Programmer Personality Test

Here is my result from the Programmer Personality Test (disclaimer: far too few questions and nuances, not to be taken serious):

Your programmer personality type is:

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You're a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a Low level.
You're from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don't mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.

You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There's no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a Conservative programmer.
The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently.

Give Them Nothing, But Take From Them Everything

As some of you might know, I am a history buff. And I enjoy watching fantasy movies, so when those two things coincide, that's just my cup of tea.

Hollywood has recently rediscovered ancient Greece. I saw Alexander as well as Troy two or three years ago. And I agree, those were not the best of their kind ("Alexander The Great" with Richard Burton back from the 1950s is way better), their makers didn't care too much about the real historical background (the Trojan War as described in Homer's Iliad is at least partly legendary of course), but then again they never claimed to do so.

The latter is also true for the dream factory's latest artefact, "300" (the movie), which refers to the Battle of Thermopylae, when 300 Spartans under king Leonidas fought the Persian invasion army lead by their emperor Xerxes at the mountain pass of Thermopylae in 480 BC. The movie's artwork is based on Frank Miller's graphical novel of the same name.

I first saw the trailer back in November and its visual force simply blew me away, especially when combined with the background music by Nine Inch Nails. Again, let's not nit-pick about historical facts (e.g. there were several thousand Greek allies, not just 300 Spartans) - it's a novel after all. The movie also seems to mash in elements of Greek mythology, so there are appearances of cyclope-like creatures and similar characters.

I also noticed a scene where a Persian ambassador is thrown into a well by Leonidas. This goes back to the Persian tradition of demanding "earth and water" from their subordinates' soil as a symbol for accepting Persian domination on land and on sea. So the Spartans pitched them into the well and told them to go and look for earth and water down there. Now that's what I call coolness.

Matrix Twins

Some folks here provided their charity event promotion with some special Christmas eye candy:



There was something about those two. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I expect every Christmas angel to look baroquesque. It was just this vague sense of having seen them before...

My Favorite Non-Tech Podcasts

History According To Bob	Homepage	Feed
Matt's Today in History	Homepage	Feed
Military History Podcast	Homepage	Feed
European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present	Homepage	Feed
US History: From Civil War to Present	Homepage	Feed
General Biology	Homepage	Feed
Evolution 101 Podcast	Homepage	Feed
The Big Bang and Creationism Podcast	Homepage	Feed
Physics For Future Presidents	Homepage	Feed
Stanford Philosophy Talk	Homepage	Feed
WDR Zeitzeichen (german)	Homepage	Feed
FM4 Off Air (german)	Homepage	Feed

Off To Rome

I am heading to Rome tomorrow, so please forgive the lack of new postings during the next days. I expect the city to be dead on my arrival as Italy will be playing against Ukraine in the soccer world cup at that time. Forza Italia!

The Big Bang And Creationism Podcast

Robert Lippens provides a scientific discussion of the big bang, inflationary theory, and general cosmology and takes a close look at creationism's conflicting views. I am still trying to catch up with all podcast episodes from the start - very interesting material. I am quite impressed - I don't think I would have been able to come up with something at this level as Robert does at the age of 17... and of course I also got caught by the theme music of "The good, the bad, and the ugly" at the beginning of the first episode. Now that was a movie I was watching frequently back when I was 17. ;-)

What's Your EQ (Entrepreneurial Quotient)?

I seem to score higher on geek tests than on entrepreneur tests, so I guess I'd rather stick with what I am doing already... ;-)

Guy Kawasaki's Entrepreneurial IQ Test


You scored 70-89%!

Guy Kawasaki was Apple's legendary Mac evangelist.