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10 Mar 09
Current Research Topics - Michael Jackson (not the singer)
Famous British computer scientist
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Individually, problem frames are too simple to fit any realistic problem. But realistic problems are compositions of elementary problems.
One Man Hacking: Learning From Sudoku Solvers
Entertaining for geeks
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Peter does **analytical systematic thinking**. Ron's process is essentially "try different things and when the tests pass, hopefully the problem is completely solved"
15 Oct 08
Co-op bank scans letter into emails - Infomatics
Interesting programme
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The system will process and index 10,000 inbound insurance and retail banking letters and turn them into emails.
25 Mar 08
Openstructure: A Call for Open Source Reform
A brilliant paper with several challenging soundbites. However the restructuring it proposes is radical and I am not yet convinced.
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...if IT managers admitted one dirty little secret: it is very hard to understand technology! That is why the industry is so rife with buzzwords...the marketing departments have got you. No matter how objective you think you are, you will inevitably find yourself choosing a brand name....after the decades of waste in IT it is time for a new level of accountability...I believe they could demand a greater accountability and openness from the industry. And there is no better way to be "open", than to avoid the kind of marketing double-talk that you find on the websites of most of the companies I have discussed.
25 Feb 08
Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth - Joel on Software
and now for the bad news
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if your strategy is "80/20", you're going to have trouble selling software. That's just reality. This strategy is as old as the software industry itself and it just doesn't pay;
23 Jan 08
Five whys - Joel on Software
This sounds like a good approach for controlling a highly reliable service.
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Instead of setting up a SLA for our customers, we set up a blog where we would document every outage in real time, provide complete post-mortems, ask the five whys, get to the root cause, and tell our customers what we're doing to prevent that problem in the future.
26 Oct 07
When Reality Feels Like Playing a Game, a New Era Has Begun
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"Is it a game, or is it real?" The computer, which has now taken on a human identity, replies, "What's the difference?"
24 Oct 07
Lisp in Web-Based Applications - Paul Graham 2001
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One way we used macros was to generate Html. There is a very natural fit between macros and Html, because Html is a prefix notation like Lisp, and Html is recursive like Lisp....In fact it turned out that Web consultants didn't like Viaweb.
Consultants, as a general rule, like to use products that are too
hard for their clients to use, because it guarantees them ongoing
employment....But by using closures, we could make it
look to the user, and to ourselves, as if we were just doing a
subroutine call.
Bill Clementson's Blog - How to make money with Lisp
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Again, Lisp shines as an alternative development language when you start talking about small, autonomous business units that are individually accountable for their own profit margins.
ArsDigita Server Architecture
Interesting package of engineering and management advice
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What if a disk drive fills up? Are we notified in advance? Are we notified when it happens? How long does it take to restore service?
That's what's this document is about.
Community - Greenspun PANDA
Updated in 2003 - Lots of suggestions for saving money building a community web service (around a learning experience or a product category for example), comments on ERP development, and a proposal for a user-scripted community system - which sounds like
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The programmers working from Toolkit40 will have to write six times as many features, but they will only have to read one-twentieth as much code. ...a project built on top of the lean, clean Toolkit40 will attract better people than a project built on top of bloated confusing Toolkit90. ...Each company that adopts an ERP system only needs a handful of new features. Yet because of the complexity of the ERP toolkit as shipped, those features will take several years, 100 programmers, and $50 million to implement...The most useful and innovative services of all are often algorithms specified by users that run on the publisher's server, e.g., "send me mail every Monday and Thursday nights if there are any new articles by my friend Judy".
The programming chapters of this book illustrate the power and reliability of this software architecture for ecommerce and Web applications that replace desktop apps.
20 Oct 07
Lecture 1a: Overview and Introduction to Lisp
Good quality 1986 streaming videos of the famous SICP lecture series at MIT
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Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Video Lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman
19 Oct 07
Frm files - Vault-Tec Labs - a Fallout modding wiki
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FRM files are unpaletted 256-color image files containing either one or several images in one file. The palette used for FRM files come in the form of external palette files.
