Computers

The Move and the Big Start

May 17, 2012
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Returning to my recollections on Texar, we come to the latest installment on the aspects of being an entrepreneur at Texar. An investment from VCs in the bank and visions of grandeur. That’s where we were in the Spring of 1999. We needed office space and found 3500 sq. ft. of it in the west end of Ottawa. Nice space, nothing fancy, but nice nonetheless. There’s an old rule of thumb that says 120 sq. ft. per person is adequate, unless you’re using cube farms in which case you can crunch that down to 64 sq. ft. Not being a believer in overcrowding I stuck with the old belief of 120 sq. ft. of space per person, preferably with a door and a window. That meant we could cram in about 30 people in the space we’d rented, less in reality as the boardroom was to remain off limits. As we were moving from my basement to the new digs all it required was getting phone and Internet service. That took some doing but soon enough it was done. We had our domain moved over, we had FreeBSD boxes up and running our mail and web services, and we were

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Top Computer Scientists, Ever

May 15, 2012
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I was going through papers as I try to clean up 30+ years of computer science clutter and came upon this list I made back in 2004. It’s a list of the 22 most influential people in computer science, in my opinion. James Anderson John Backus Dan Bricklin & Bob Frankston Vannevar Bush Fernando J. Corbato Edsger Dijkstra Doug Engelbart Richard Fateman Grace Hopper Kenneth Iverson Alan Kay Donald Knuth J.C.R. Licklider John McCarthy Ted Nelson Dennis Ritchie Claude Shannon Richard Stallman Ivan Sutherland Andrew Tannenbaum Ken Thompson Alan Turing Looking over that list today I wouldn’t change a thing. No one else comes to mind as being sufficiently great so as to go up on that list. If you just

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RIM No More?

March 30, 2012
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RIM No More?

Although I’ve never wanted a RIM device I’ve appreciated what they offered way back when, mainly the 90s when it was a very handy device for sales people or those on the road. An easy way to stay connected. But I could never own one because the device made little sense to me as a techie. It always seemed to be nothing but a bunch of compromises structured around upselling various other services. The constant and only focus on the business user may well have been warranted early on, but as consumer sales of handheld devices eclipsed business sales RIM stood around, hands in pockets, hoping that it didn’t matter. And when they tried to do a consumer product it always seemed halfhearted. Like the Playbook. I was looking forward to that, but when it came out it seemed some “genius” at RIM figured it had to be tethered to a Blackberry to operate fully. Why? Who the hell knows. All I know is that it pushed many people I knew to an iPad. I doubt that was RIM’s intent, but that’s what they accomplished. I also never fully understood their idiotic notion of having so many devices. I even

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I Wonder…

December 12, 2011
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If the cost associated with complaining is eliminated does that mean that negative reviews become worthless?

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Lasagna Code: Redux

November 25, 2011
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I write here as sort of a pressure release valve. It seems that my little rant on Lasagna Code got some attention. I read through the comments. It seems most get what I’m on about. But I figure I might as well be a bit clearer, in case any of those posters revisit. Yes, I’m against object oriented programming. I’ve been against it for years. I find it an obtuse and bloated way to code. And beyond Smalltalk, I’ve really not found another decent object-oriented language within which to code. This obsession language designers have of wedging an object system into a language “just because” is rather stupid. After all, all objects are is formalized data structures. It’s really that simple. For those that are about to jump up and down and scream they aren’t, I won’t argue because it’s pointless. I’ve used OO since the early 80s, initially in Smalltalk. Later, much to my horror, C++, and then for a brief period with Java — but I refuse to ever touch Java again. Too horrible and, happily, I’m sufficiently old enough to not have to do what I don’t want to do. Python, as I said, is a very

