Month: November 2011

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Importance of Names

Came across a blog post noting how people with great influence on the world can receive greatly divergent levels of attention that is not proportionate to their effect on the world.
Dennis Ritchie v. Steve Jobs.
I suppose Ritchie just didn’t have the same “personality cult” as Jobs. That’s really the best explanation in my opinion. Jobs was a public person, making speeches all the time, whereas, Ritchie doubted how influential his invention would be.

I must provide a clarification to the content in the link above. Now, I’m sure no one actually believes the statements to be literally true, but it’s worth noting that of course things like Firefox, Google, Windows, and iPhones would exist in a world without C. It’s just that the implementation might have been different and the time frames might have been different. These things would simply have been done in a different language.

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cvramen.com, Now More Robot-Free!

A few weeks back, I mentioned implementing a method for protecting this website’s comment system from spam-bots using a text-based CAPTCHA which I was going to write in PHP. Well, in turns out that I did not have to write it because someone has already made it! It is a WordPress plugin that, instead of making users look at a hideously distorted line of text to prove they are human, it asks them a question.

After downloading and implementing it, I went back to the page to see if the creator had a tipjar or something like that (because his PHP application has made managing my website much easier!) but I did not find any.

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I ♥ Wikipedia

What might your reasons be for donating to the world’s largest open compendium of knowledge? I saw the banner at the top of wikipedia.org today, donated and provided three:

  1. Though many college instructors do not recognize it as a valid source for papers, information from Wikipedia can be a good starting point for what kind of information to think about or look for. Wikipedia has made my college experience much more pleasant by helping me with my papers.
  2. Wikipedia has helped me improve my happiness and overall quality of life simply by informing me of things I didn’t even know exist.
  3. Wikipedia has been key in proving to the world: crowdsourcing/collaborative media works!

I do not want to see wikipedia become subject to the will of a small handful of donors or even have to become ad-supported.
Support Wikipedia

Check out the letter from the programmer, which they were using to raise funds. I find this very important, so I will quote it here:

When we have access to free knowledge, we are better people. We understand the world is bigger than us, and we become infected with tolerance and understanding.

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