Wealth distribution in America, comparing perception and reality. It documents a dramatic hollowing out of the middle class.
Tobi Lütke is a Shopify co-founder and Rails Core alumni. He writes about his education as a programmer via Germany’s apprenticeship system. It’s an interesting contrast to the university Computer Science or Software Engineering route that’s more common in other places like here in New Zealand, or North America
He writes:
Not that degrees matter anymore. They do not. Experience does. That is one of the things my apprenticeship and the dual education system in general taught me: experiencing and learning things quickly is the ultimate life skill. If you can do that, you can conjure up impossible situations for yourself over and over again and succeed.
Perhaps most importantly, the apprenticeship program gave me a solid head start. If I had gone to a University and studied to get a PhD like my Cofounder, I might JUST be getting out of school. Instead, at 32 years old and I have been paid to build complex software for almost half my life.
I don’t agree that “degrees don’t matter any more”, but in the software development world, a degree is no longer enough on its own. Here’s the full post http://tobi.lutke.com/the-apprentice-programmer
Tobi Lütke
Why the ITU shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the Internet.
On the very sad story of the loss of Aaron Swartz:
- The Economist
- Boston Globe
- The New Yorker
- Larry Lessig
- Danah Boyd
- Glenn Greenwald
- Linus Torvalds
- David Byrne
Freedom to Connect: Aaron Swartz
Upgraded to Mountain Lion and not much broke. Printing to the Canon printer, shared from a Windows 7 computer, no longer worked. Previously printing on this printer has been fiddly to get working, with hand editing of /etc/cups/printers.conf being required. It worked as an LPD printer, but SMB never worked in the past. Happily Apple finally seem to have fixed printing to an SMB share and it just worked.
The Mountain Lion upgrade overwrote my Apache configuration. The changes to the the config are easily recovered from a TimeMachine backup. The previously mentioned change to /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd.plist to set the PATH had to be re-applied. The block of XML from the previous post was inserted immediately after this section:
<key>EnvironmentVariables</key> <dict> <key>XPC_SERVICES_UNAVAILABLE</key> <string>1</string> </dict>
I use this Python script in a cgi-bin folder to check that the environment changes actually worked.
#!/usr/bin/env python import os print "Content-Type:text/plain" print "" for param in os.environ.keys(): print "%20s %s" % (param,os.environ[param])
System Preferences > Sharing no longer lists the web service, but probably most people controlled Apache from the Terminal anyway with
sudo apachectl stop|start|restart
Finally MacPorts needed updating – took a couple of hours of re-compiling
sudo port selfupdate sudo port -cup upgrade outdated
Xbee are a convenient relatively low-cost wireless modules. I’ve been using them to connect Arduino projects. The Arduino Fio is especially convenient for wireless projects. Digi, the manufacturer, has started a series of how-to blog posts showing how to use the analog and digital ports on the Xbee’s, without a microcontroller. Looks promising.
