The Fast Country

I recently purchased a Raspberry Pi. While poking around in /proc I discovered that java is one of the features of the ARM processor in the Pi. It turns out that some ARM models have Java bytecode instructions implemented in hardware .

I like doing things that have a body of theory behind them. For example, I prefer taijiquan to kickboxing, as a martial art, as it has deeper theory. So when I started blogging, I went looking for its theoretical foundations. I found them in the principles of good nonfiction writing. I bought two books: The Elements of Style , by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, and On Writing Well , by William Zinsser. The book is unusual for a writing guide. Firstly, it is a good read. It is actually hard to put down. Advice on writing is given clearly and simply. That is part of it. However, Mr. Zinsser illustrates his points with personal anecdotes, and this is what makes the book so interesting. In the chapter entitled A Writer's Decisions, for example, he uses an account of a trip he took to Timbuktu. He walks us through the article he wrote, paragraph by paragraph, explaining what he wrote and what he was thinking at the time. Between the travel piece and its explanation, you ge

Hello and welcome to the inane ramblings of an Irish software developer. The title of the blog comes from Lewis Carroll's, Through the Looking Glass . In the book, Alice goes running with the Red Queen, but they don't seem to make any progress. Alice remarks on this, saying, "Well in our country, you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing." The Red Queen replies, "A slow sort of country. Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place." The Red Queen Effect is quite applicable to the software industry, and as I probably will be talking quite a bit about the software industry, I thought it would be a good name for a blog. I have a few objectives for my new blog. By writing here, I hope to learn how to write well. That is, I hope to learn how to write clearly and concisely, and be interesting at the same time. I also hope that this blog will become a good prof