Saturday, January 02, 2010
The Ultimate Machine
A few days ago I posted a link to The Most Useless Machine. Useless but pretty cool. Apparently Claude Shannon used to have a similar device on his desk he called the "Ultimate Machine" based on an idea by Marvin Minsky. There are more details and a few videos of other versions of the box at www.leavemealonebox.com
Friday, October 16, 2009
C++ in Coders at Work
Peter Seibel, author of Coders at Work, asked most of the book's interviewees how they felt about C++. Not surprising that most opinions were negative.
I haven't written a substantial amount of C++ code since I worked at Iris. And I have no plans to ever go back. That said, I used to enjoy C++, despite the complexity. But once we started to to use templates and STL it got really unpleasant, especially since our code had to compile on several different platforms. Dealing with C++ compiler differences between say, Solaris and HP-UX, is painful. And compared to languages like Java and C# which offer garbage collection, array-bounds checking, type safety, extensive class libraries, etc. C++ is generally more pain that it's worth.
I haven't written a substantial amount of C++ code since I worked at Iris. And I have no plans to ever go back. That said, I used to enjoy C++, despite the complexity. But once we started to to use templates and STL it got really unpleasant, especially since our code had to compile on several different platforms. Dealing with C++ compiler differences between say, Solaris and HP-UX, is painful. And compared to languages like Java and C# which offer garbage collection, array-bounds checking, type safety, extensive class libraries, etc. C++ is generally more pain that it's worth.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
IntelliJ IDEA Open Sourced
IntelliJ IDEA has just gone open source: I guess it was just a matter of time before IntelliJ either disappeared or went open source. Competing against free IDEs (Eclipse and NetBeans) in the development tools market has to be pretty tough.
Starting with the upcoming version 9.0, IntelliJ IDEA will be offered in two editions: Community Edition and Ultimate Edition. The Community Edition focuses on Java SE technologies, Groovy and Scala development. It’s free of charge and open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license. The Ultimate edition with full Java EE technology stack remains our standard commercial offering. See the feature comparison matrix for the differences.
BlogPress post
Testing BlogPress from iPod touch.
Here is Swine flu Patient Zero:
Here is Swine flu Patient Zero:
Friday, October 09, 2009
History of Visual Studio
If you developed Windows applications in C/C++ during the 90s, you probably used Visual Studio at some point. Rico Mariani has written his own "History of Visual Studio" in four blog posts.
When we ported Lotus Improv to Windows 3.1 we used Borland C++. Debugging was done using a Hercules Graphics Card with a separate monitor. When you stopped at a breakpoint, everything froze. It was horrible. In contrast, as Rico mentions, Visual C++ 1.5 supported "soft mode debugging" which allowed other apps to keep running. A neat trick in a "cooperative multitasking" operating system. I'd always wondered how they did that.
Note: by the time VC++ 1.5 came out, we had already moved Improv from 16-bit to 32-bit Windows, getting it ready for what eventually became Windows 95. Unfortunately, the next release, Improv 3.0, was canceled in 1994.
When we ported Lotus Improv to Windows 3.1 we used Borland C++. Debugging was done using a Hercules Graphics Card with a separate monitor. When you stopped at a breakpoint, everything froze. It was horrible. In contrast, as Rico mentions, Visual C++ 1.5 supported "soft mode debugging" which allowed other apps to keep running. A neat trick in a "cooperative multitasking" operating system. I'd always wondered how they did that.
Note: by the time VC++ 1.5 came out, we had already moved Improv from 16-bit to 32-bit Windows, getting it ready for what eventually became Windows 95. Unfortunately, the next release, Improv 3.0, was canceled in 1994.
Monday, October 05, 2009
Monty Python Turns 40
Today marks the 40th anniversary of the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. To celebrate, we should all say "Ni!" (which is a lot easier to say than "Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang Zoo Boing Zow Zing").
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Man Eats Nothing But Cheese
We've had struggles getting our older son to broaden his diet but this guy is an extreme case of picky eaters:Dave Nunley eats a half-pound of grated cheddar cheese each day. And nothing else. He's 29 and has been eating this way since he was a toddler.
