Today's background image of MacDougal St in NYC was taken by Frank Lanza, a freelance photographer in Cleveland. #

This picture was posted on Twitter by Steve Silberman. #

Since adapting Fargo to do photos as background images, I've been seeking out interesting work to showcase here. This photo certainly qualifies! #

We need this piece to make the Internet work, imho. #

A few months ago I asked this question, and got torched for it, which is bad, because it was a straight question, something I was wondering for a long time, and something we should imho be trying to understand. Rather than shutting down discussion, we should be encouraging it.#

One of my detractors, Nitasha Tiku, a writer for Valleywag, has an op-ed piece in the NY Times today offering ways to make programming more interesting to girls. It's a good piece, you should read it. What's odd is that before one can write such a piece, someone must have asked the question I asked. I suppose she must be getting flamed too? (Hah, not likely.)#

You could look at it this way. Suppose you ran a company and someone asked publicly why your company isn't selling more product. You could take offense at the question, and encourage people to shame that person for daring to ask it. Or you could say, hey it seems like this person is trying to figure out how we could sell more product. Let's see if we can help figure this out!#

Or if you were a programmer (since we are talking about programming), you could get angry at someone pointing out a long-standing and glaring bug that every user sees. Or you could ask for more information in the hope that just possibly this person might have an idea how to trap the bug and fix it. #

Shutting down discussion is the worst thing you can do if your cause really is to achieve more gender balance in software development. Which makes me wonder if that's the actual goal of the people who express such strong negative opinions.#

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Apple says I should surprise my Dad with an iPad. #

My Dad sure would be surprised, because my Dad is dead. #

I remember in the first couple of years these spam mails around Father's Day would really piss me off. Spam is one thing, but spam that assumes I have a living father is another altogether.#

With these companies doing such a great job of Big Data, you'd think they could get a clue about this one. I no longer send emails to my father. When I blog about him it's in the past tense, always. #

Come on this is a bug, you all can fix it. It's time.#

I don't know a single programmer or developer who likes the term "coder." It's generally used by people who don't do development. It suggests that you can divide up development into coding and thinking. That's why I don't like it. I develop software. Part of that is writing code. But I am not a coder, any more than a writer is merely a presser of keys on a keyboard. #