk with her about it, she decided on her own, thankfully. My friend and his family will still be going to Disneyland.
I didn't want to go against her wishes (if I wasn't uncomfortable with it I wouldn't have asked for advice here 
) and now I don't have to.
Linkdump through March 29th, 2007
Google Code: Updates: Four Google open source tools on Google Code
JPL.NASA.GOV: Cassini Images Bizarre Hexagon on Saturn
Foreign Policy: The Case Against George W. Bush
Late Night Cocoa | A Podcast For Cocoa Developers
Colour Me Cocoa: Exploring the world of cocoa development for Mac OS X.
Worldwide Developers Conference 2007 - Tracks
the wphj blog: Interview With Brian Amerige, Developer of Flow
Red Sweater Blog: Who Influences You?
MacApper: Journler: Jot Your Thoughts Down
The .NET Addict's Blog: An experience with the Leopard beta
Ten Myths of the Apple TV: 5.1 Audio
Metro.co.uk: Student punished for spaghetti beliefs
Yahoo! News: Senate OKs war bill with Iraq timeline
Think Progress: Rove's PowerPoint Presentation Revealed During Oversight Hearing
Teaching Online Journalism: Why Al Jazeera English is blocked in the U.S.
CNET News.com: JavaScript bug hunting tool demonstrated
1989 Bill Gates Talk on Microsoft
QJ.NET: A plea for Folding@Home on Xbox 360
LEGO: Digital Designer : Download
TidBITS: Switching My Mom to the Mac
WiiLoaded.com: Nintendo sells 6 million Wiis ahead of schedule
MIT Responds to Admissions Parody
Lambda the Ultimate: R6RS Ratification
A Patch for Enhanced OCaml Toplevel
a3dweb.com: Getting Lost in a Virtual World
Rail Spikes: 7 Signs Your Project Will Never Make it to Production - all too familiar.
A List Apart: Articles: Ruining the User Experience - also too familiar. 
Giles Bowkett: A Conversation With Reg Braithwaite
halostatue: What’s Wrong With Bitwise Magazine?
RedHanded: Wonder of the When-Be-Splat
Kevin's random thoughts: Higher-order messaging
Tom Moertel: Debate to learn. Learn to debate.
Python extension for libmemcache
Google Video: Advanced Topics in Programming Languages: The Java Memory Model
William E. Caputo: Wormhole anti-pattern
Read/Write Web: Numenta - Has Artificial Intelligence Arrived?
TechCrunch: Web Services Coming To Twitter
Paul Graham: Why to Not Not Start a Startup
Coding Horror: Going Commando - Put Down The Mouse
csmonitor.com: How Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico
Dr. Dobb's: An Algorithm for Compressing Space and Time
arghyle: Great design- Ineeka Tea
Analysis of Unconventional Evolved Electronics
Conal Elliott: Tangible Functional Programming
Exploring Beautiful Languages: Formating Fortress code with Fortify
Ruby Forum: On Enterprise Ruby
CNET News.com: Oil at $15 a barrel?
The Cafes: What Java Still Can’t Do
Jeff's SQL Server Weblog: Dear DBA ....
Oracle Proposes Open Source Persistence Project at Eclipse Foundation
Goldblog: Python3000 vs. Perl6 ... Wanna Bet?
gnuvince.net: Five things I hate about Emacs and Vim
meanoldteacher.com: C/C++ Programming 2 - course pretest
The B-List: Typo - re: programming language type schemes
TSN: Serge Savard speaks out on fighting
Macworld: Why Microsoft should fear Apple
Crooks and Liars: Jon Stewart Slams Gonzales for Blatant Contradiction
Rubynations: Evolution:: (Rails,Ruby) -> Haskell
bbum's weblog-o-mat: Fatblogging: Huh?
kuro5hin.org: Homeland Security Classifies TRON as "Sensitive" - fiction, but things are so fucked up right now I had to look twice to be sure.
jacobian.org: Five things I hate about Python
Control.Modal : Unobtrusive CSS Modal Windows and Lightboxes for Prototype
PragDave: The RADAR Architecture: RESTful Application, Dumb-Ass Recipient
Dare Obasanjo: Brendan Eich on Mozilla and the Future of AJAX
Thinking Parallel: Ten Questions with William Gropp about Parallel Programming and MPI
How to Write an Interpreter in One Day
Slashdot: GWT Java AJAX Programming
EETimes.com: Judge rules against DVD consortium (via Wes)
eigenclass: The PostRailsMonkey Manifesto
Moral Dilemma, advice please
Here's the situation... I have a friend who lives out of town (a day's travel by car). We haven't really spoken much since we left high school but I'd still consider him my friend. I'm 99.999% certain he doesn't read this site.
His mom still lives in town, and we just found out the cancer they thought was under control has spread, it's really bad, and she's already registered to enter hospice care.
