Bob Congdon

The Ultimate Machine

2010-01-02T22:00:00.000-08:00

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

The design reminds me of a coin bank I had as a kid. You put a coin on top and a skeleton hand pops out, drags the coin away and closes back up. I've found several videos of similar banks on Youtube.

C++ in Coders at Work

2009-10-16T20:00:00.000-07:00

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.

IntelliJ IDEA Open Sourced

2009-10-15T19:30:00.000-07:00

IntelliJ IDEA has just gone open source:

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.

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.

BlogPress post

2009-10-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

Testing BlogPress from iPod touch.

Here is Swine flu Patient Zero:

History of Visual Studio

2009-10-09T08:30:00.000-07:00

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.

Monty Python Turns 40

2009-10-05T22:30:00.000-07:00

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").

Man Eats Nothing But Cheese

2009-10-03T17:00:00.000-07:00

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.

What mathematicians see at the movies

2009-09-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

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.

Urine Space

2009-09-11T21:00:00.000-07:00

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.

COBOL Lives On, And On, And On...

2009-08-07T20:00:00.000-07:00

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:

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.

Pretty impressive for a fifty-year-old "obsolete" programming language.

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.

How Different Groups Spend Their Day

2009-08-05T08:15:00.000-07:00

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.

Look at the details in the Computer use category: 8 minutes a day? That's less time than the Couldn't remember category. Who are these people?

TV Tropes

2009-08-04T20:30:00.000-07:00

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.

High Five Escalator

2009-08-03T00:45:00.000-07:00

It's great to see how many bored, grumpy subway commuters gave "Rob" a High Five and enjoyed it.

Google Simple Programming Language

2009-08-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Code Rush

2009-08-01T17:00:00.000-07:00

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)

Skating around a Roller Coaster

2009-07-31T21:45:00.000-07:00

Wearing specially designed in-line skates, Dirk Auer skated on a roller coaster track at the Trips Drill theme park in Stuttgart, Germany. Reaching speeds of 60 mph, he skated the entire track in just over one minute.

This is the same guy who appeared on TopGear taking on an Aston Martin V8 Vantage Roadster while wearing jet powered rollerskates!

The Death of Handwriting

2009-07-27T21:45:00.000-07:00

Interesting article in Time on the Death of Handwriting. I remember the struggle I had learning to write in cursive. As a left-hander I had to twist my hand in just the right way getting ink stains on my fingers as they slid across the page. I envied the ease with which others, primarily right-handers, could produce pretty cursive writing. Today, I print everything. The only thing I write in cursive is my signature and it's illegible.

Journey into Kimland

2009-07-27T21:00:00.000-07:00

Journey into Kimland is Scott Fisher's story of his trip to North Korea in 2002. It provides the sort of first-hand account of the North that's hard to find in the mainstream press. A very good read.

Scott has written a book, Axis of Evil Tour, that also documents his travels through Iran and Iraq. Excerpts can be found here.

Scribblenauts

2009-06-10T20:30:00.000-07:00

Scribblenauts is a Nintendo DS game that's coming out in mid September. The player controls a character who must collect objects called Starites. The main element of Scribblenauts is to summon objects into the game by writing the name of an object on the touchscreen (or via keypad). Apparently the number of recognized object words is in the tens of thousands allowing you, for example, to pit God vs. The Kraken.

Unicode Snowman

2009-05-30T08:30:00.000-07:00

The Miscellaneous Symbols plane of Unicode (2600–26FF) contains various glyphs including weather symbols: ☃ ☀ ☁ ☂ The snowman symbol indicates "snowy weather". Combine the Unicode snowman with Internationalized Domain Names and you can have http://☃.net/, the Unicode Snowman web site. The Unicode standard doesn't specify what the glyph is supposed to look like. Depending on what font is used, you may see a smiling snowman surrounded by a ring of snow balls or an unsmiling snowman wearing a hat that looks like a fez.

Note: since my blog posts are encoded as ISO-8859-1 rather than Unicode, the link above is actually http://xn--n3h.net/ which contains the Punycode version of the hostname.

When Monkeys Flew

2009-05-28T08:30:00.000-07:00

One of my younger son's favorite books is Curious George Gets A Medal where George becomes the first monkey in space. The book was first published in 1957. I hadn't realized that it predates a real world event. Today is the 50^th anniversary of the space flight of Abel and Baker, the first monkeys to survive spaceflight. Able was a rhesus monkey, and Baker was a squirrel monkey.

The Five Stages of Soylent Green

2009-05-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

Lang.NET 2009

2009-05-03T23:30:00.000-07:00

I didn't attend the Lang.NET 2009 Symposium but I've been watching some of the presentations online. A few that stood out:

Jeffrey Snover on Powershell V2. I've been using Powershell since it was called Monad. I use it all of the time. There's lots of cool stuff in V2 and it's great to watch Powershell's creator show them off.
Lars Bak on Google's Javascript V8 engine. Lars Bak talks about the V8 engine used in Google Chrome. Lars has been behind lots of innovative VMs including Self, Strongtalk and Sun's HotSpot. V8 builds hidden classes from JavaScript and performs dynamic native code generation rather than interpreting JavaScript.
Anders Hejlsberg on Co- and Contra-variance in C# 4.0 This is a narrow topic but interesting to me. Generics types in C# didn't support co-variance which means that, for example, an object of type IEnumerable<string> cannot be assigned to a variable of type IEnumerable<object> even though string is a subtype of object. In C# 4.0 this will be supported.
John Rose on Method Handles and Interface Injection in the JVM The Da Vinci Machine Project is extending the Java VM with first-class support for languages other than Java, especially dynamic languages. One of those extensions is Method Handles which is quite similar to C# delegates.

Poken Schmoken

2009-05-03T19:30:00.000-07:00

Did you ever own a Palm Pilot or other Palm device? One feature that was pretty popular in the early days was the ability to "beam" items from Palm to Palm, usually "business cards". It uses infrared to transmit and receive the data and can be used to beam any sort of data that you want, including full applications. But both parties need a Palm device.

Bluetooth can do much the same thing but never really caught on in a big way. Exchanging email addresses verbally or the like seems to work just fine today. Given that, what do you think the chances are that a new physical device called a Poken will become successful?

You connect with someone else that has a Poken by holding them together (this is called "poken someone" — ugh!). The devices exchange tokens and you plug your Poken into your computer to upload your new contacts.

The Poken has two components: a Poken hand and a little character that the hand connects to such as these:

Would you pull one of these out in a business meeting? Hey, can I poken you? Probably not but that's not the target audience for this device anyway; teens and college students may love them. Will Poken succeed? Maybe. Depends on whether enough Poken get out there for owners to, er, poke. Otherwise the whole thing may be silly as the CueCat. And the CueCat was free while each Poken costs ~~$24.95~~ $19.96.

The Freesound Project

2009-05-01T20:30:00.000-07:00

The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Could be pretty useful in games, videos, etc.