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Velocity 08: High Performance AJAX Applications
Julien Lecomte from Yahoo! is speaking about creating performant AJAX applications. The most important point: plan for performance from day 1. Interestingly many of his initial points are about telling the developer to work with the product manager and... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 23, 2008 4:24 PM
Transactional Memory
We all know that Intel and AMD have punted. They can't keep building larger, faster chips for a variety of technical and economic reasons, so they have started placing multiple cores on a single chip. This, in theory, maintains... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 28, 2008 9:29 AM
Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for April 2008
In doing this month's top ten for IT Conversations, noticed two things: First, since Doug put in our own code for ratings, the number of ratings per show is way up. I think with the new homepage design (oops!... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 7, 2008 8:31 AM
Tyler Close: Using Promises to Orchestrate Web Interactions
Tyler Close answers questions after his talk(click to enlarge) Tyler Close of Waterken fame presented a way of using promises to produce succinct JavaScript (and Java) code for doing multiple asynchronous requests with a Web server. The idea of... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 25, 2008 1:43 AM
Cloud Computing: Dr. Kai-Fu Lee of Google
Main hall where keynotes were held. I love the red slip covers on the chairs. They were more comfortable than your standard hotel chair. (click to enlarge) The opening keynote at WWW2008 is Dr. Kai-Fu Lee of Google. Before... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 22, 2008 8:04 PM
Visualizing Workflow and Transparent Systems
I thoroughly enjoyed Jon Udell's interview with Ward Cunningham on IT Conversations. They talk a lot about Ward's efforts at the Eclipse Foundation to build transparent workflow systems. That is, as Jon puts it: But what if you could... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 20, 2008 8:49 AM
Can Your Programming Language Do MapReduce?
Joel Spolsky has a great, understandable description of what MapReduce is and why you might care. He also speaks to the benefit of learning functional programming, even if your first job interviewer isn't going to ask you "Have you... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 7, 2008 3:50 PM
John McCarthy on the Elephant Programming Language
John McCarthy(click to enlarge) He wasn't on the program, but this morning's keynote was given by Professor John McCarthy--the inventor of LISP and coiner of the term "artificial intelligence." This morning, he's talking about Elephant 2000, a programming language... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 5, 2008 10:28 AM
Marc Hedlund: Debugging Hacks, What They Never Taught You About Solving Hard Bugs
Marc Hedlund talks about debugging(click to enlarge) There's no doubt that debugging is a critical skill for anyone who codes. Marc Hedlund is talking about how to tackle the really difficult ones. I enjoyed Marc's tutorial from last year,... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 3, 2008 3:42 PM
Fran Allen: Compilers and Parallel Computing Systems
Fran Allen delivers Organick Lecture(click to enlarge) Fran Allen was the Turing Award winner for 2006. This afternoon she's giving the University of Utah's Organick Memorial Lecture. I've reported on some of these in the past few years: Jim... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 21, 2008 4:55 PM
On Static Types and Language Choice
I caught a little flack in response to my post calling attention to Steve Yegge's recent essay "Portrait of a Noob." In particular Levi thought I was out of line for endorsing something so inflammatory: "People who approach programming... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 12, 2008 8:46 AM
Types as Comments
Steve Yegge is at it again. This time he's taking on modeling: Well, we also know that static types are just metadata. They're a specialized kind of comment targeted at two kinds of readers: programmers and compilers. Static types... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 11, 2008 5:08 PM
Unit Testing in Scheme
I put together a mini-lecture on unit testing in Scheme for my CS330 class. It's not a complete introduction, just a tutorial on getting started. If you have suggestions on using SchemeUnit, I'd love to hear them. Students in... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 11, 2008 12:08 PM
Starting a High Tech Business: The Rude Dog Demo and Working Code
I’m starting a new business called Kynetx. As I go through some of the things I do, I’m planning to blog them. The whole series will be here. This is the eighth installment. You may find my efforts instructive.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 31, 2008 10:03 PM
Arc Is Released
Paul Graham has released Arc, his new language. Arc is still a work in progress. We've done little more than take a snapshot of the code and put it online. I spent a fews days cleaning up inconsistencies, but... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 30, 2008 4:40 PM
Perl Testing
I didn't grow up in an era where testing was as well though of as it is now. When I learned to program, you ran a few tests after the fact and threw it over the wall to the... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 18, 2008 3:21 PM
Kynetx Making Progress
I now have evidence that Kynetx is gaining momentum: I got my first call from an Indian "business process outsourcer" today asking if we had any programming work we wanted to outsource. They answer, by the way, is no.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 17, 2008 8:34 AM
