See if you can intuit this one:
What?
The “Wedding reception” edition.
Last year, I moved our small programming department from using JDeveloper and editing shared files directly on a network drive to using Netbeans 6.x and a proper version control system (Subversion).
After the initial learning curve, this has all been going swimmingly. I merged my first development branch into the trunk yesterday, and this branch just so happens to dovetail nicely into the whole point of this post, which is the YUI compressor, an open-source javascript and CSS minification tool developed by Yahoo’s YUI team.
I Am a Strange Loop I was vaguely aware of Douglas Hofstadter by reputation: his reputed magnum opus, a dense 1970s work called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Brain Braid, has been the subject of much praise and adulation. My brother, who read the work in question in the context of a college course, read and apparently enjoyed this new work by Hofstadter somewhere in the time surrounding the death of our father. It is from that recommendation that I picked the book up.
Before I started throwing adjectives or grades around, I should expand upon the context at play here: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden BrainBraid was, if I may condense it thus, an exposition of Hofstadter’s thoughts on conscious and the nature of Self-with-a-capital-S. Despite the acclaim which this book earned him, Hofstadter was perturbed that much of his thesis was largely ignored or misunderstood, and so almost 30 years later comes this latest book about Self, and if I might guess, I would wager that none of the imprecision or vagueness or…. opaqueness… has been resolved in that span.
The “R.I.P. David Foster Wallace” edition
