A Terrorist Fist Jab

July 17 2008

I like the New Yorker's Obama cover. I chuckled. I got the joke. I'm not angry, nor am I offended. It could have been drawn better. Maybe they were in a hurry. read more

Character Sets

July 11 2008

In the early days of programming languages, before there were standardized character sets, each programming language would define its own character set. Some languages had arrows instead of = for assignment, which really makes much more sense because anyone with any mathemat read more

Las Vegas, Las Vegas

July 09 2008

I was in Las Vegas recently. Bruce Vilanch was on permanent display at the east skybridge entrance of New York New York. Spooky. read more

Sleep Apnea

July 05 2008

Lucy had a sleep test a couple of weeks ago and they found that she has what they call moderate sleep apnea. She is supposed to go back Monday night to find out if, and at what level, a CPAP machine might help. She is concerned about how difficult… read more

Telephone

July 02 2008

I have a telephone instrument on my desk. I rarely use it. Most of the calls I get are recruiters, evil telemarketers, and wrong numbers. I mostly communicate with people using email, im, and the old reliable f2f. The office phone is as useful to me as a typewriter, Lamson… read more

Fireflops

June 30 2008

The Ajaxians picked up Peter Michaud's story about another problematic Firefox feature. This read more

Velocity 2008

June 25 2008

This week I attended O'Reilly's Velocity conference. This was the maiden event for this conference, and excepting some trouble with space management, it came off really well. The talks were kept short and they kept to the schedule so there was a lot of fast paced information. The talks were… read more

That's Morse Code! They're Still Alive!

June 20 2008

Unicode is (or should be) the single encoding for the transmission of all of the world's text. But Hollywood teaches us that when all else fails, our very survival may depend on our knowledge of Morse Code. Samuel Morse was a portrait painter with an interest in electricity. He designed read more

minify

June 16 2008

The first person I ever heard use the word minify was Alvy Ray Smith who was at the Lucasfilm Computer Division in 1982. Alvy used it to mean to reduce the size of an image by scaling down or zooming out. In 2000, at Electric Communities (aka Communities.com), I wanted… read more

Firefox

June 11 2008

Our best immediate hope for safe widgetting with state-of-the-art web browsers is safe JavaScript subsetting. A safe subset of JavaScript restricts or eliminates features of the language and runtime environment that grant excess authority to evil scripts. However, subsetting is not without risk. The problem is that new deficiencies in… read more

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

June 08 2008

One of the most important textbooks on computer programming is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman. It is available online at http://mitpres read more

Taxes

June 06 2008

I like the progressive income tax. The people who are benefiting the most from this civilization should pay more to sustain it. I'm doing pretty well, so I don't mind that I pay more in taxes than people who aren't doing as well. But I do not like that there… read more

Stifel

May 27 2008

David Stifel did a lot of the programming on the NES conversion of Maniac Mansion. Now he acts. You may remember him as Lycon, the eyeless inhaler dealer in Minority Report. read more

The Jesus The Clown Show

May 20 2008

Many years ago I created, but never produced, a low-budget children's show called The Jesus The Clown Show. The theme song went like this: Honk your nose if you love Jesus Honk your nose if you love Jesus Honk your nose if you love Jesus
read more

Meta Variables

May 19 2008

Sometimes when programmers talk about programming, we need meta variables. Typically a meta variable stands for a variable. You might say "and this is where you would mention a variable" but you don't because that is too awkward to say. So instead you simply say foo, and that works pretty… read more

The World's Most Popular Programming Language Has Fashion and Luck to Thank

March 18 2008

Jean Sammet wrote Computer Languages: History and Fundamentals in 1969. It was a survey of 120 programming languages, some examined in considerable detail. Sammet's book chronicled languages that were designed before the Structured Programming Revolution and the later development of Object-Orientation. The book's cover featured a picture of the Tower… read more