Scheme and Ruby
Duane Johnson pointed me to a very interesting discussion on Y Combinator about the differences between Scheme and Ruby. This is an excellent discussion--not a flame war--that I found enlightening. The summary, if you don't want to read the... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 16, 2008 2:16 PM
Some Major CS Conferences in Utah Coming Up
There are a number of major technical events coming up in Salt Lake City in February. It is not often that premier computer science research conferences come to Salt Lake City, as opposed to Boston, Austin, Seattle, or the... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 14, 2008 1:25 PM
Not All HD Programs Are Alike
1080i broadcast, KSL TV (local news) note: jaggies on collar(click to enlarge) The picture to the right shows a close-up of the anchor in a local newscast from KSL-TV (channel 5 in Utah). The broadcast is advertised as 1080i... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 10, 2008 5:11 PM
The IO Programming Language
One of my students, Duane Johnson, asked me this morning if I'd heard of the IO programming language. I hadn't. Looking around, it looks like a fun little language. IO is a "pure" object oriented programming language with a... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 7, 2008 5:10 PM
Getting Free HD TV Programming
As I mentioned before, I bought a new HD TV for Christmas (a Sony 40 inch XBR4). That put me on the hunt for good sources of HD programming. Something I overlooked for a while, and I'm sure I'm... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 7, 2008 2:19 PM
Is Intuitive Always Good?
Here's a good, short artcile from Raganwald on the trade-off between intuitiveness and programming languagge expressiveness. Most of the article is a few quotes. The meat is at the bottom. Is Ruby's for loop an improvement over Java? By... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 7, 2008 1:54 PM
Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for November 2007
Here's the top ten shows, by download, for IT Conversations during November 2007. I'm late because some recent server changes means that I didn't have access to the logs for a bit. Also, unfortunately, we lost 11 days worth... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 12, 2007 11:15 AM
Starting a High Tech Business: Choosing a Deployment Model
I'm starting a new business called Kynetx (nothing to see there yet). As I go through some of the things I do, I'm planning to blog them. The whole series will be here. This is the fifth installment. You... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 7, 2007 9:06 AM
HQ9+
Here is proof positive that the utility of a domain specific language depends on the domain.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 28, 2007 9:47 AM
30 Inch Dell Monitors Are a Steal
I've got two Apple 30: displays--one at home and one in my office at BYU. They're lovely. I can't imagine programming without one. All that real estate makes a huge difference in productivity. Last week I picked up three... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 13, 2007 7:36 AM
Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for October 2007
Here are the top ten shows on IT Conversations (by download) for October 2007: Bruce Johnson - Technometria: Google Web Toolkit (Rating: 4.20)Recently, Google released from beta its Google Web Toolkit. Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 6, 2007 2:26 PM
Domain Specific Languages
Recently, I've been designing a domain specific language for Kynetx, the start-up I'm working on. When you tell someone you're designing a language, the usual reaction is incredulity. "Why would you design your own language?!?!" they say. I'm here... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 2, 2007 10:24 AM
CTO Breakfast Recap
The first item on today's schedule was to get an update on the EMC acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems. Scott gave us a report on his recent trip to the Millenials conference last month. This led to a discussion... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 30, 2007 9:42 AM
NBC's Troubles
NBC has announced that it will open its own download site for it's programs after a dispute with Apple over the price and DRM for its programs on ITMS. There are a lot of people who think NBC is... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on September 20, 2007 12:17 PM
User Expectations Are Out of Control
This is great essay from Raganwald on what users expect and IT fails to deliver. Hyperbole? Sure, but that makes it funny and just like antiseptic, the sting let's you know it's working.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on September 19, 2007 4:00 PM
Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for August 2007
Here are the top ten shows (by downloads) for August 2007 on IT Conversations. Geoff Moore & David Thompson - Tech Nation (Rating: 3.60)Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Geoff Moore and David Thompson about how Web 2.0 is seamlessly... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on September 6, 2007 8:33 AM
An Accidental Simula User
Luca Cardelli is one of the big guns in programming language theory--consistently producing interesting and important results over several decades. His paper (with Peter Wagner) "On Understanding Types, Data Abstraction, and Polymorphism" which I read as a graduate student... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 23, 2007 3:46 PM
Perl Web Framework Recommendations