The problem, IMHO, is that his Mom doesn't want him to know about it right now, because he and his family are going to Disneyland in a couple of weeks and (I presume) she doesn't want him to cancel the trip on her behalf...
I totally disagree with that though. What if she dies or goes into a coma or otherwise becomes unresponsive before he comes back from vacation? It doesn't seem right. I want to tell my friend that his mom is sick, but I don't feel I have the right to do that. But I'm one of very few people who know she's sick and know how to contact him, and I worry about him having to possibly live with a really bad and avoidable situation.
Have you ever had to deal with a situation like this? What would you do?
Linkdump through March 26th, 2007 (belated)
This linkdump is actually a few days old, it's sat as a draft in MarsEdit waiting for my attention. I've been too busy to post it. In the mean time I've accumulated TONS of other links in Firefox and NNW I need to dump soon.
I didn't know about reddit.com's programming "subreddit" until a week ago or so. It's fantastic, there are dozens of excellent links every day. I'll probably be posting links from it regularly, but if you're a programmer, you should check it out yourself...
reddit.com: programming - what's new online
Coding Horror: What's Wrong With The Daily WTF
The .NET Addict's Blog: Purpose-Driven Development Environments vs. Capability-Driven Development Environments
Red Sweater Blog: The Responder Chain
NSBlog: Custom NSCells Done Right
Cocoia Blog: Review: Security in OS X Leopard Preview Build
Google Hardware in 1998. A classic.
Sunday Magazine: JOHN BOLTON GETTING NAILED ON BBC - great video, definitely check this one out!
C PUZZLES, Some interesting C problems
Emergent Technologies Inc. -- LMI K-Machine - I didn't get a chance to read through it, but it looks interesting...
ergo: Make - An afterburner for your command-line
BBC: h2g2 - Tea
Figurelicious : How Sugar Makes Us Fat
Varnish - Trac "a state-of-the-art, high-performance HTTP accelerator."
Red Sweater Blog: How Do I Really Feel About MarsEdit?
Lap Cat Software Blog: Selectors and performance anxiety
Yahoo! News: Rare Semi-Identical Twins Discovered
Yahoo! News: Riches await as Earth's icy north melts
IBM doubles CPU cooling capabilities with simple manufacturing change - brilliant!
International Herald Tribune: Venezuela's Chavez announces plans for 'collective property' under shift toward socialism
Linkdump through March 23rd, 2007
UC Berkeley Webcasts: Video and Podcasts: CS 61A
The Dilbert Blog: Today I Will Improve Your Sex Life
Scribd What People say in Court - hilarious stuff
IOL: Anti-rape device to hit market - and rapists - I hope their assumption that the device will give the victim time to escape is true, because if not I think the women would be in even more trouble.
roScripts: CSS creme of the month
A Turing Machine in Conway's Game of Life, extendable to a Universal Turing Machine
Tux Deluxe: Konrad Zuse - Turing's Alter Ego?
Linux Forums: Unlock the Power of VIM - a far less convincing argument than the emacs one posted a few days ago.
E.W. Dijkstra Archive: The strange case of The Pigeon-hole Principle (EWD 980)
Sitepoint: Cost-Effective Website Acceleration
Google Code: google-code-prettify
Fractals of Change: Morph of a Nerd CEO - The Power of Silence
Scribd: Exciting Times To Be An Entrepreneur In America
Neatorama: 10 Most Magnificent Trees in the World.
Be A Good Dad: Why dads should read to their children
Niall Kennedy: Adobe Apollo, beyond the hype
O'Reilly Radar: How Google Books is Changing Academic History
The .NET Addict's Blog: Batch observing an entire array of objects in Cocoa (or - how I learned to love Categories)
The .NET Addict's Blog: How I learned to love NSUndoManager
The .NET Addict's Blog: Leopardizing Hillegass' Book - Chapter 6 "Bindings and NSController"
Coffee & Cocoa: Data for a custom cell in a NSTableView
Coffee & Cocoa: First Responder: A Dynamic Heaven
Dan Wood: Making a "Do not show this warning again" alert
Thinking Parallel: Ten Questions with Joe Armstrong about Parallel Programming and Erlang
Lambda the Ultimate: A Real-World Use of Lift, a Scala Web Application Framework
Okay, time to fess up... I've had a "draft" post in MarsEdit about Scala 2 for 1 week short of a year. Sigh. Yet another language that I really want to look at but haven't made time for. Scala seems _extremely_ cool.
Here's where I was at with last year's draft post...
The Scala language fuses object-oriented and functional programming while staying completely interoperable with Java. It is compiled to JVM class files, subclassing is allowed both ways between Java and Scala classes, and no glue code needs to be written by users.
Scala also adds several important and convenient constructs, such as:
- mixin composition with traits,
- first-class functions,
- case classes and pattern matching,
- XML expressions and patterns,
- virtual types,
- for-comprehensions,
...
The second major version of Scala is now publicly available. This version adds some new constructs to the language and simplifies some idioms (http://scala.epfl.ch/docu/scala2.html).
