Bjørn Stabell 白熊

Once upon a time there was a guy called Donald Knuth. Besides being the author of our discipline’s most prominent work, the Art of Computer Programming, he also invented Literate Programming, of which he says:

I believe that the time is ripe for significantly better documentation of programs, and that we can best achieve this by considering programs to be works of literature. Hence, my title: “Literate Programming.”

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of variables carefully and explains what each variable means. He or she strives for a program that is comprehensible because its concepts have been introduced in an order that is best for human understanding, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that reinforce each other.

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Seth Godin in his latest post writes about the Wii again, and he still doesn’t like its name:

It still has a dumb name, though.

Seth’s right that good names have to be both findable on the Internet and evoke the right feelings in people, but I think he’s dead wrong that “Wii” is a bad name:

1. It is already very findable. Nintendo made sure they got wii.com, and wii.nintendo.com is the first hit for a “wii” search on Google these days.

2. It is evokative in the right way. It sounds like the kind-of cute sound someone would make while playing a game, thus it could probably be considered onomatopoetic for “fun”. Secondly, it’s got the obvious connotation to “we”, meaning a group of people, friends.

3. It is differentiating. Seth got the target audience wrong at first: it’s not teenage male players. They’re broadening the market, making games that are fun to play for casual gamers, NOT the hardcore gamers. “Wii” as a name is in stark contrast to the techie and macho “Play Station 3″ and “XBox”, further increasing the feeling that this is a different type of game console for a different type of people. It makes PS3 and XBox sound like complex and boring tech toys, not like something fun you’d like to play with. Strike ‘em where they ain’t, Nintendo

For a while now I’ve been aware of this situation, but thinking it would pass I didn’t do anything. Well, it hasn’t, so I thought I’d start sharing what I see.

Beijing Telecom has broken the Internet

At various places, one or more of the DNS servers you get from, e.g., wifi hotspots, will be configured to always resolve any domain name lookup. That means typos like www.doesnotexist11.com will resolve.

What do they resolve to? They resolve to IP addresses for websites of advertisers. It’s most likely a pay-per-referrer business model.

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