October 13, 2011

There were 2 posts published on October 13, 2011 (this is page 1 of 1).

Getting restless

It was a day not filled with good news. It wasn’t a bad day, necessarily. Just not one that contained a job offer.

It’s funny. I’ve been working from home for a few years now and never really felt cabin fever until I was not working from home. I wanted desperately to have some assignment to be done today.

With no job to do, I dusted off a project I’ve been meaning to complete for some time now. It’s a Raleigh-themed web forum I’m hoping fills a gap I see in the online discussions around here. I’m still hammering out details so it’s no where near ready for public unveiling. Still, I’m enjoying working on it and it’s teaching me a lot.

I’m just ready to be out of this in-between state I’m in. Kelly’s working now and I’m not: it’s a total change in responsibilities. I have to play a bigger role around the house than I have before and still find time to job hunt. Then when I do get a job, the kids will be in an after-school program for the first time ever, which means less family time for all of us. At least at that point, though, we’ll be in a routine that will hopefully last us a while.

Maybe some luck will come my way. I feel I could use some right now.

Dennis Ritchie, 1941-2011

Dennis Ritchie, legendary creator of the C programming language and co-inventor of the best operating system ever (UNIX), died earlier this week. He was 70.

Ritchie was every bit as influential as Steve Jobs in shaping our computing world. Perhaps even more influential than Jobs.

Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and co-creator of the Unix operating system, has died aged 70.

While the introduction of Intel’s 4004 microprocessor in 1971 is widely regarded as a key moment in modern computing, the contemporaneous birth of the C programming language is less well known. Yet the creation of C has as much claim, if not more, to be the true seminal moment of IT as we know it; it sits at the heart of programming — and in the hearts of programmers — as the quintessential expression of coding elegance, power, simplicity and portability.

Its inventor, Dennis Ritchie, whose death after a long illness was reported on Wednesday and confirmed on Thursday by Bell Labs, similarly embodied a unique yet admirable approach to systems design: a man with a lifelong focus on making software that satisfied the intellect while freeing programmers to create their dreams.

via Dennis Ritchie, father of Unix and C, dies