All posts for the month October, 2013

Low Standards in Educational Software

Follett Destiny is synonymous with Library software where I come from, where I am now, and where I’m going. It’s ubiquitous. There are hundreds of thousands of districts and schools using it. It does Library catalogues, maintains check-outs, and stuff like that. Which is pretty amazing when you think about it, because apparently all these […]

Winblows

Can you believe that the operating system produced by Microsoft has such atrocious battery life. Truly a sinking ship.

US going into default is extension of the Civil War

Bruce Bartlett’s piece is practically an academic journal-esque article offering documentary proof that defaulting is just the latest round in the on-again-off-again Confederacy uprising. He outlines how there are more than just indirect connections. It really is a must-read. And if those facts don’t convince you that defaulting is really just an extension of the […]

Never use template files for a workflow

Report writing season is coming soon, and it’s also the season when I want to point out something about what an effective report-writing workflow looks like. I once worked in a school that tried its damn-dest to make a fool-proof Word template file, and give that to the teachers to use to write the school […]

Great stories are contagious

I read this at work and it literally made my day. So great. I have been asked to tell the following story many times, and it became so famous that I was even asked to record it for NPR. I worked for a high-tech company when high-tech was just starting to make an impact on […]

Conventional wisdom

This has been true for a long time now, basically since the Bush presidency, but the showdown shutdown brings this to bear: The conventional wisdom in American politics used to be that Republicans followed their leaders while Democrats were barely unified enough to be considered an organized political party. Today, the reverse is true. Democrats […]

Get yourself globstar, bash 4 for your Mac terminal

So how many times have you wanted a simple, easy-to-remember command that will do a pattern search for files with a certain name in a directory while using Mac? Even Spotlight is annoying to do something like that. I do this all the time, as I want to find any file that has a .txt […]

Get Python in your Terminal on the Mac

Twice in the last two weeks I helped someone with getting started with Python in the command line on the Mac. You could just download it from python.org and use the built-in IDE, but that’s just not quite powerful enough for many needs. Besides, having some success with the command line is sort of like a […]