Occupy Wall Street

I haven't been following the ongoing protest that is "Occupy Wall Street"as closely as I should have, but I'm not entirely oblivious to it. I am aware, however, that in spite of what the right-wing would like you to believe, the protests grow from a very real set of awarenesses, even if there is no clear manifesto.

Over the next few days I will drop a few posts here that I consider interesting or smart or useful. Here is the first: An articulate summary of why people are protesting.

Breaking Bad Season 4

Breaking Bad Season 4 is done. I'm a bit late to the party, since the finale ran two nights ago, but whatever.

Throughout this season I've been wondering whether the show had run out of stream. The characters and their issues are still interesting, and I admire the writers for sticking to their guns and not morphing them into anything other than they are, but a lot of the insanity had bled out of the show as Walt and Jesse's meth cooking business went mainstream. Cooking for Gus became a well-paid job, with the only downside that the boss was looking to replace Walt and maybe Jesse with lower-risk staff.

Breaking Bad has always been at its best when circumstance and reason are pushed to the extreme - under pressure the characters reveal themselves utterly. Season 3 ended with Walt commanding Jesse to murder Gale. In season 4 we had to wait until the final episode to see Walt at his brilliant best, out-thinking Gustavo Fring. His slight smile as he tells Skyler "I won." was perhaps the best moment of the season.

So, what's next? Can the producers really top this? I'm not so sure. I think this season laboured at times, although the final three or four episodes were as brilliant as anything from the previous three. Here are some of the areas I'd like to see explored…

1. What exactly is the relationship between Walt and Jesse? Is Jesse another son, a little bit broken, but otherwise decent? How does Walt rationalize the extra emotional investment he has in Jesse, and who owes who what?

2. How much longer can Skyler continue to be the beacon of decency? Having already succumbed to using Walt's illicit cash to help Hank, and having bailed out her former lover, the tensions of living above the line while profiting from Walt's "gambling addiction" must eventually have more than a minor effect on her.

3. Will Hank figure out that there is more behind Walt's absent-mindedness than he appears to think there is? Having unravelled pretty much the entire operation of Gustavo's organization from his wheelchair, when will Hank begin to see what is under his nose?

I won't be as desperate for season 5, but I am looking forward to it.

Multilingual

I collect programming languages like some people collect t-shirts. I'm not hard-core enough to become an expert in every language I take an interest in, but sufficiently persistent so that I can write more than a "Hello, World!" example in a number of different languages.

Java (and it's ecosystem) pays my mortgage and puts food on the table. Sometimes I use Perl when no-one's looking and I need to get something done quickly. I wish I was a sed, awk kind of guy, but every script I've ever needed could be coded in Perl, so why learn something I'm bound to forget?

There was a time when I thought that Python would be all I would need. But this was 15 years ago, and I found a few little things that didn't work for me, despite the ease with which I was able to get from problem to solution in Python. I don't remember what they were... I seem to recall that I was doing some windows work at the time and Python DB drivers onWindows weren't too easy to integrate. I also remember being disappointed with Python in terms of performance.

That said, I recently played with Python for some server-side work and it was easy and fun. However, the way the work is going I probably won't have many more such opportunities.

Over the years I've done major (read "been paid for") work in Java, Assembler, C, C++, Natural, COBOL (yes, I'm that old), Fortran, Algol and Pascal. Yes, I was paid for the work I did in Pascal. And, no, I didn't do it at school.

In between, I tasted a lot of languages - C#, Visual Basic, Haskell, Erlang, D, Lisp, Objective-C, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Javascript...

Right now I'm playing with Go (www.golang.org). I'll write more about it when I've taken it around the block a few times, but right now I can say that I'm very excited. It feels very mature (despite it's age) and it seems to fit into a lot of the domains I think I'll be working in for the immediate future. It reminds me a lot of C, with a smattering of Javascript. Yet, it's not a pure scripting language (it needs to be compiled and linked (yes, linked) before it can run). For some reason I like that.

Waking it up.

It's been a while.

I've tried a number of hosting and blogging options over the years, and now I'm back at Blogger. In short, when you're at best an occasional blogger, the overhead of maintaining a complete Wordpress setup becomes an onerous responsibility that quickly extinguishes the desire to write something down. Logging in to find that this or that security update needs to be applied, 100 spammy comments removed and the like is simply more hassle than the blog is worth.

Add to that the pretty crappy uptime/response time of the major low-end hosts and you have a recipe for endless procrastination if not complete capitulation.