In her recent collection of essays (drawn, I believe from pieces published online in the last decade) the eternally wonderful Ursula K. LeGuin discusses a quote mistakenly attributed to her. This essay got me thinking about quotes, and attributions, and the appalling illiteracy of the internet-savvy. Some of those thoughts:

As is well known, most...

In a recent story in the Times, we find the following sentence:


This is a strange usage of the word "accused" - this is not an accusation, it is an observation. A man who devotes years of his life to running an organization whose output consists largely of white supremacist and anti-semitic views and conspiracy theories is a person who...

Recently, e_i_pi discussed working for an organization that maintained issues list as a set of Sharepoint lists.

I wish I could say I was surprised by this, but it's all too common. An organization starts out thinking, well, we don't really need all that stuff, we can get away with writing them down on this old shopping bag, and...

Kaizen: Tickets For All Work (Sprint 6)
(an entry in the Kaizen Diary)

This was the first kaizen for our team that I have a record for. Right away, you can see that this is a team with some issues: the most important improvement we could come up with was that we follow one of the most standard pieces of developmental rigor, and require...

One of the most common beginner traps in Java is the behavior of the "convenience" methods of the Scanner class. The usual scenario is this: the assignment is to write code accepting inputs of various types and process those inputs in some fashion. For example the assignment might be to prompt the user for a String, a substring, an...