Chaos Magnet

Every Calvin and Hobbes ever printed

I could kill a heck of a lot of time reading Every Calvin and Hobbes ever published. I was so disappointed when Waterson stopped, but I really respect the decision. Has it really been almost a decade? (Thanks to A Small Victory for the link...)

Technorati tags: humor, comics

MythTV

One of these days, I'll have time. And when I do, I'm going to build a MythTV system.

Technorati tags: MythTV / TiVo

Is intelligence sustainable?

My nephew, Jake, is four years old, and he's so smart that the pediatrician can't even measure his intelligence because the scale only goes up to age seven. He lives 1000 miles away from me, but I met him for the first time a couple of years ago during the big Northeast blackout, when I got stranded in New York. He was really sweet, and I could see from his personality a lot of why people said he was just like me at that age. Given his obvious intelligence -- he was spelling multisyllabic words at two -- I took it as a compliment.

Today I had lunch with my mother, who informed me that Jake has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism.

Jake's fortunate, though. Apparently, the doctor said, he has all of the "good" qualities that come with that diagnosis, and none of the "bad" ones. Unsure of what that meant, I went off in search of information on Asperger's. [Update: what it actually meant is that my mother mis-interpreted what my sister said. Jake was tested for Asperger's, but because he only scored high on the cognitive portion -- he is, as I said, extraordinarily intelligent -- and not on the negative areas, such as interpersonal relationships, he is offically NOT diagnosed with Asperger's. But the rest of this post still stands.]

I'm a little shaken by what I've found.

If you live in Silicon Valley, you probably already know this, but apparently there has been a huge spike in the number of children diagnosed with autism, especially in areas with high concentrations of, well, geeks. Why? Well, an article in Wired, The Geek Syndrome, points to a potential reason.

Let's put it this way. If you're a programmer or an engineer and you work with a large number of other programmers or engineers, you know someone with autism. Period. They may not even know it. It might even be you.

But apparently those "good" qualities the pediatrician was talking about are closely related to the creativity and focus that make us good at what we do. A few of the necessary genes, apparently, is a Good Thing.

Too many, though, is a Bad Thing.

Thing is, where people who are borderline autistic, or who have Asperger's, used to gravitate towards professions (and attitudes) in which they were unlikely to reproduce (such as monks and "strange old aunts"), they are now becoming programmers and engineers and starting to wind up in the same profession, where they meet each other, get married, and ... well ... produce children.

It's been a running joke for some time that autism runs rampant in the tech industry. As the Wired article points out, Bill Gates is regularly rumored to have it. Think I'm overestimating? There's a screening test, the Autism Quotient (AQ) linked from the article. Pass the URL around your office and see what you come up with.

I don't even want to tell you what my score was.

So here's my question: if the genes that give us the ability to succeed and change the world ultimately cause problems when they become too concentrated, could it lead to a breakdown in society? Autism rates are rising around the world. Are we just a generation or two from an intellectual armageddon?

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Technorati tags: autism, intelligence, evolution

Jython and numeric directory names

After getting some inspiration from Sean McGrath, I've decided to expand the Programmer How-To a little bit, and add tips for those niggling things that people just generally spend hours and hours on. This first one involves Jython and numeric directory names when importing code.

Sean's right, though; if we all documented these things when we figured them out, we might not spend so much time floundering around pulling our hair out.

Quote of the day

Today's quote of the day, courtesy of Scott Gose:

"Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle." - Abraham Lincoln

One click, yes. One aggregator, NO.

I've discovered that I'm generally cranky when I post to InformIT. My take on a one-click aggregation solution is no exception.

Wikipedia URLs as blog subject codes

Dave Megginson (yes, the SAX Dave Megginson) has arrived on the personal blog scene, and he's got an interesting suggestion: that Wikipedia URLs could be used as blog subject codes. Wikipedia is, as the name implies, an encyclopedia in the form of a Wiki (like the Programmer How-To). Anyone can come in and provide an entry about canoes or XML or Star Wars and it'll be there for reference. (I just linked to it to find out what the heck the Long Tail was a post or so ago.)

I like the idea. Wikipedia URLs are easy and intuitive and if everyone would use them, well, it would certainly make my ChoasCrusher job a little eaiser...

The Long Tail

Quick quiz: Today, will Amazon a) sell more books that didn't sell yesterday, or b) sell more books that also sold yesterday? Answer: a. In other words, if you look at a bell curve, you will, in many (or even most) cases see more items in the long, skinny, portion of the graph on the left and right side of the bulge in the middle than there is in the bulge itself. I'm sure I'm not explaining that well; Wikipedia explains The Long Tail better.

Hacking TiVo

OK, it's not really hacking, but TiVo has released the TiVo Home Media Engine SDK, which lets you program your TiVo using Java. The hitch, well, besides the fact that it's not supported by the DirecTV receivers, which is more my problem than a general complaint, there's the fact that "HME applications can not control any of the TiVo DVR’s scheduling, recording, or video playback capabilities."

BAH.

Creating a GUI Feedreader using C++, Part 1: A No-Brainer Guide to UML

Now live on DevSource -- Creating a GUI Feedreader using C++, Part 1: A No-Brainer Guide to UML: "If you've never used the Uniform Modeling Language (UML) before, it can seem a little intimidating. However, UML is actually not all that difficult, once you get to be familiar with the different diagrams and how they can help you to model and document your project. This article takes you through the process of modeling an application using UML, explaining each of the different diagrams, and the basics of how they work. When you're done, you'll have enough of an understanding of UML to document your own project. You'll also have enough of an understanding to delve into UML's finer points without feeling overwhelmed."

Note that this is also the first article chronicling the development of ChaosCrusher, an RSS/Atom/syndication feedreader that will hopefully do what I want a feedreader to do.

Netscape, anti-phishing, and competition with Firefox

I don't know why it surprises me to see that Netscape is competing with Firefox rather than working with it. Or maybe I should rephrase that, because I suppose it's not quite accurate. I mean, yes, Firefox comes from Mozilla, which sprang into existance when Netscape set it free. I'm not really clear how much of Firefox consists of that original code, true. But of course Netscape will be incorporating Firefox into their browsers, so they do get the benefit and ... I've gone and made myself dizzy.

Never mind. The important thing here is that Netscape is adding antiphishing capabilities to the browser in the form of blacklists of "Web sites that are suspected of purveying spyware, phishing schemes and other hostile code. When someone accesses such a site using Netscape 8, the browser would flash warnings to the user and disable various technologies with security implications, including ActiveX, scripting and cookies. Sites thought to be harmless would join a white list and gain a green-light icon in the address bar. Unknown sites would be coded yellow."