This reminds me of an an interesting 1990s superhero movie called Darkman. In that movie, a scientist is brutally attacked and disfigured by mobsters. Darkman uses his lab to make fake faces, which he then uses to go under cover and destroy the mobsters (framing them against each other, etc). He's also crazy and immune to pain :-)

I've done just that. Here's the message I left with Google in their "we're sorry to see you go, please leave a message" box:

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Hi there.

I've heard about a lot of problems with Google plus, for instance:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/google-plus-deleting-accounts-en-masse-no-clear-answers/567

I don't want to use my real name online, for privacy reasons.

And at the same time, I don't want to have my gmail account (that I use a lot), blogger, or others be deleted because of a TOS violation in Google+ (that I barely use).

I'd rather use Facebook or Twitter instead of Google+, and risk a TOS violation there (due to using a nick rather than my real name, or other issues).

At least in that case I won't lose access to all my email, blog posts, etc at the same time.

I wrote more about this problem on my blog over here:

http://chmmr.blogspot.com/2011/07/concerned-about-google-identity-policy.html

And I'm sure you're aware of many other people complaining about this.

I was really interested in your Google+ service before, and was encouraging others to try it out, but your recent policy of deleting accounts has me very concerned, so I'm not going to bother with using Google+, and I'm recommending to other that they be really careful about signing up with Google+.
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Also I made sure that all my Google-related backups are up-to-date.

- Blogger - using their export function each week to save a backup to XML.
- Gmail - I'm using a mail client (kmail) in offline IMAP mode to slurp all my mails.

Google also thankfully has some other exporting services, if you're paranoid about losing your account with them.

More problematic is losing access to my gmail email address, but it's too much trouble/I don't know how to setup my own domain, email server, dns records, etc, so I'll take that risk for the time being. I'm also keeping track of all my logins/passwords/etc in a separate secure location, I don't rely heavily on websites "reset forgotten password" functions.

I've worked with maths/science types before to integrate their formulas into linux-compatible production code.

It's usually been pretty small formulas (a couple of screens full of code at most), and I don't understand most of it, being a programmer and not a maths guy. Also, we're a pretty small business, and these haven't been under any major deadlines (it fell more under R&D), so I had time to do this properly.

Anyway, what I've done in the past is these steps:

1. When their matlab version is done, ask them to make a representative table of expected inputs and outputs.

2. Port their matlab version to Octave, so I can run it under linux on my workstation. Usually only minor changes are needed.

3. Check my Octave results against their tables, and also confirm that version with the maths person.

4. Port that over to the final version (Python+numpy in this case. Performance isn't a major issue, and I can always use something like Cython to get C-like performance if needed for this type of code), and do a lot of testing and checking with the maths person. The testing part also includes writing automated tests cases against the "known good" inputs and outputs.

And in other cases, the maths guy knows a fair amount of C (an embedded/maths/hardware guy, but not an experienced coder), so they've worked directly with me to port their code over from algorithm to Python, fix issues and test it (where I again don't understand most of the formula), and I've made it more maintainable (added a lot of comments, error checking, etc), and forwarded a very tidied-up version to other coders in my team to work with.

In my opinion, the easiest type of TODO list to manage and edit, is one stored in a text file, rather than having to go through GUIs to edit details or move things around, save backup versions, etc.

When I get some new task, I'll quickly add a new task entry to the top of my main todos text file. I'll either complete them quickly (and remove from the top of the text file), or later I'll organize things and integrate into my TODO wiki articles, which I keep organized into sections (in order of priority, by date, recurring, low priority, and randomly split some low priority things off into other articles). This part is necessary, because massive TODO.txt files get hard to manage, and wikis are much nicer to browse and read TODOs in, and keep things organized, even if they're harder to edit than a text file.

For major wiki TODO updates, I'll copy the article back into a text file, move parts around, edit, etc, and then save them back into the wiki. This also has the advantage that you can save your text file during extensive editing, rather than saving a lot of temporary versions in the wiki, or risking losing your work if the browser closes unexpectedly.

For coding projects, each has it's own TODO.txt file, rather than being stored on the wiki (the wiki would have more detail on overall tasks, if it's a complicated project). The project itself would be listed in the prioritized section on the TODOs wiki page (do some work on project foo). The projects themselves and their TODO.txt files, are managed via git revision control.

I've tried several different TODO and task-tracking systems in the past, and I've found them all to be much more complicated, or limited in various ways, compared to using a text editor to take down and manage tasks in a free-form way, combined with wikis for keeping larger task lists organized.

One interesting example of "dumbing down programming" is the RPGMaker series, particularly the VX and XP versions.

You can do basically all of your game eventing, scripting, resource editing, etc, a using user-friendly gui, no need to touch programming code. And you can do some fairly involved "eventing" logic, which is basically a very high level scripting language that you edit through user-friendly dialogue boxes.

But you can also start digging into the lower details. Actually, the core of the RPGMaker game engine is Ruby code, including an interpreter, which loads, interprets, etc the above resources. And that engine is very easy to extend, using custom Ruby coding. And in fact there is a huge number of custom scripts you can download from third parties to customize your games that way. Basically you can customize just about anything that way, except for the user-friendly editor that most people use.

Clearly we need a Shenanigans Handler