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.
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.
We have NoSQL but maybe it’s time for noOS. I’ve talked about this with colleagues for a while. Many are old enough to realize why we have operating systems, but some of the younger crowd don’t. The reason for an operating system is to equitably share the resources of a computer. This made sense when the systems were large, hulking brutes sitting in air conditioned rooms. It makes no sense today when one core of an average computer is faster than any mainframe of 40 years ago — or even a roomful of them. It’s why I’ve had discussions asking why we even need an OS anymore. Perhaps it’s time to revisit another idea that came out of the great CS labs, namely machines that only ran a language. I’m talking about Lisp Machines, Smalltalk Machines, APL Vector Machines, etc. These machines had the beauty of allowing you to program extensions into their core via well-defined languages all within a fully interactive environment. It was bliss programming these types of systems. And it’s not like computers aren’t fast enough to allow for fully interactive, dynamic environments as the way to build applications. Today’s hardware makes those old Smalltalk, Lisp and
I’ve been looking at the Kindle. I installed the Kindle app on my iPad and must say I’m impressed. But maybe not in the way a lot of people see it. Instead of something that allows me to lug lots of books around instead I see it as the means to an end. At the moment my house has thousands of books in it. They’re everywhere. My biggest problem is I love books and read 50 – 100 per year. Problem is, more than that many interesting books are published per year. Take into account yesterday. I wandered through Chapters here in town and immediately saw 4 books I wanted to buy. I had to restrain myself, but in the end bought 2 anyway. Sigh. The problem I have is one of space. At the moment I still have some room for books, but that will end. And I doubt I can convince my wife to allow me to have yet another room filled with bookcases. So, I have to come up with a solution and the Kindle is a major part of that solution. Instead of always buying physical books I have decided to separate my reading into three
For the most part computers just aren’t that much fun anymore. I’ve come to this stark conclusion of late and realize that part of my general malaise regarding the industry is that my passion for and love affair with computers is over, or at least in the latter waning stages. When I first got into computers in 1978 I thought they were simply the neatest things I’d ever seen. The whole industry was still new back then, and personal computers were something few talked about and many dared not dream of. But that was more than 30 years ago! I remember my first encounter with a computer via a batch card system while in high school. Mr. Lane, our computer and Functions and Relations teacher, introduced a large number of Grade 13 students — and a few Grade 12s — to computers. He had a passion for them and loved teaching the course. I think most people who took the course were taking it either out of sheer curiosity or from the need for one more math/science credit to complete their high school diploma. Regardless, I found the notion of algorithms and applying what I had learned in Algebra, Calculus,
Just a quick note to point out Steve Blank’s latest, Why Pioneers Have Arrows in Their Backs. Awesome. Read it if you’re thinking of starting a company. Especially if you think it’s revolutionary.
This article is interesting in an ironic way. Why? Mostly because the black-or-white thinker is how I think. Make a decision, go with it. Hemming and hawing is stupid and just delays the inevitable. Pick a way, go that way. If it’s wrong. Admit it, turn around. Duh. Stupid people drive me nuts. And this article just shows that even the author is unable to just come out and say that dithering just leads to problems. Especially the dithering that so many people engage in in trying to make sure everyone is happy or that no one is offended. Bah. No wonder so many people are screwed up today. They’ve never had their feelings hurt. They’ve never been allowed to fail or been told their ideas are stupid or wrong. They’ve never had to deal with reality within the safe confines of the social fabric that is modern Western Civilization. Instead, we get this placation of “every opinion matters/counts”. Which is utter bullshit. Not every opinion matters or counts. If someone tells me the moon is made of cheese his (or her) opinion is bullshit and doesn’t count. If someone tells me that the heart is the seat of intelligence,
As I continue to wade through saved bookmarks and articles on my computer I came across this article that discusses the discovery that men lose their minds speaking to pretty women. And it brings to mind a set of events more than two decades old that forever changed my life. I’ve always been a tad picky when it comes to women. I have no idea why. I tend to believe that everyone has a list of features they want in their significant other, and mine has always been rather short. I tend to like intelligent, determined, passionate women. I also prefer shorter to taller women. I just find them less gangly. My friends find this rather humourous since I stand 6’3″ and my taste in women is for those who tend to be about a foot shorter than me. Had I been given that article say, back in 1984, I’d have pretty much laughed it off. I could talk to any woman, regardless of beauty, with ease. I still can. But there was a time, a brief window, when two particular women made me stupid. So much so that my friends doctored Far Side cartoons to claim I was being
Turned them on in a little experiment. Spam rolled in. I have better things to do with my time than examine the comments to keep the spam out so comments are off, again. I doubt I’ll ever turn them on again. No point. Unless I get famous and can hire folks to deal with it. But I don’t see that on my horizon…
I’ve rather grown tired of some software developers and companies who don’t seem to comprehend the simple fact that all software is crapola. And that the definition of a good programmer is one who knows his software is crap. By definition, a good programmer will immediately know a better way to do something right after he or she has written the code. If someone is super happy with the code and figures it to be perfect they either wrote a trivial piece of code, are someone of the ilk of Knuth, or are self-delusional. And to see that most software is crap one needs only use it. If software was well done as so many practitioners tend to think we’d have no bugs, software would work efficiently and be easy to maintain, and it would never require anyone to revisit it. But I’ve never found a piece of code like that. Sure, I’ve found elegant pieces of code. But that’s the whole point, elegant pieces. Sometimes you even find an old program that, even when substantial time has passed, the code remains elegant. But inevitably it’s a few thousand lines of finely honed software and not hundreds of thousands or
I saw the demo of the new Playbook by RIM powered by QNX. It looks impressive. Which, to be honest, is exactly what I’d expect from the crew from QNX. They are truly an impressive bunch of techies who comprehend their market and whose software is superb. I’ve had the pleasure of working with QNX in the past and it was a most pleasurable experience. I’ll definitely be checking out the Playbook when it comes out, which will be a surprise to many of my friends who know I have no use for Blackberries. But this is different. If it’s priced right it might become a great competitor to the iPad, which is a great media consumption device. As to the complaints from some that the Playbook doesn’t as yet have any business software I’d just point at the iPad and its lack of business software. It hasn’t hurt the iPad’s sales any. Besides, with a bit of thought anyone should quickly realize the niches at the moment not filled will be filled by QNX-aware developers. What they’ve been handed is virgin territory and that must be really exciting for a lot of developers. I’m also happy for QNX in