Turkey's government was radically secular for close to a century, since Kemal Ataturk's nationalists kicked out the Allies, Sultanate, and Caliphate after the WW I fall of the Ottoman Empire. They were fairly aggressive about it - requiring western-style clothing, banning fezzes, and suppressing non-Turkish cultures (such as the Kurds), enforcing use of a Latin-based alphabet instead of Arabic alphabet (and too bad for you if your name used not-officially-Turkish letters.) They did strongly push education of women, banned headscarves even for women who wanted to wear them, and let women vote (at least in the years they were paying attention to votes.) They've even had women as Prime Minister. Islam was still permitted as a religion, and was still the most common religion, but the government was not Islamic.

They stayed secular until a few years ago when more Islamists got elected to Parliament, but have loosened up since then.

Google for your favorite Wizard of Id cartoons...

Sometime in the last week or two I went to a website that didn't display properly and found that it was because I was missing the Java plugin for my browser. (Apparently the IT department at $DAYJOB had just blocked it, because they're really on the ball, or more likely I'd forgotten to reinstall it after the last time they updated the browser and just hadn't encountered any sites that used it in a while.)

It's disappointing - Java has a fairly strong security model (except for the occasional implementation bug), and I've felt fairly safe running it over the years, as opposed to JavaScript which lets all kinds of people do all kinds of dangerous things, and I keep it turned off by default using NoScript, but have to enable it for way too many websites. (And people tell me "It's easy to write perfectly safe code in JS", missing the whole "It's also easy to write really malicious code in JS so it's not safe to leave it turned on.")

The article is really ambiguous about the cause here. Is it

- Non-academic-track kids in non-US countries don't take the test , or

- the US has a lot of poor kids who don't get adequate schools because they're poor, and we'd have better test results if we didn't have so many poor kids?

Both factors are true, but I can't tell from the article whether it's saying "US ranking would be this much higher if the non-academic kids on the other countries took the tests (yay, US!)", or "US ranking would be higher if we didn't include the poor kids (sorry, doesn't count.)"

Ok, they've added Bluetooth, and use Wifi instead of wired Ethernet, and use some really uncommon powered video plug instead of HDMI and a USB socket, but it's still pretty much the same. RPi in a box is about as practical, and it wouldn't be hard to build commercially.

Topeka's way out in the middle of nowhere.

"Kansas City" mostly means Kansas City Missouri, as well as the adjacent Kansas City Kansas and sprawl of suburbs. Sprint is in Overland Park, KS, a suburb about 10 miles west of downtown. Downtown KCMO is a pretty decent city - go visit the Plaza area or the university.

If he isn't understanding your code, maybe you need better comments in it. Have him write some!

Or maybe your code is complex because it's trying to implement a bunch of complex semi-contradictory requirements that evolved over time, rather than implementing one clear design specification that was available upfront. That also needs really good comments.

Firefox crashes way too often for my taste, but since about version 13 it's gotten a lot better on memory use. I haven't used Chrome in a while, just tried it and found that yeah, it's really really fast. It used to be a real memory hog, and I won't be able to tell if that's still true unless I load it up with a lot of tabs. (And unfortunately, since I'm stuck running 32-bit Win7, I can't just throw enough virtual or real memory onto the laptop to handle memory bloat, and modern browsers don't seem to like waiting for Win7 paging anyway.)

I used to use a yoga ball as my home office chair. It took a little while to get used to, but my muscles adapted quickly enough.

Then one day I backed up and scared my cat. He slashed at the ball, claws out, and I started sinking slowly to the floor as it deflated.

Tai Chi and QiGong have a lot of great stretching and stability exercises you can do in not much space, and they're slow moving enough that you're not going to work up a sweat.

Also, getting up from your desk periodically and doing things, like going and getting coffee.

I picked a gym near the train station, so during the years I was commuting by train it was convenient to go there when I got back from work, before doing other things for the evening. I've been going a lot less frequently since I changed offices.

Bad crypto can cause you no end of trouble. There are people out there who know what they're doing who've written PRNG systems in the general direction that you're talking about, but understand what to do and not do in the designs. Some of it's pretty subtle, like only bringing in new entropy in big chunks rather than trickling it in, and knowing what crypto algorithms work well for applications like this and what don't. And some of it's tuning.

Go read the "/dev/urandom" Wikipedia page. If you need Yarrow, use it.

The general speculation is that something in Android is using /dev/random when it would probably be ok with /dev/urandom, but nobody's sure quite what. Google Maps was mentioned; maybe it's using https to fetch map segments or something?

Ok, it only works if you've got a cybernetic dolphin who can use SQUIDs to read you brain, but you could still become a very technical boy...

Real programming jobs usually spend a lot more time in the requirements gathering and clarification and solution analysis phases than they do in actual coding. On the other hand, it does weed out the people who don't actually have a clue, at least if you provide enough time rather than trying to get speed. Shouldn't be necessary, but HR departments are usually run by people who understand contracts, not technology.

My department recently tried to hire a lab manager contractor to do router gruntwork and organize a lab move. We quickly found that after the candidate's contract shops and our HR department had both reformatted their resumes, we couldn't tell much except who they'd worked for (e.g. "working on CCIE" meant "didn't have CCIE", not "had CCNP, working on CCIE", and "worked on X" might mean "developed the X system from scratch" or "used the X system to enter data without understanding what it was"), and most of the people who really did know their stuff found better jobs so we didn't end up getting second interviews (good for them, we really needed somebody to do unexciting gruntwork.)

We ended up asking everybody the question "You've just typed "google.com" into your browser, tell me what happens on the wire in as much detail as you can." It should be elementary, but way too many applicants didn't understand the OSI stack enough to talk about Layer 1 vs. 2 vs. 3, much less about arp or broadcasts, or didn't get the concept that typing things into your browser makes stuff happen on a wire, and the technically competent people could talk their way through it pretty quickly.

My resume has lots of buzzwords on it so I can get past the HR department, but I also try to indicate what I'm actually good at. HR department people usually don't have complex engineering skills, and while it would be nice if they could actually identify people who do, it's tough.

And the fact that you wrote "CV" instead of "resume" implies you're not American - over here, calling the previous employer isn't going to get you anything more than a confirmation that they did work at the company, they usually won't say anything negative about work quality because they could get sued, and maybe they'll say something positive but you can't really trust it. Google might find you people with uncommon names who've done open-source work; it's much less likely to help for people with common names or people who've done their software work inside large companies.