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Lasagna Code

November 1, 2011
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Anyone who claims to be even remotely versed in computer science knows what “spaghetti code” is. That type of code still sadly exists. But today we also have, for lack of a better term — and sticking to the pasta metaphor — “lasagna code”. Lasagna Code is layer upon layer of abstractions, objects and other meaningless misdirections that result in bloated, hard to maintain code all in the name of “clarity”. It drives me nuts to see how badly some code today is. And then you come across how small Turbo Pascal v3 was, and after comprehending it was a full-blown Pascal compiler, one wonders why applications and compilers today are all so massive. Turbo Pascal v3 was less than 40k. That’s right, 40 thousand bytes. Try to get anything useful today in that small a footprint. Most people can’t even compile “Hello World” in less than a few megabytes courtesy of our object-oriented obsessed programming styles which seem to demand “lines of code” over clarity and “abstractions and objects” over simplicity and elegance. Back when I was starting out in computer science I thought by today we’d be writing a few lines of code to accomplish much. Instead, we

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RIP John McCarthy

October 24, 2011
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The creator of my favourite programming language passed away yesterday. Lisp is, in my view, the best language ever devised. Sadly, too few in the computer industry realize or comprehend this fact. Lisp, and its descendants such as Scheme, are beautifully consistent programming languages wherein the programs and the data are defined identically and as such can be manipulated similarly. This allows one to generate code easily that can then be executed. Most people stare at Lisp-like languages and can’t get past the parentheses. Ironically, most every language uses parentheses of one sort or another. If one does a quick comparison with C, for example, one will quickly realize that Lisp doesn’t have that many more parentheses than does C. And with C, you can’t work in a fully interactive environment wherein you develop your code and test it all in a fully integrated way. Instead, you’re still stuck with the stupid edit-compile-run-debug cycle that made sense when we used punch cards but doesn’t today. Even “modern” languages such as Java are really only prettied up C, though truth be told, I’d rather code in C because it’s powerful and puts the onus on the programmer to do things right

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RIP Dennis Ritchie

October 12, 2011
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Dennis Ritchie passed away this evening at the age of 70. I doubt it’ll get the play in the papers that Steve Jobs death did even though Ritchie’s impact was greater in my opinion. For those unfamiliar a brief writeup on Unix and its founders. Rob Pike posted a note re: Ritchie’s passing. A true passing of an era. And man does it make me feel old. I still remember first using Unix back in 1979 and then used it pretty much constantly ever since. The  most apropos send off comes from Muppet Labs, albeit no relation to the Muppets or their infamous lab.

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Ambient Overload

March 10, 2011
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Nicholas Carr talks about Ambient Overload. A fascinating take on “information overload”. Instead of it being a “failure of filters” it’s instead the success of filters that we’re seeing, allowing information of interest to flood our screens and inboxes. I’d not thought of it that way, but I think he’s right. We can find just about anything. And the Internet provides it to us immediately. When pulling “interesting bits of information” from an infinite supply should it be any surprise that we end up with a near infinite quantity of interesting tidbits? His closing paragraph sums it up nicely, so I include it here: “When the amount of information available to be filtered is effectively unlimited, as is the case on the Net, then every improvement in the quality of filters will make information overload worse.”

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Info Glut

November 20, 2010
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I’ve been cleaning out the house slowly. Sort of like an extended Spring Cleaning. And as part of this chore I’ve decided to clean up my office and my computers as well. I’ve been storing all kinds of shit thinking it might one day be useful, that I may make some sort of artwork from it, or otherwise have deluded myself into keeping all sorts of useless things: old motherboards old memory (1 meg simms, etc.) newspaper clippings that I at one time found interesting old Dilbert comics snipped from the paper old CDs for software that is ancient and probably wouldn’t run all kinds of dead old mice, keyboards, … But no more! I mean, really. I can’t find useful things in my house anymore. I find stuff and wonder why I kept it. I’ve lost — well, I think I’ve lost — pictures from my past. But I can still find the motherboard from my first Pentium. Why? Out it goes into the recycle bins. Enough already. Similarly on my computer. Junk everywhere. I seem to be a packrat where ever I go. So I’ve started to clean up my computers. Gigs gave already been toasted from my systems,

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Musings

A blog of my musings. Some folks find it interesting and so I continue. Hopefully it will remain fairly interesting. At worst, it'll keep me writing orthogonally to my day job.

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