The NYT has a story about radical Muslims attempting to convert an American Christian and convince her to travel to join them in Syria, all done via the Internet, mainly Twitter and Skype. (tags: isisislaminternettwitterreligionradicalisation)
It’s 20 years since “Microserfs” was published. Here’s an article looking at the changing portrayals of the tech industry in fiction, from Microserf’s optimism to a more cynical view today. (tags: microserfsdouglas-couplandtechnologysilicon-valleyprogramming)
The experiences of ex-Muslims in the UK, who face ostracism and maybe even violence, as well as finding it hard to find help because of worries about Islamophobia. Sulaiman, who is featured in the article, is a former colleague of mine. “Shams believes that this kind of gesture and the NUS decision last month to lobby alongside Cage, the militant Islamic prisoners pressure group, undermines the position of dissenting Muslims. “What it does is to say to reformists and secularists, you’re not really Muslims.”” (tags: ex-muslimislamapostasypoliticsmulticulturalismukislamophobia)
Nifty unit test framework which does the checking arguments and providing return values from stub/mocked functions which I tend to spend a bit of time re-creating each time I write a test. (tags: testdevelopmentprogrammingtestingunit-testC)
A Twitlonger page (which I guess is what we used to call a blog post) about Hume and the varied meanings of “subjective” and “objective” wrt morality. (tags: humedavid-humesubjectiveobjectivemorality)
Make replacement in Python which finds file dependencies by using strace to work out which files the compiler reads. (tags: pythontoolsbuildmakeprogramming)
Things to bear in mind before starting on your quest to replace Make, especially if you’re writing your own replacement. (tags: makebuildprogrammingtools)
John Regehr and friends note that C compilers aggressive optimising around use of constructs the spec says are “undefined” can lead to unexpected behaviour. They propose a friendly C dialect where compilers would produce unspecified values in response to use of these constructs, but would not feel free to make demons fly out of your nose. (tags: Cprogramminglanguagesoftware-engineering)
This, from Al Razi of Ex-Muslim Forum, seems a sensible response, although as the worlds only impartial observer, I’d say that both the class of the victims and the race of both victims and perpetrators contributed to the horrors being ignored for so long. The Guardian will only talk about the former and the Telegraph about the latter, I suspect. (tags: rotherhamabusereligionislamnewsmulticulturalism)
“Social psychologist and author Carol Tavris on “Who’s Lying? Who’s Self-Justifying?: Origins of the He Said/She Said Gap in Sexual Communications”. Discusses sexual assault but is mainly about discussions of sexual assault and dissonance. (tags: sexsexismpsychologyscepticismcognitive-biasevidence)
