History

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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Why I Have Serious Problems With Some Atheists

March 27, 2012
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Why I Have Serious Problems With Some Atheists

This is not a rant against some of my atheist friends who are thoughtful and willing to think deeply beyond the limitations of science. This is directed at certain “new atheists” who, to me, espouse infantile arguments and show utter contempt and intolerance to any views but their own. I have simply grown weary of dealing with the inanities of folks of Dawkins’ ilk and his myriad half-witted followers. Individuals who believe that you should look solely to nature and the physical laws and that nothing beyond said laws require any rumination. One must simply draw a line at some imaginary point in the past and say that everything forward from there is understandable and that’s all that needs to be understood. But what of before that point? No one, not Dawkins, not Hawking, not anyone that I know of in science can explain why there is something instead of nothing. Not even books that use “nothing” and “something” in their titles and proclaim to be “science” books explain it. They always fall back upon materialism, upon physical “things” to explain why there is something. But they fail miserably when trying to explain why those physical things even exist or

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Things I Don’t Get

February 27, 2012
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There are a lot of things I just don’t get, such as renaissance fairs, reenactments of past battles and many other things. I also don’t get collecting old stuff and by old stuff I mean what most of us would call junk. So I find it pretty funny that I actually enjoy two shows about looking for old junk, namely American Pickers and Canadian Pickers. Between the two shows I particularly like Canadian Pickers because I find Scott and Sheldon to be warm, friendly, funny guys that’d you’d hoist a pint with. Mike and Frank over on American Pickers are OK, but sometimes they come across as just too prototypical American — i.e., loud. And now that I’m older I think I can do without loud friends . There’s just something appealing about quiet. Never thought I’d end up this way, but I guess it happens to us all. Next up I’ll be complaining about the racket of rock and roll, to paraphrase The Pursuit of Happiness. What attracts me to the shows is that these four guys are crazy into old junk. They look at it not as junk but as something that they can buy and flip for

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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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Things I Miss

November 13, 2010
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I’m coding seriously again for the first time in years. And I can’t believe how much I missed it. There’s a certain joy in writing a program seeing it work, and solving a problem. When it’s an entirely new programming language it’s even cooler. But as I start programming again I realized I truly miss something I thought I’d never miss: fan-fold listings. There’s just something much better re: a fan-fold listing than a listing on 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper. It just somehow feels like a proper program listing to me. I know some will say “Why print it out, screens are huge today”. Yeah. But you can’t lay down as much code across a screen as you can across a table and scratch it up with a pen. Paper just makes coding easier, in my opinion. It allows you to touch the code, in effect. Move it around freely across a table figuring out exactly what’s wrong or right about it It’s much like with whiteboards/blackboards. Some folks claim you can do everything with a computer, but there’s just something about standing at a blackboard or whiteboard with colleagues that cannot be equaled electronically. At least not

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Lest We Forget

November 11, 2010
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My deepest thanks go out to our veterans who did so much so that we could enjoy our freedoms and liberties. Long may their sacrifices be remembered.

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RIP: Benoit Mandelbrot

October 16, 2010
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I recall reading about him in High School and then studying his work more in university and thereafter. He passed away today; his legacy will live on. Rest in Peace.

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Why’d It Take So Long???

September 19, 2010
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First off I should let anyone who cares know that I’m a UNIX guy from way back. I started using System III and subsequently System V from AT&T in 1983. I used BSD on Vaxen in the 80s as well, where I found Rogue and spent way too much free time battling characters (literally ) to get the Amulet of Yendor. Simpler days. In the past I’ve had FreeBSD running on an old 200Mhz Pentium. I had an old box running BeOS, and quite quickly too. BeOS was great. Fast and elegant. But too different. And that led to its demise. I don’t run Linux anymore. I’m tempted now and again, but I haven’t succumbed. Why? Mostly because Linux offers me nothing I want or need. I’d like it to, but it doesn’t. Maybe twenty years ago I’d have loved it, but now it’s an anachronism to me. I want the OS to get out of my way, I want to get real work done. I don’t want to compile kernels or drivers. I don’t want to look at code. I just want to focus on my work as a computer scientist,a s a researcher. It’s really too bad. I

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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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