My dear gentle readers, Internet Explorer 7 has been out for more than a year now. It doesn’t even require that stupid WGA check to install anymore. Please, please, please stop using the garbage that is Internet Explorer 6.

I’m going to try to fix these layout problems, of course, but it would really make my life easier if you just start using IE7 or Firefox instead. Consider this a public service announcement.

Thanks for keeping the intarwebs sane.

So now I’m trying out Flock as a blogging client. I remember trying their browser out back when they had their first public beta (after teasing us with screenshots galore) and feeling distinctly unimpressed. But hey, everyone deserves a second chance, right?

Wow, is it April already? Time sure flies.

Okay, so clearly I’m not the most prolific blogger in the world. It’s not that I’m out of ideas; I just find it hard to express myself in prose nowadays. Part of this might be because I’ve immersed myself in relearning a couple of programming languages lately: Ruby, Objective-C and even good ol’ C++. It’s kinda hard to write in plain English again after all you’ve seen lately are things like if ([obj respondsToSelector:@selector(valueForKey:)]) (BlockMethods.getImplementation()->*eachPtr)([obj valueForKey:@"array"]) { |x| class << x; attr_accessor :tag; end }

You may think this is because I’m a huge geek with no life outside of computers. That is, of course, absolutely correct. But to be honest, I’m not very good at programming for a geek; I just love learning about new languages and appreciating the beauty of their design.

In my freshman year at Cornell, I took a course where we had to write a compiler for a simple object-oriented language that would output assembly for a fictitious machine. Going through this course was like a revelation: scoping rules were not—as I thought at the time—dictated by some lower-level system, but were intentional design choices. I also saw that inheritance in OOP wasn’t at all natural to implement, which implied to me that the concept of objects came first before someone decided to put it in a language.

Put in other words, I realized that programming languages were human-created abstractions. And from that point on, I saw programming languages as something akin to works of art; each language is a collection of design choices—some more unusual than others—that come together and attempt to form a coherent whole. It’s really quite a fascinating subject…

No? Oh come on, at least I think so.