Cryptosmith

I’ve taught programming on-and-off since the 1970s. Most recently I’ve taught some Java and C. If you’re teaching the mechanics of programming to lots of people (not just the few who instantly “get it”) then you must take an incremental approach. You start with simple concepts and mechanisms and work up from there.

In particular, you start with “straight line” programs (no IFs or loops) so students learn about assignment statements, expressions, and output formatting. Get them used to the idea of variables changing in order of execution. Then you introduce IF clauses, comb structures, and bracketing. Finally, start with Do While loops, While loops, and finally, For loops. Continue Reading »

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Here is a terrific (but depressing) article by Saul Hansell explaining how the Wall Street meltdown was fueled by feeding nonsense to the risk management systems in the big investment houses.

The systems did not have models of those weird derivative instruments being traded, so traders would say they were trading a generic (safe, well-understood) loan instrument. So the systems did not really model the risk.

I find this really heartbreaking. I have to believe some people behind the scenes knew what was going on, and I can imagine them losing the argument with their bosses when they tried to fix things. Continue Reading »

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Will Norris is working on a revision to OpenID for WordPress. This is good, and I have some observations and suggestions. At the moment the OpenID plugin works pretty well – I have separate logins delegated through domains I own. I routinely log in through OpenID for both routine and administrative activities. Continue Reading »

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This is more of a reminder to myself – you can enable SSL on WordPress, but it’s essentially an undocumented feature. This afternoon all I could find was a forum posting on enabling SSL.

There doesn’t seem to be genuine documentation on it in the Codex, at least, not documentation that pops out when you do a search. Continue Reading »

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