Bob Congdon

The Ultimate Machine

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 04:00:00 GMT

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

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 01:00:00 GMT

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

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:30:00 GMT

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. Itâ��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

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:30:00 GMT

Testing BlogPress from iPod touch.

Here is Swine flu Patient Zero:

History of Visual Studio

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:30:00 GMT

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

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 03:30:00 GMT

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the first episode of Monty Pythonâ��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

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 22:00:00 GMT

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

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 13:30:00 GMT

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

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 02:00:00 GMT

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...

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 01:00:00 GMT

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 worldâ��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

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:15:00 GMT

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

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 01:30:00 GMT

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

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 05:45:00 GMT

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

Google Simple Programming Language

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:00:00 GMT

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

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 22:00:00 GMT

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)