I just donated money to a couple of political campaigns...

... for the first time in my life. Thanks to this nasty, nasty innuendo-filled ad by Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, against her rival Kay Hagan.

Who uglified iGoogle?

Awww, crud... who decided to change the iGoogle home page? It's now totally ugly and hard-to-read, with all kinds of tiny text coming from my RSS feeds.

Can anyone at Google make an option to re-enable the old format??

Surveying scientists' use of computers

Here is an interesting survey for all the scientists out there.

And here is an explanation of it:

Computers are as important to modern scientists as test tubes, but we know surprisingly little about how scientists develop and use software in their research. To find out, the University of Toronto, Simula Research Laboratory, and the National Research Council of Canada have launched an online survey in conjunction with American Scientist magazine. If you have 20 minutes to take part, please go to:

http://softwareresearch.ca/seg/SCS/scientific-computing-survey.html

We’d also be grateful if you’d spread the word through any mailing lists, blogs, or bulletin boards you have access to. Thanks for your help!

Programming languages I know

There's an interesting post making the rounds on planet.python.org about what programming languages people know and in what order they learned them.

My list (bold for the ones I still use and know well):