Last week, Facebook launched vanity URLs, like your MySpace usernames only with “facebook.com/” in front of them and about two years late. Thank God! Now I don’t have to memorize my 12-digit, numeric user ID and those of my friends. Death to friend codes! (You hear that, Nintendo?)

As someone older than twelve, (which, by the way, twelve year-olds should probably not be allowed to have FB accounts – there’s some nasty stuff on there), I’m not particularly fond of keeping my “handle” around for the rest of my life. Being creative is fun, but eventually all dads need to lose the bell-bottom jeans and overly-long mustaches. Now’s the time of boot-cut and goatees, get with the program!

Some FB users didn’t get the memo, however; and their loyalties are abundantly – and permanently – clear. There are Halo fans, ([1], [2]), Star Wars junkies, ([1]), and g33k5 in general, ([1]), and assholes, ([1]), that abound.

I’m all for indulgences, but even I don’t think I could profess my unwavering allegiance to the Horde or play such a practical joke on a friend like that. Way to go, fellas and lady, you’ve successfully wrought detrimental opinion to the entire community; though you’ve sure made a great many of us laugh our asses off as well!

(Inspired by TechCrunch.)

Reporting on Google Latitude, an add-on to Google’s own Maps service, Fox forwarded an AP article on the mobile aspect of the new technology. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone will find the first mobile device they list supporting the software: T-1 Mobile phones running on Google’s Android software. Excuse me? It sounds like the Terminators made a cell phone and it could kill a small dog.

Granted, it’s not too hard to figure out what phone they were intending to reference, I own one, so I can’t come down too hard on the writer, but it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that there isn’t a cellular company called “T-1 Mobile” and there isn’t a phone called a “T-1″.

Sorry, Fox News, leave the technical reporting to TechCrunch, Gizmodo, et. al.; they actually hire people who know what the hell they’re talking about.

Then came O’Reilly and his onslaught of black and woodblocks of wonderfully foreign animals. After all, what business does a camel have learning Perl, anyway? Regardless, the new and fresh cover matched an epoch in programming/coding reference books. Gone were the days of black and gray boxes, laden with cross references and appendices; now, we have analogies and metaphors to spare. Reading up on honing your skills as a software engineer just got a whole lot more interesting.

But, you have to draw the line somewhere…and I’m very glad Dave Thomas, (the programmer, not Wendy’s uncle), did. Look at a humorous reworking of one of his past titles:

Swap the terminology and provide a few additional presumptions, and the natural order of the world seems to lend itself to the linear instruction set of the programmer’s mind. It’s like predicting the butterfly effect after skipping everything up to humanity. (Luckily, it seems, most of these effects can be generalized or canceled out from the effects of other butterflies.)

Somewhere along the way, I would say that every programmer has looked at the world and applied what they’ve learned in training or practice to what they see. Personally, it’s a weekly occurrence. And not so often is it a matter of stress or ire for understanding, but a colloquialism batted around between friends in the business to pass the time.

The classic example: The waiting line at a fast-food counter. The phrase “first-come, first-serve,” while generally precise, isn’t accurate. I’m certain that if President-elect Barack Obama stepped in line behind you at a Subway or Wendy’s, that most would step aside and let the man (and his five hundred Secret Service agents) get ahead in line. So the observed structure was a queue, but the factual component is a priority-queue. It was an amusing observation at the start, and certainly one which didn’t warrant any pursuant action; but, what it did offer was realizing the difference.

It’s the same thing with a program’s features. It may seem like a moderate improvement, but the differences between two scheduling algorithms can be all the difference in servers where uptime and throughput are extremely important. In college, I overheard a novel idea to implement a ’2-D’ chain: with origins in the North-East corner, one could traverse the ‘map’ in two directions. East-West was a standard linked list, but North-South was a pri-queue which would be deprecated upon every traversal of the E-W inbound link. It’s these innovations that in and of themselves aren’t staggering or ground-breaking, but could equivocate to the difference when Obama visits Subway or not.

Without having observed this simple fact, I wouldn’t have known how to pick up on it in the future. That’s a major difference between being a junior-/mid-level programmer and senior level architect: Being able to pick up on structural similarities, generalizations, and disparities then react to or plan for them, is a distinguishing ability. I’m getting better as the time passes, and hopefully it will only be a matter of time before I can efficiently and effectively take my Subway pri-queue observation and apply it to a client request; then I’ll know I can fulfill at least one of my self-prescribed requirements for a senior-developer position.