Inside The Matrix for Mobiles
Sounds like an amazing tool to get a competitive advantage in rolling out an app or a web service
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For example, one might buy access to Sprint's entire current lineup, or only those that include a Java runtime. Access to the phones starts at about $200, and runs to $17 an hour and up...."We don't need fast graphics, and their remote phones have SIM cards, so we can test even the network latency."
28 Sep 07
Nailing Jello to the Wall
Brad Cox recommends this Master's thesis by one of his students. I don't have time to read the paper right now - there is a lot of in depth narrative, research and analysis. Therefore, I wonder if the conclusion and recommendations are as simple as shari
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I began this practicum intending to show the possibilities and benefits of direct interaction between human-savvy and techno-savvy individuals, and while I still see that direct interaction as possible, I am re-thinking my assumption that it is most beneficial to have the groups talk directly with each other rather than using a translator/mediator. If care and overall concern about Quality is not present in the interaction, it is destined to be frustrating and highly unuseful. For that situation, I quickly recommend a translator. If, however, care and concern for Quality are stated and agreed upon as the overall goal, the interaction has a chance for being a collaboration of two points of view which produce a combined, greater point of view. This hypothesis is applicable to both the human-savvy "territory" and the techno-savvy "territory," since it breaks down turf issues from the outset of the interaction. It no longer is my issue or her issue -- it's our (human-savvy and techno-savvy)issue in reaching a goal of greater care and Quality.
17 Sep 07
Contributing to Open Source Projects HOWTO
This tutorial looks wonderful - I must dig into it properly.
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Many open source projects make use of the Gnu Autotools to generate their Makefiles. The learning curve for the Autotools is steep, but a few tutorials are available. Here are some places to start:
* A Very Short Introduction to Autotools by Peter Vrancx
* "hello world" autotools demo by Eleftherios Gkioulekas
* IBM's tutorial (free registration required)
* The Autotools Book
* Shlomi Fish's autotools page
* Debugging Configure, by Peter Seebach
30 Aug 07
Sub Ubi » The Busy Writer: Revisiting Backups
JungleDisk
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Incremental backup of only the changed portion of large files (YES! YES!)
Sub Ubi » The Busy Writer: Backups (followup)
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Off-site backup is not an option if you care about your data. And, it MUST run on a daily basis.
# Test your backups
This is the hardest part. You must, on a regular basis, make sure that your backups are working. At the least, once a month, download one or two folders from your backup.
29 Aug 07
A Conversation with Joel Spolsky - ACM Queue July 2007
Fantastic interview with an influential leader. And some critical maths on risk-based scheduling
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JS Pseudoscience, right. But if you try to find an article where somebody actually used a team with doors closed and a team with doors not closed, there's only one example: a weekend coding experiment done by Lister and DeMarco before they wrote Peopleware, where they actually tried both.
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The only evidence there seems to be is that it's very easy to find orders of 10 differences in productivity, and nobody knows why, and being faster or slower doesn't necessarily mean you do a better or worse job....The most important observation here is that even if you're very good at estimating the 50 percent point, it is mathematically incorrect to add two estimates to get the estimate of those combined features.
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A small company is more like a bed and breakfast. You're going to have a great time because you get along with people and it's a much friendlier experience. You don't really mind that the bathroom is down the hall because the people made a special vegetarian meal for you and then showed you around town. On the other hand, you might be at a bed and breakfast where they have weird leather implements and lots of cats.
28 Aug 07
Will VMware's sales double forever? [printer-friendly] | The Register
2007 market analysis
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If Microsoft and XenSource/Citrix can get their acts together, they should have viable competitors to VMware in two years. That gives VMware 24 months to keep charging outrageous prices for its core ESX Server - aka Infrastructure 3 - software.
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