Miscellaneous and Useless Information
James Lin’s infrequently updated blog
This holiday season, I learned that the melody of the Christmas carol “Carol of the Bells” is from a Ukrainian New Year’s song called “Shchedryk” (Щедрик), first arranged in the early 1900s, which in turn is based on a traditional Ukrainian folk melody. Here is “Shchedryk” sung in its original Ukrainian: Happy New Year everyone …
Continue reading “Carol of the Bells in its original Ukrainian”
I’ve joked with my friends that I want to get into building hand-crafted, artisan software. Then Lian Proven of The Register makes the case for it, such as higher quality and being more attuned to a specific group’s needs. I can think of a few examples of folks making hand-crafted software:
I’m a bit too young to have watched (or certainly understood) the sitcom Taxi, but I remember the opening theme song vividly. Here is Bob James, who wrote the song, performing it with his jazz trio at age 82. (Sometimes the YouTube algorithm is good for something!)
Last night, I watched Yang Liping’s interpretation of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at Stanford. Totally stunning and definitely worth watching. We also enjoyed her conversation with Thomas Mullaney (Stanford professor of history and East Asian languages and cultures) — like him, I didn’t fully understand what I saw but it set off my brain in …
I love this collection of free online creativity tools, from drawing and music to creative coding.
A salute to Thomas Kurtz, who created BASIC with John Kemeny in 1964. BASIC was my first programming language, and I stuck with it long enough to graduate to QuickBASIC, without GOTOs or line numbers. In fact, I first really got structured programming in QuickBASIC.
Wow, Roy Clay Sr. was such a pioneer: leader of the development of HP’s first computer, the first Black executive at HP, the first Black elected to the Palo Alto City Council, and so on. The history of Black Americans in Silicon Valley and the tech industry needs to be better known.
Even though I haven’t blogged in a while, I at least try to keep the version of WordPress and PHP up-to-date. Last year, my hosting service DreamHost notified me that it would start charging me for using PHP 7.4, which was no longer supported. So I upgraded all of my PHP installations to version 8.1, …
This is an update of a blog post I wrote in 2012. Be sure to look at a comment written by Daniel Azuma, who made a lot of excellent points of his own. Here are some thoughts for students who are considering computing, including computer science and software engineering, as a career. While these tips …
KCBS just changed their tagline, emphasizing their FM instead of their AM station: “106.9 and AM 740”. I bet this will cause the anchors to slip up from time to time.