At Eastercon, one of the few items I managed to get to, between wrangling offspring, was the "Ethics of AI" panel ( Read more... )

In the middle of an interesting post about online identity, eggwhite wrote something I want to highlight for everyone working in any sort of software development environment:

I'd been banging on and on about how identity was important, meaning one thing. The folks I'd been working with had heard me banging on about identity being important, but hearing ( Read more... )

If you work in the business of generating web pages to display to users, you need to know: there's going to be some major changes in the browser landscape over the next year or three ( Read more... )

Dear Compuware,

Speaking as someone who writes web applications professionally, the web interface to TrackRecord is a huge, steaming pile of shite.

Let me enumerate the ways:

• Accidentally clicking the incorrect option in a dropdown list results in a bug being snatched out of my hands allocated somewhere I can't edit it.
• ditto if I carelessly used ( Read more... )

(With apologies to readers who don't give a flying #'%^ about J2EE programming. That'll be most of you, probably)

A general principle: If (when) I run into an IT problem, Google can't help me find a fix, and I subsequently find a fix on my own: write it up and publish it somewhere search engines will find it, to help the next poor schmuck
Problem ( Read more... )

I know I read this paragraph about 9 months ago, but I was reminded of it recently, and find it even more appropriate now:

Imagine a world where speaking or writing words can literally and directly make things happen, where getting one of those words wrong can wreak unbelievable havoc, but where with the right spell you can summon immensely ( Read more... )

As many of you probably know by now, my day job is programming computers. A year or so back, a non-technical friend, having got that question out of the way, followed up with "so what does that mean, then? What do programmers actually do all day?" This occurred at about 1am, and I wasn't exactly sober, so I did what any other programmer would. ( Read more... )

On Saturday, the Financial Services Authority takes over regulation of the UK general insurance market.

I work as a computer programmer for a company that sells software to insurance intermediaries.

Let's just say things are a little busy right now, and customers that are still changing their requirements are likely to be disappointed if they ( Read more... )