Does anyone have recommendations on a Perl Web framework? I've heard of Catalyst and not much else. A few things make me leery: the blog is infrequently updated and the last release of the code was November of 2006.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 30, 2007 5:09 PM
The Yin and Yang of Software Development
This ACM Queuecast by Mike Vizard interviews Sergei Sokolov, Solutions Manager, for C++ at Parasoft about how putting in the right infrastructure elements allows an innovative development process to exist despite the structure the project wants to impose on... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 27, 2007 10:00 AM
Java Framework Round-Up
Matt Raible of Raible Designs gave this morning's keynote presentation comparing Java Web frameworks (slide - PDF). Matt started off with an overview of the pros and cons of each framework, as he saw them. Java Server Faces or... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 26, 2007 10:01 AM
Computational Thinking
When Jon Udell interviewed Phil Libin, on IT Conversations, Libin said that in the future people will have to understand asymmetric encryption in order to function in the world. At first I was incredulous--that seems like a pretty esoteric... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 18, 2007 2:05 PM
Java Desktop Developments
This week's show on the Technometria podcast is an interview with Chet Hasse. Chet works for Sun Microsystems in the Java Desktop group. We talk about upcoming features in the Java desktop and Sun's applet strategy. Chet's new book... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 14, 2007 9:15 AM
Fast, Interpreted XML Parsing
I'm in a presentation on a paper called A High-Performance Interpretive Approach to Schema-Directed Parsing (here's the PDF for the paper). Last year these authors presented a fast, validating XML parser (called Screamer) that outperforms Xerces (validating) and Expat... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 10, 2007 12:11 PM
I've Got Fiber to My House
Utopia truck ready for install(click to enlarge) Utopia is Utah's large-scale municipal-broadband project. My city, Lindon, was one of the first supporters of the project and all winter I've watched in anticipation as crews dug up the lawns in... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 3, 2007 10:09 PM
Adobe Open-sources Flex
Yawn... I'm not sure what the excitement is all about.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 26, 2007 8:20 AM
Jeannette Wing on Computational Thinking
Tonight is Jeannette Wing's general interest talk as part of her Organick Memorial Lecture at the University of Utah. The talk is on computational thinking. Here's an article she wrote for ACM Communications. These slides are close to the... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 25, 2007 8:40 PM
Speeding Up Crypt::DH
I was installing Crypt::DH, the Perl Diffie-Hellman library today. The tests took 20 minutes on a Macbook Pro. Then I noticed a comment on an OpenID forum about "making sure the GMP Perl bindings were enabled" to speed things... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 24, 2007 7:45 PM
CTO Breakfast Report for April 2007
Today was bring your child to CTO Breakfast day. Not officially, but with today being Spring Break, there were a few here. I brought my son so he could visit a friend who lives south. Scott Lemon just got... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 20, 2007 10:47 AM
Alan Kay's Early History of Smalltalk
If you're interested in programming language design, this history of Smalltalk by Alan Kay from the 1993 HOPL conference is worth reading. That was the second HOPL conference. The third is happening June 9-10 in San Diego. I'd go... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 17, 2007 8:51 AM
Is Your API Too Fat?
Kode Vicious offers a nice, short tutorial on API design in this month's ACM Queue. Getting the right balance is never easy. I face this question all the time with students in my large scale distributed computing class. KV... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 12, 2007 11:32 AM
Miguel on Mono
In this week's Technometria podcast, Scott, Ben, and I talk with Miguel de Icaza, the founder and force behind the Mono project. We had a great discussion about the project's history, purpose, and architecture. We also got into some... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 10, 2007 11:42 AM
Java and IP Addresses
A few weeks ago, I cut over my blog and several other Web sites to a new, much fast server. I don't know that it's made much difference in how fast people retrieve my blog since it's mostly static,... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 4, 2007 3:32 PM
Cleaning Up Unwanted Files in Linux
One of my grad students just went to remove some unwanted, automatically created files in his directory and accidentally deleted some things he wanted. I use a script to do clean ups to prevent these kinds of silly errors... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 4, 2007 10:41 AM
Applied Web Heresies: ETech 2007
I really wanted to go to Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software by Amy Jo Kim, but my inner geek won out and I went to Applied Web Heresies with Avi Bryant (slides). I... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 26, 2007 2:56 PM
John Backus Dies
John Backus, the inventor of FORTRAN, BNF, and winner of the 1977 Turing Award (read his lecture) has passed away at 82. I tell my CS330 students about Backus and the development of FORTRAN every semester when we discuss... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 21, 2007 10:13 AM
Would You Like to Update Now?