"
'
Engadget: How-To: Automatically back up your computer
WKRN.COM: Playboy Causes Controversy On Vanderbilt's Campus
The thing I find so funny about this is the Vanderbilt student newspaper is The Vanderbilt Hustler. You can't make up stuff that good, folks.
Andres' thoughts: Top ten things ten years of professional software development has taught me
Engadget: Raytheon claims world's first "polymorphic" computer - that was actually the 2nd story I read about this. The first was more interesting but I can't find it in my browser history.
1P Start: Brunswick Bowling for Wii - I bet this will have huge sales after the success of Wii Sports.
TheStreet.com: 10 Reasons You Aren't Rich
have *laptop* will travel
I stumbled across this weblog a few minutes ago. It looks good!
Have Laptop Will Travel (found via 9rules)
Nice design and the content looks good too. That reminds me that I registered havebrowserwilltravel.com ages ago but never set it up to redirect here. D'oh!
A monday tip on friday
I spent a little more time on the Chief Happiness Officer's site after reading about the cool workplaces. Here's a quote from one of his other posts...
When I keep my mind mostly on how good a snowboarder I want to be, I’m paralyzed by the gap I perceive, and I don’t get there. If I keep my mind on how good (or bad) I really am right now, I constantly improve."
This goes hand in hand with the Backus quote I posted a few days ago. As I said, I "stall" when I don't know how to do something the way I want to do it.
One very interesting thing is my daughter, Cyan, has inherited this problem from me. Possibly it's environmental, she's observed how I organize learning and doing and has picked up the same habit. Either way, I find her doing the same thing as me, but she doesn't have the benefit of maturity to be able to recognize her behaviour, understand its impact on her, and try to improve the situation - so quite often is she can't do something perfectly, she'll try to avoid doing it at all. This has been quite a challenge this year with her playing Soccer and Hockey (and now Lacrosse!) - she is encountering so many situations where she has to do things she doesn't know how to do properly yet and it's hard for her to enjoy the experience and chalk it up to learning instead of failure.
She's lucky her dad understands her so well. 
Cool workplaces
Alexander Kjerulf (Chief Happiness Officer): 10 seeeeeriously cool workplaces
Linkdump through March 20, 2007
Code on the Road: Code on the Road: exampleCode != productionCode
Papadimitriou, Berkeley: CS294: Reading the Classics
Hailperin, Gustavus: Concrete Abstractions - An Introduction to Computer Science Using Scheme
I'm currently reading SICP. I don't plan on reading Concrete Abstractions any time soon, if at all, but I found the link to this free book and thought it was worth linking to...
scimaplarge.jpg (JPEG Image, 6013x5782 pixels) - a huge map relating fields of study in science. Awesome!
Torben Mogensen: Basics of Compiler Design
My Financial Journey: Frugal cure for a sore throat - I haven't tried it, but it sounds interesting. Hopefully it's a long time before I get such a sore throat I need to reach for this treatment.
Telegraph: Is this the fabric of the universe? - the complexity of E8 is so staggering...
Eric Lippert's Blog: Fabulous Adventures In Coding : How Not To Teach Recursion
New York Times: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies
I read this yesterday, via LtU. I've downloaded the Backus Turing Award paper from that page, and look forward to reading it. The obituary (link above) has an amazing quote, which is incredibly timely and important for me. Here it is:
"You need the willingness to fail all the time," he said. "You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work."'
I opened my desktop background with Fireworks and superimposed that quote onto the image, as big as I could make it. I need to remember that, daily. One of my problems right now is there are so many things I want to do, but I know that right now I don't have the knowledge to do them "right", or at least, do them as an expert would. So I stall, because I hate doing things wrong and having to re-do them... I'm stalling for the day when I know "enough", but in the mean time I'm not failing enough to gain enough experience. So I need to be willing to fail all the time. Anything better is totally unrealistic.
RIP Mr. Backus. And thank you again.
Clinton Forbes: Junior programmers: Earn Respect in 5 Easy Payments (+$19.95 P&H)
Derek Slager: The Case for Emacs
Delatores: Top 10 Best / Worst Cities For Software Developer Pay
Bad news for my friends in San Jose and San Francisco.
AllTh.at - Your personal search agent
hyperstruct blog: seethrough: a simple XML/XHTML templating system for Erlang - taking inspiration from ZPT and Nevow. It's good to see this style of XHTML templating become more common.
free university lectures - computer science, mathematics, physics
ars technica: Minireview: Papers for OS X
CNET News.com: Test flight for Adobe's Apollo
CNET News.com: Apple releases WWDC details
Consumerist: Consumerist's 9-Step Beginner's Budget
Microsoft Watch: Apple to Developers: Get a Mac
Mac OS X Tips: Top 15 Terminal Commands for Hidden Mac OS X Settings
The Apple iRack
YouTube: Introducing...................the Apple iRack
It's unstable, but that's by design!
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