I'm going to chip in here because I've seen a lot.

I contend the complexity of today's programs is different, not necessarily better or worse. Anyone who's worked on a system with hundreds of thousands of lines of IBM 360/370 Assembler code, like I have, will be nodding their head right now. Brooks' seminal "No Silver Bullet" paper was written in 1987 and was heavily based on his experience in the '60s and '70s managing projects requiring centuries of work-hours. There was quite a lot of complexity back then.

Then the software engineering community created development software and methods greatly reducing that complexity. I cannot express what a joy it is to have automatic garbage collection in modern languages and features such as classes that help enforce modularity and encapsulation. When I first learned C#, I was gobsmacked because there was a pre-existing data type, language feature, or library method for pretty much everything. I remember learning about sorts, hashes, etc. in college, but nowadays those are all efficient library functions that most people use without caring if it's O(n^2) or O(nlogn) or how many duplicate hits you get on your hash algorithm. I once worked on a large production system that contained self-modifying code, and today's development environments are absolutely wonderful in comparison to what existed back then.

So today's developers, for the most part, don't have to deal with that type of stuff unless they're being sloppy. Instead, as the article stated, it's more about the massive amount of distributed connectivity and networking. Software engineers in the '80s and '90s did a great job of solving many of the early complexity issues. Now we have a new breed of complexity which is just as bad for modern developers, and which we will hopefully solve in the coming decades.

I used complex variables to do circuit analysis when I worked on a software GPS receiver and also used Fourier transforms and vector math. In addition, I've used numerical methods to extrapolate data. But in both these cases, it wasn't computer programming that required me to use the math; rather, it was the nature of the subject area.

Daemon reminds me of Neal Stephenson at the top of his game. I just recently re-read Daemon and loved it just as much as the first time. A pulse-pounding mystery/techno-thriller with lots of actual technology thrown in. His characters use real-world hacks to attack networks and computers, like SQL injection.

Unfortunately the second book, Freedom, was a radically different type of story. And it was too removed from reality to be as exciting as Daemon.

The newer versions of Ubuntu with the Unity interface (e.g., 12.04) don't allow you to change to the theme like you've recommended -- at least not without using a separate program to change things.

What a neat way to propose. I can see it now... "Honey, let's see what's on the HAM radio tonight. Oh! Listen to this, it's for you."

The Education of T.C. Mits: What modern mathematics means to you, by Lillian R. Lieber.

This book explains non-Euclidean geometry, along with other math, in a way that just makes sense. It has a recommendation from Albert Einstein.