This morning Michael Sullivan of Booz Allen Hamilton was speaking about bar codes and his computer flashed a "Would you like to update..." message. I had to laugh at the inappropriateness of the message in the context. Vista is... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 21, 2007 9:03 AM
Rentals on Rails
Cid Dennis, an old friend from the iMall days--and one of the best programmers I know--has built his first Rails application: RentSpider, a rental property listing service. Go Cid!... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 17, 2007 1:52 PM
Building Newsletters for IT Conversations
I was a little late getting this week's IT Conversations newsletter out because I was trying to finish my tool for building the newsletter. I like building tools because they help me leverage my time. The newsletter tool is... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 15, 2007 10:17 PM
Using Amazon Web Services
I just posted a piece at Between the Lines about our latest Technometria podcast with Jeff Barr and Doug Kaye. We discussed using Amazon Web Services to build sophisticated Web applications. Lots of good things in the podcast about... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 13, 2007 4:00 PM
On the Importance of Names
Phil Hagelberg of Technomancy references the essay on Confucianism and Technical standards with this quote: In a famous passage, Analects 13.3, Confucius was asked by a disciple what his first order of business would be if he were to... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 12, 2007 8:44 AM
Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for January 2007
Here are the top ten most listened to shows on IT Conversations for January 2007: Who Owns "You"? - Supernova2006 John Seely Brown - Supernova 2005 Peter Navarro - Tech Nation Curt Carlson - Tech Nation David Platt -... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 7, 2007 4:22 PM
Funding Public Radio (and ITC) with VRM
In a post at Linux Journal about identity and VRM, Doc Searls says that rather than boil the VRM ocean, he would rather pick a specific problem. Beyond cash for goods or services, I would like the option of... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 5, 2007 10:04 PM
Personal Businesses On the Rise
Number of US businesses with no employees (Intuit/IFTF study)(click to enlarge) Paul Kedrosky pointed out an Intuit/IFTF study on small business (PDF) that talks about the rise of the personal business. Tim O'Reilly has a nice riff on this... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 1, 2007 10:46 AM
Bosworth on Physics, Psychology, and Software
Adam Bosworth almost always makes me think, so I jump at a chance to listen to him or read what he writes. He recently gave a talk in NYC as part of the Google Speaker Series and Darryl Taft... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 31, 2007 11:01 AM
January CTO Breakfast Report
We talked about the recent SHA-1 hack and the MD5 exploits that are available. Lockcrack (a password cracking program) apparently has a table of pre computed hashes now installed that make cracking many hashes a job of just a... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 25, 2007 10:24 AM
Building Living Software
Steve Yegge rants, in reference to software design, that crap is still crap, no matter how many rubies you swallowed. If software design interests you, then you'll enjoy this--even if you don't agree. As I was reading this, I... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 19, 2007 3:10 PM
Why Software Sucks, the Podcast
I just published the podcast version of Why Software Sucks on IT Conversations. The interview is part of the Technometria series with David Platt, author of the book. Here's the description of the show: What is the most important... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 9, 2007 9:08 PM
Teaching Yourself to Program
This article from Peter Norvig on teaching yourself to program in 10 years has been around for a while, but it's still worth reading. The basic points? Get interested in programming, pick an interactive language, and do it--for a... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 2, 2007 11:17 AM
What's Your Interface?
