What is Lohutok?

Lohutok is a small town in Southern Sudan, where I spent part of my childhood. Sudan is a beautiful country full of warm and caring people, and a little piece of my global "home". After decades of civil war, recent events show the first real chance for peace in Sudan.

Read more about the Tennet people...

Mooer's Law

"It is now my suggestion that many people may not want information, and that they will avoid using a system precisely because it gives them information... Having information is painful and troublesome. We have all experienced this. If you have information, you must first read it, which is not always easy. You must then try to understand it... Understanding the information may show that your work was wrong, or may show that your work was needless... Thus not having and not using information can often lead to less trouble and pain than having and using it."

—Remarks by Calvin N. Mooers on October 24, 1959. Reprinted in the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science. October/November 1996.

Who is Allison Randal?

It all started at the age of 5 when Allison's father handed her a soldering iron and a printed circuit board. Her first geek career was as a research linguist in eastern Africa. But eventually her love of coding seduced her away from natural languages to artificial ones. A Perl programmer by trade, Allison is on the board of directors of The Perl Foundation, the architect of Parrot, designer and lead developer of Parrot's Tree Grammar Engine (TGE), co-author of "Perl 6 & Parrot Essentials" with Dan Sugalski and Leopold Tötsch, and founder and president of Onyx Neon Press. She also works for O'Reilly Media, planning the program for their Open Source Convention (OSCON). She currently divides her time between Portland, Oregon and Cape Town, South Africa.

Compiler Theory

There's an odd misconception in the computing world that writing compilers is hard. This view is fueled by the fact that people don't write compilers very often. People used to think writing CGI code was hard. Well, it is hard, if you do it in C without any tools. I don't know anyone who writes CGI code in C anymore. If we wrote compilers as often as we write shopping carts, or web forums, or wikis, there would be just as many tools available to make the job easy. (And just like web tools, only 10% of them would be worth using. That's evolution in action.)