Except for a very occasional bag of chips and some breakfast cereal he hasn't really eaten carbohydrates since infancy.
Reminds me of a bad joke: What do you call a cheese that's not yours? Nacho cheese.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
What mathematicians see at the movies
Samuel Arbesman describes what mathematicians see when they watch movies: fractals (Casino Royale), game theory (The Dark Knight), epidemiology (zombie movies), and balance theory (Reservoir Dogs).
Update: Oliver Krill in the Math Department at Harvard has a large collection of movie clips in which Mathematics appears including The Happening where the audience is asked to predict the probability that Mark Walhberg could play a believable high school science teacher.
Update: Oliver Krill in the Math Department at Harvard has a large collection of movie clips in which Mathematics appears including The Happening where the audience is asked to predict the probability that Mark Walhberg could play a believable high school science teacher.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Urine Space
That bright sparkling glow in the night sky on Wednesday? It was astronaut pee. Astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery dumped about 150 pounds of waste water and urine into space. Makes you wonder if other mysteries of the cosmos have similar mundane explanations. The beginning of life on Earth? Probably started by an ice ball of pee from some passing alien craft.
Friday, August 07, 2009
COBOL Lives On, And On, And On...
COBOL was created 50 years ago by Grace Hopper. According to an article in CIO Magazine, the maxim to a first approximation, all programs are written in COBOL appears to still be true:
Update: Jeff Atwood has a blog post on the same topic COBOL: Everywhere and Nowhere. I've never met anyone who was actively writing COBOL code either.
Pretty impressive for a fifty-year-old "obsolete" programming language.There are over 220 billion lines of COBOL in existence, a figure which equates to around 80% of the world’s actively used code. There are estimated to be over a million COBOL programmers in the world today. Most impressive perhaps, is that 200 times as many COBOL transactions take place each day than Google searches — a figure which puts the influence of Web 2.0 into stark perspective.
Update: Jeff Atwood has a blog post on the same topic COBOL: Everywhere and Nowhere. I've never met anyone who was actively writing COBOL code either.
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
How Different Groups Spend Their Day
The American Time Use Survey asked thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here's an interactive chart from the New York Times on how people over age 15 spent their time throughout each day in 2008.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
TV Tropes
TV Tropes is a terrific wiki filled with the tricks of the trade for writing fiction (and not just for TV). Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations.
For example, Just Between You And Me, a trope that's described as "Villains have an urge to gloat. Rather than simply start the needlessly complicated Death Trap, they will pause to outline their plan to the hero, often including information on how to stop it." This trope has been used in pretty much every James Bond film, often more than once per movie.
One caveat, pick just about any trope on the website, click around and you may have a hard time getting out again.
For example, Just Between You And Me, a trope that's described as "Villains have an urge to gloat. Rather than simply start the needlessly complicated Death Trap, they will pause to outline their plan to the hero, often including information on how to stop it." This trope has been used in pretty much every James Bond film, often more than once per movie.
One caveat, pick just about any trope on the website, click around and you may have a hard time getting out again.
Monday, August 03, 2009
High Five Escalator
It's great to see how many bored, grumpy subway commuters gave "Rob" a High Five and enjoyed it.
Sunday, August 02, 2009
Google Simple Programming Language
Google has invented a new programming language called Simple. It's a Visual Basic clone for building Android apps. What? Why? The project lead at Google, Herbert Czymontek, used to work at Sun on Project Semplice which was going to be Visual Basic for the Java platform. (It's probably no coincidence that Semplice is the Italian word for Simple). The main intention of Project Semplice was to get VB developers to come develop applications for the Java Platform. So now, it seems that Google is trying to get these same VB developers to come develop applications for Android. I don't see that happening.
Saturday, August 01, 2009
Code Rush
Code Rush is a 1998 documentary that follows the lives of a group of Netscape engineers. It was shot during a time of flagging company fortunes, the initial release of the Mozilla code as an open source project, and the friction of an impending AOL-Netscape merger. The film was aired on PBS in March 2000 and has been available on VHS.It's just been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. You can view it online or download the film in various formats. (Via waxy.org)
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