Steve Yegge is a great writer. The latest from Stevie's Blog Rants proves it. Take 15 minutes and read it.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 22, 2006 9:17 AM
Composition as a Programming Activity
When I started programming, you had four choices on the IBM 370 system that the University of Idaho made available to students: Cobol, Fortran, Basic, and APL. I learned Fortran and Basic, avoided Cobol because it was for "business",... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 21, 2006 9:50 AM
Haskell vs. Java Smackdown
Defmacro.org has a small example of Haskell's expressive power and the same code written in Java. Both take five lines of code to "[go] through a parse tree of Haskell source code, locates every reference to an identifier that... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 18, 2006 4:00 PM
Introducing User-Centric Identity
Doc Searls(click to enlarge) The Internet Identity Workshop (2006B) has begun. I flew in this morning and spent the time before the conference started shopping for things we need for snacks, etc. Today is not an unconference event--that starts tomorrow.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 4, 2006 6:00 PM
Integrating Mantis and Subversion
Tom Gregory has a nice tutorial on integrating Subversion and Mantis so that, for example, Mantis tickets can be automatically closed when a fix is committed to the repository. Frankly, I'd never even considered this. Good stuff and well... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 29, 2006 2:48 PM
Building Reservations System - Volunteers Needed
I've been asked by the Heber Valley Camp (HVC) to help them build a reservations system. HVC is an 8500 acre camp east of Heber Utah that is used by young women's groups from the LDS Church. The camp... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 26, 2006 12:01 PM
And Now...Scheme in Haskell
AS a followup to my post last week about building a Lisp interpreter in Haskell, here's a similar, albeit more in-depth, tutorial that shows how to implement a good-sized subset of R5RS Scheme in Haskell.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 13, 2006 8:14 AM
A Lisp Interpreter in Haskell
Defmacro.org has an excellent little article on using Haskell to build a working Lisp interpreter--at least a good start at one. I do something similar with my 330 class using Gofer (an outdated dialect related to Haskell). I mostly... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 8, 2006 5:07 PM
Rails Demo
I put together a Rails Demo for my class that shows them how Rails could be used to do part of what they're doing in one assignment with J2EE. I plan to run through the entire demo Monday in... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 2, 2006 3:42 PM
Ruby and Unicode
Kevin Tew and Devlin Daley, two of my students went over to RubyCon last week. When I asked them how it was, they said the usual things people say about a conference, but they only mentioned one presenter by... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 27, 2006 7:43 AM
CTO Breakfast Report for October
I posted a piece on why mobile data centers matter at Between the Lines. My thoughts were in response to the most recent Gillmor Gang where Sun's new mobile data centers were discussed. Another interesting tidbit from that show... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 26, 2006 9:49 PM
Matz Talk on Ruby Design Principles
Last week, Matz, the chief designer and creator of the Ruby programming language stopped by BYU on his way to RubyCon. I was fortunate to go to lunch with him and capture the colloquium talk he gave. I've posted... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 25, 2006 3:03 PM
Emacs and Ruby
Jao at Programming Musings linked my my post on tools with a nice article on using powerful editors. Jao's post included a link to a screencast on using emacs and ruby by Marshall Vandegrift. I've been using emacs for... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 23, 2006 3:15 PM
My HTML Mode for Emacs
Some people have asked what HTML mode I finally settled on. I'm using a customized version of Daniel Pfeiffer's adaptation of James Clark's sgml-mode. Yeah, there's lots of SGML stuff that I don't use, but it has a set... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 20, 2006 2:18 PM
Ralph Griswold Dies
I learned the Icon programming language as a grad student at UC Davis. Ron Olsen, then a new assistant professor had just gotten his Ph.D. from Arizona where Ralph Griswold, Icon's inventor taught and he brought it with him.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 18, 2006 10:58 AM
When You Pick Your Tools, Pick Those That Can Build Tools
This morning I was listening to Karl Fugel talk about tools developers need and thought about Doug Kaye. Here's why... Yesterday Doug sent out a note to a few friends asking what editor they used to writing code on... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 18, 2006 10:17 AM
Rails, Streamlined, and DabbleDB
I've been playing a little with Rails over the last week. This is the first time I really tried to build something I cared about in Rails as opposed to just running someone else's scripted tutorial. I'm having fun... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 16, 2006 4:18 PM
The Most Important Language in 2006: JavaScript
You gotta love Steve Yegge's blog. One of his latest posts is called Dreaming in a Browser Swamp. Steve's style is to write infrequent, long posts, but they are always worth the wait and the read. "Browser Swamp" makes... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on September 26, 2006 2:47 PM
