The Assembly Programmer From Hell

Today I was reading chapter 3 (Revenge of the Nerds) in Steven Pinker’s book How the Mind Works. It talks about evolution and Darwin and Dawkins, and got me thinking about how replicators are all coded with DNA, and how…

Random Ruminations

My thoughts are as entropic as the leaves falling off the trees this season (just about as colored too). Graduate School Applications <rant>I really dislike forms; actually I frothingly detest them. I don’t know why, but I have always hated…

Call-Trace capability in IDEs

I was thinking about the features that I’d want in a perfect language, and recalled something I was reading about compiler type-checking. I believe that the common type-checking algorithm can be adapted to do checking of interfaces. An IDE should…

The Jet-powered Car

I had a really long discussion about car engines with my co-worker today. He has tons of information locked in his head about internal combustion design. We touched on valve and cylinder design, compression ratios, cam design. Discussed all the…

Relational Programming

Back in the dark-ages of computing we all had a hierarchical database with which to store our precious information. It was known as the file system. Then efficiency became vogue and organizational demands moved everyone to explicit database applications (client-server…

The Language of the Future

Most of the popular languages today (Perl/Python/Php/Ruby, C++, Java) are all locked into the serial, von-Neumann model of computation. Concurrency is expressed as Threads and Processes, which rely on the underlying OS’s handling of memory and other resources. Joe Armstrong…

Multi-Core Multi-Language Machines

I was doing my traditional web searching about languages, this time beginning with parallel lisp. I was wondering, if LISP, being one of the oldest and original languages, had explored the concurrency model, and what concepts it had to offer….

The Cloud

I was reading Marc Andreessen’s blog entry about The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet. and all his talk about sharing code and running that code on other systems and community and all that really got me…

End of the Keyboard

End of the Keyboard

Lets review a few really awesome experiments with user-interfaces, and then I’ll introduce my own. First, we have the Optimus Keyboard. Each key on this board has it’s own display. That means you can use the board for all sorts…

Tuition-Free Education

From, My Biased Coin we have an argument for a Tuition Free Harvard. While, this is a really great idea, I don’t think it goes far enough. I actually think that the goal of providing a reputable education at zero…