Tuesday, December 03, 2002

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Now that my Spybotics book is available at Amazon.com, it's just too tempting to keep track of its ranking. For a while there, it was way up there at around 89,245.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday it peaked around 8,012 and now it's at 9,354. Yeah, it's a bit of ego surfing - but it beats looking for your own name on Google.... 10:41:43 PM

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

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Wohoo! My new book for Apress just arrived from the printer!

It's called "LEGO Spybotics Secret Agent Training Guide" and has its own website. You can buy it at Amazon.com right now. 11:57:58 AM

Tuesday, October 29, 2002

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Just a quick test post to see if everything is up and running after replacing the hard drive in my Omnibook 4150B laptop. 9:22:46 AM

Tuesday, September 17, 2002

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In case anyone still cares, Coble's dead bio link...is still dead! 11:53:37 AM

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[via Scripting News] The New York Times reports that Charles Simonyi is leaving Microsoft to start his own company that hopes to make writing computer programs easier by using a combination of graphic images, charts, and text.

The idea, Mr. Simonyi said, is to make it easier to build and debug complex software programs by moving a step further away from conventional, close-to-the-machine coding — the painstaking handwork that can be where programmers' good ideas or intentions are lost or left out.

Some of you may not know that Simonyi is also the architect of the Hungarian notation that is used in many Microsoft products. It adds prefixes to identifiers to help programmers understand the identifier more easily. In its most extreme form, it makes code unreadable, so I use a trimmed down version in my own code.

What gets me all fired up is the notion that designing and implementing complex software systems can be made easier by automating the process. Programming is hard work. The hardest part is getting the design right.

How does wrapping the problem up in yet another layer of abstraction make things easier? And how do you debug the code generated by this graphical system?

"His research had its ups and downs at Microsoft, Mr. Simonyi acknowledged. But he is being joined in founding Intentional Software by another leading researcher in software engineering, Gregor Kiczales. Mr. Kiczales, a computer scientist at the University of British Columbia, has had success applying a technology called aspect-oriented programming to make changes automatically in complex software, like sophisticated financial-transaction programs.

Don't hold your breath. By the time they figure out how to make accurate changes in huge code bases like financial tracking systems we'll be old and grey. 11:50:10 AM

Thursday, September 05, 2002

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Update on Coble's dead bio link...it's still dead! Surprise, surprise. Now, I'll admit that I didn't notify them until first thing Tuesday morning, and I said I would do it on Friday.

As another example of the extremely poor quality of information on Coble's site, here's the contents of the link on Legislative Issues for the committee of which he is the Chairman. No updates since July of last year!

Actually reading his remarks as Chairman during testimony on Privacy and IP Issues around WHOIS confirm the suspicion that he reads prepared statements of intoduction, then sits down and nods off to sleep. 10:49:30 AM

Tuesday, August 27, 2002

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[via John Robb] In his note K-Logs - The Next Generation Desktop John Robb makes the case for Radio (or other UserTalk based programs) running on cheap hardware as a tool for helping to connect workers in corporations in developing countries.

This is a great idea, and it doesn't really matter which language you use for this as long as you have decent network connectivity built-in. I use the Tcl/Tk language in this way, and it has the advantage of running under Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

I firmly believe that the closed (or at least hard to parse) proprietary document formats will eventually change to a more open standard. These open formats will be easily parsed by general purpose software that build on ideas we have developed in the past few years such as SOAP, XML, and CSS.

The dream of using Linux on old hardware is questionable though. Yes, the performance is acceptable on my old P266-MMX machine with 96 MB of RAM - and maybe that's enough. But Windows 98 is pretty fast on that old laptop, and that's the hardware generation that Windows 98 was designed for.

It's just too bad that Userland does not have a tool that runs on Linux! There was some noise a while back about running Radio under Wine. What about WineX? 7:49:17 PM

Monday, August 26, 2002

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Just for fun, I poked around the House of Representative's website to "see what I could see" as Winnie the Pooh would say. Now here's a caucus I'd like to get in on!

Clearly, Rep. Coble is a bit of a lame duck if the only people he can get photo-ops with are high-school kids. Based on the fact that this guy is considered a shoe-in in his district and seems none too bright about his committee's subject, it makes sense to have him as a chairman. He's not going to ask tough questions and he's not going away any time soon.

Until Tara Sue and all of us come into the picture, that is. I say us, but I'm a Canadian citizen. I think that we are about to see a wonderful example of the power of a group of individuals that is very similar to King's March on Washington, but without the risk of fire hoses and cross burning. Maybe the Internet is about to help Americans exercise their rights to retain their rights? 1:44:57 PM

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Yesterday, I pointed out a dead link on Rep. Coble's home page. Nothing serious, just the link to his bio. Dave linked to that post and in 6 hours I got almost 400 hits. I have to assume that some of these hits will look at Coble's site, and that some will report the dead link. How long will it take Coble's staff to fix it?

In all fairness, I have not emailed Rep. Coble to notify him of the dead link. Normally, if I like a site and it's broken, I let the author know about it.

Here's the deal. If it's not fixed by this Friday, I'll send them an email - OK? 1:27:42 PM