Scary Voting Videos
Diebold AccuVote-TS voting in Princetons Voting Studies Lab Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten have completed a security study using an Actual Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine. The study will no doubt provide some good information for... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on September 15, 2006 2:39 PM
HTML to Kwiki Markup Conversion
I use Kwiki for lecture notes, homework and other Web pages I need to teach my class. Here's an example: the lectures for my programming language design class. Today I needed to convert some old pages (embedded in PHP)... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on September 7, 2006 9:44 AM
On the Acceptability of Lisp
Steve Yegge has a post that I just stumbled across on why Lisp isn't an acceptable Lisp. He hits on some great points, many of which numberless concourses of Lisp programmers would argue with him endlessly on. Nevertheless, good... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 24, 2006 2:12 PM
MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Audio`
Between the Lines has a collection of audio from this year's MIT Sloan CIO Symposium online. So far, there's no RSS link. I'm looking forward to listening to these. I also just posted an article to Between the Lines... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 15, 2006 11:24 AM
Building Cars With Small Teams
Ariel Atom front view(click to enlarge) This video about the Ariel Atom is fun to watch. This would be a great car to drive. The best quote from the video: "anyone who wants to know what a car should be... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 8, 2006 10:54 AM
On The Virtues of Functional Abstraction
Joel Spolsky, who I interviewed for IT Conversations last year is talking about virtues of first-class functions and their positive impact on functional abstraction. Ok. I hope you're convinced, by now, that programming languages with first-class functions let you... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 7, 2006 2:32 PM
Building Tools for Personal Productivity
Peter Bowen wrote about system administration and procrastination. His particular problem was with Nagios, but we've all been there from time to time. When I became Executive Producer of IT Conversations I tried to spend the time necessary to... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 12, 2006 11:55 AM
More Less Is More
If you think Jason Fried was just some geek who doesn't know what he's talking about when he says Less is More, be sure to listen to Moira Gunn's interview with Cheskin CEO Darrel Rhea where he specifically talks... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 21, 2006 1:45 PM
Practical Common Lisp
I just published an interview with Peter Seibel at IT Conversations. I did this interview as part of my Technometria podcast. I saw Peter's book, Practical Common Lisp, in the bookstore a while back and picked it up. Now,... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 13, 2006 2:35 PM
Evolving Software
Jon Udell's latest column at InfoWorld is a scary story that's all too common: fork-lift upgrades of Web-based software that leaves users worse-off than before. I've been consulting with a company that's developing a Web-based product for the last... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 5, 2006 11:03 AM
Less is More
Jason Fried is the CEO of 37 Signals, a company that's garnered attention for delivering great Web-based tools like Basecamp and Writeboard. I've used these in my lab at BYU to great effect. At IT Conversations, however, we found... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 5, 2006 10:32 AM
Spectrum Talks Up UTOPIA
An IEEE Spectrum article discusses Utah's muni-broadband project, UTOPIA. There's a map of UTOPIA cities, but the legend seems to be missing. There's also a page of photos. The piece also contrasts the UTOPIA architecture with Verizon's FiOS service.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 2, 2006 1:00 PM
Learning CSS
A friend of mine is learning CSS. Like me, his standard MO when learning something new is to just look at the source and start playing around until you get it right. Mostly that works for CSS, but I... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 8, 2006 4:41 PM
It's Not 500 Channels Stupid
I remember reading an article in 1996 about "what is the Internet and what does it mean to me?" in one of those airline magazines that are always sitting in the seat pocket when you get on a plane.... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 20, 2006 10:43 AM
Obsoleting Grades
I recieved an anonymous hate email this morning that read in total: You made my grade obsolete. Ugh...You suck like no other This intrigued me. I'm not sure what it means to "obsolete" a grade. Is this a student,... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 12, 2006 1:09 PM
At the IT Conversations Helm
Doug Kaye has asked me to be the Executive Producer of IT Conversations, one of the real pioneers in podcasting. Doug's not moving on, he's moving up. As the audience has expanded, the range of topics that could be... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 3, 2006 9:18 PM
Using the Law to Stop Electronic Voting
A group called Vote Action is suing California to stop the use of touch screen voting systems citing security and integrity concerns. The suit, put together by the voting rights group Voter Action, asks a San Francisco Superior Court... [Continue reading]
Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 22, 2006 1:42 PM