Monthly Archives: April 2005

Computers/Technology

Computer Language Cultures

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I came across an interesting article on Code Project today. The general aim being to make the point that the difference between C# and VB.Net is not about features, but about the programming cultures of the two languages.

Having said that, the article does pour a little bit of petrol into the debate with some of the comments comparing the two cultures:

Hiring good C# programmers is easier than hiring good VB programmers. This is because 80% of C# programmers are good, while 80% of VB programmers are not good.

Or what about:

VB programmers, on the average, know less about good object-oriented, distributed, loosely coupled application design and development than C# programmers, on average. This is because their language has not supported these notions, so their culture has grown without them. Although these notions are supported now in VB, they are more slowly being adopted than in the C# culture because of cultural inertia.

And another good one:

In the near future, there will be less good VB programmers than C# programmers. This is because all the good VB programmers are switching to C#. This is partly because they like the language better, but mostly because they like the culture better. As the cultural separation become more evident and self-reinforcing, it will accelerate until there are very few good VB programmers left.

If you are a VB.Net programmer who is now totally offended, there is a heated debate going on about the article at the bottom of it’s page, and over at Channel9.

Politics

Who Should You Vote For?

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So our poll cards turned up today, and by coincidence, over at Deep Thought, Sarah highlighted a page designed to help me decide who gets my vote at the upcoming election.

Anyway, I took the test, and to be honest, I doubt the results will come as a surprise to anybody who knows me…

Labour 2
Conservative -35
Liberal Democrat 55
UK Independence Party -3
Green 45

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Of course one thing that the site doesn’t take into account is the situation in your particular seat – in my case a sitting Conservative candidate without an overall majority, and the Lib Dems in second place. According to the BBC, the seat is number 34 on the target list so hopefully appearing on their list will mean that my pessimistic prediction earlier in the month about the focus of the campaign will be untrue. Having said that I’ll still be surprised to wake up on May 6th and find that the seat has changed hands!

Having said that, if you are in a seat where you feel that your vote won’t make a difference, you could always try a bit of tactical voting as suggested by Billy Bragg, through the Tactical Voter site who are again offering vote swaps trying to keep the Conservatives out, or the slightly bizarrely named Backing Blair that is trying to persuade people to vote Tony Blair out in the same way!

Alternatively if you don’t like the idea of tactical voting, or even voting at all, head along to Not Apathetic and register your opinion.

Pictures

Pictures from Beth’s Parents Visit

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I’ve spent the afternoon sorting out a batch of pictures from Beth’s parents visit to the UK earlier in the year. The pictures are mainly from the trips that we made together, although they do come from both our cameras and from Beth’s parents camera. There are a lot of shots of our visit to London, plus pictures of our trip on the Watercress Line, and visit to Winchester.

Stan and Robin

The pictures can be found on our pictures site.

Doctor Who

Aliens in London

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So we’ve watched episode four of Doctor Who, and it looks like the entire government has been taken over by aliens, and the Doctor has been captured!

The effects shot of the ship smashing through Big Ben and crashing into the river was great. There were also some nice domestic touches with the Doctor proudly announcing that he’d brought Rose back home only twelve hours after she’d left, except it was actually twelve months!

As in previous weeks the fake web site created for episode one, ‘Who is Doctor Who?‘, has been updated for events in this weeks episode. There is also a rather amusing picture tied in to this weeks events in real life…

Welcome Aliens

Anyway, Amazon are now listing the DVD’s of the new series. The basic DVD’s will be released fairly soon…

Doctor Who : Series 1 Volume 1 [2005] Doctor Who : Series 1 Volume 2 [2005]

But I’m holding out for the box set come November… 😀

Doctor Who - Complete Series 1 Boxset

Computers/Technology

Wikipedia

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You might have noticed, particularly on my grumble about C# during the week that I made pretty extensive use of the Wikipedia. This was partly due to my having added the Wikipedia search to Firefox which made it a lot easier, but also is because of the quality of the information that is available on the site.

For those of you scratching your head wondering what a Wikipedia actually is, it is a project to use Wiki software to make an online encyclopedia, a Wiki being software that easily allows a large group of people to collaborate on a task.

As the number of people involved has grown, the range and quality of information on the Wikipedia has grown considerably, although inevitably there are still gaps, and the knowledge has somewhat of a bent towards techie stuff in places. However considering that Encyclopedia Britannica will charge you for their online version, Wikipedia seems like a good deal – lots of people providing information on something they know a lot about, forming a great general resource.