Being the new year is almost upon us and I’ve spent most of the last year lamenting my lack of progress on health fronts (besides that sweet spot in the summer) I was looking forward to dialing in my lifestyle and diet over the next month and into 2018.  It wasn’t going to be anything more structured than 2017, which may or may not have led to more or less the same results, but I was going to be focusing in on the same core Blue Zones lifestyle elements that I’ve previously highlighted.  It was therefore a bit of a coincidence when I received an e-mail from 23andMe about enrolling in a genetic weight loss study they are doing.

I almost never wait in huge lines for anything.  I camped out once for football tickets in college.  Once.  I also once waited six hours for an iPhone 4 when it first came out.  It was my first smart phone and I had been putting off getting one way too long.  That was it though.  Yet I know people who have waited in ever decreasing lines for each iteration of the iPhone.  The reduced lines are definitely part of the sizzle wearing off and the iPhone being just another smart phone.  Yet even at 8 pm last night there was a line for iPhones outside our local Apple store.  It didn’t wrap around the mall like in the iPhone 4 days but the end of the first day still having a line for an iPhone 8 was pretty telling to me.

On one of my classic computing Facebook Groups there was a post quoting Edsger Dijkstra stating, “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”  It’s actually part of a much larger document where he condemns pretty much every higher order language of the day, IBM, the cliquish nature of the computing industry, and so on. Despite most of it being the equivalent of a Twitter rant, in fact each line is almost made for tweet sized bites, there are some legitimate gems in there; one relevant to this topic being, “The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.”  No, I don’t agree with the concept that starting with BASIC, or any other language, permanently breaks someone forever, but the nature of the tools we use driving our thinking means that it can lead to requiring us to unlearn bad habits.  Yet has someone tried to actually write BASIC, as in the BASIC languages of the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, with actual design principles?  Fortunately/unfortunately, I tried a while ago, with some interesting results.

While I’m obviously becoming quite enamored with Kotlin recently, this is like the early dating stage for me.  Everything is great when you first start dating someone but it’s after you’ve been with them for awhile and see their warts, which everything and everyone has, that you finally decide whether it’s the right fit or not. 

As I wrote about here yesterday I am taking my exploration of Kotlin to the next level by looking at performance metrics using the Computer Language Benchmark Game .  As of right now I’ve completed my first two steps: got the benchmark building/running Kotlin code, and doing a straight port of the suite (follow along at the Gitlab project ).  This was really 90% IntelliJ auto-converting followed by me fixing compiling errors (and submitting a nasty conversion bug that came up from one test back to JetBrains).  So now onto the results! Well, actually not so fast on that one…

A little over a year ago I switched from the FitBit ecosystem to the Garmin one when I traded in my ChargeHR for a VivoactiveHR, reviewed here .  I made many compromises when I made the move to pick up a lot of additional capabilities, but now that the FitBit Ionic is on the horizon it may be time to re-evaluate that equation to see if it still balances out.

Like many people I got into my software development stack rut; complaining about the things I hated about it and why I wanted to change. The Java stack had been treating me ever increasingly well, especially with the refactoring of Spring into what it is today, but the language itself and it’s stagnation bothered me and had me starting to gaze at .NET now that it’s open source. I am now officially done with that exploration and will be sticking with the JVM-based system for the time being. This is driven by three major things: Kotlin, JavaFX, and the fully open source nature of the pieces I use.

I am totally loving ArsTechnica’s two part series on the history of the IBM-PC (Part 1 , Part2 ).  However there are some glaring omissions around the MS-DOS part of the story that I think they should have added in at least an afterward.  My write-up here is based substantially on other articles but most importantly this article from the Computer History Museum .