OpenSolaris powers my home brew NAS, because ZFS, DTrace, and a number of other key items it provides simply rock, and allow me to do things more quickly and easily (with less grief) than alternatives I’m willing to consider. Yesterday, I saw Ben Rockwood’s blog post regarding a license change to Solaris proper, and it […]
Read More »The Tablet Device Rush 0
There has been a deluge of tablet devices recently, so much so that the iPad feels ever more late to the game by the day. Lesser known brands such as Archos have 5″, 7″ and even 9″ parts these days, while the major manufacturers are just jumping into the game (HP Slate?). Microsoft has it’s […]
Read More »If you build it (web services), will they come ? 0
A recurring thought came to me again last August while attending a conference called CSIG (Cyber-infrastructure Summer Institute for Geo-scientists), that there seems to be a rush to use new technologies whenever possible, commonly without considering why or how they’ll be used. I’ve experienced this first hand not only in technology companies, but research centric […]
Read More »Waltzing with Bears, review and opinion 0
I finally finished Waltzing with Bears this week, after nursing it for a few months. It’s a book about “managing risks on software projects” from the authors of Peopleware. Peopleware is one of my all time favorites, so I had high hopes going in. As you may have gathered from my previous comment, that it […]
Read More »WorldWideTelescope 0
TFP (last post) is already introducing me to new things… I came across Microsoft’s WorldWideTelescope project in the book, and decided to check it out. It runs painfully slowly (even on my 2.93GHz C2D MBP), but I can still use it, and determined that it’s extremely cool. That said, I should point out that being […]
Read More »It’s the data stupid (“The Fourth Paradigm”) 0
I stumbled across this New York Times article in my RSS feeds this AM regarding a Microsoft research endeavor/book titled “The Fourth Paradigm”. I’ve skimmed TFP so far, and have highlighted a few sections I want to read in depth, and it looks quite good. Essentially, it explores today’s data volumes in the science realm […]
Read More »DIY desktop glass multitouch/touchpad from a unibody Macbook 0
~6 months or so ago, I purchased a top case from a parted out 13″ unibody Macbook from eBay, with the intent to strip off the touchpad and make a DIY desktop touchpad USB device out of it. Similar things have been done before, albeit not for these glass touchpads. I thought it would be […]
Read More »Google LiquidGalaxy, would be even better with multitouch :) 0
I came across this rather awesome Google project in my RSS feeds today, LiquidGalaxy Essentially, it’s 8 large screens integrated as a single Google Earth UI, complete with a gazebo for the user to stand in. After reading this, I had a thought. This would be even better if the screens incorporated multitouch!, perhaps using […]
Read More »Closure, perhaps it will convice some JavaScript haters to stop… 0
Google open sourced their Closure JavaScript Tools! If you’re not familiar with them, and you do any web development at all, now’s the time to read up. In short, this is a set of groundbreaking tools for the JavaScript developer, which bring some amazing capabilities to the table. If you are in any way involved […]
Read More »Calendar Heat Maps 0
I’m a huge fan of data visualizations, and this one is pretty cool. calendar heat maps of two different time series data sets 1. Performance of Microsoft’s stock 2. Airline Peformance This certainly has potential a little closer to home than some of my other favorites, and may end up finding its way into some […]
Read More »To Wave or not to Wave ? 0
I’ve had access to Wave for a tad over a week now, and so far I have to say that I see the potential, but I will withhold judgment until it’s a final product, or heck, even a Google Beta(tm). The integrated communications platform that is Wave allows one to combine communication mechanisms in new […]
Read More »TravelFli 0
Last night at Boulder New Tech Meetup, the founders of TravelFli showed us their latest. They also talked about some interesting stats regarding frequent flier miles in general, such as it being one of the largest untapped assets. Their app can scrape all of your mile accounts and allow you to book travel in such […]
Read More »blink 0
I recently finished blink and must say that with each of the books of his I read, I become an increasingly large fan of Malcolm Gladwell. blink has been added to the Books Page.
Read More »Google Voice on iPhone :( 0
Like a few others, I am disappointed by Apple’s decision to prevent Google Voice for iPhone. I am not as upset as some, but do think the situation is unfortunate. The startup I worked for a few years ago was doing something very similar to Google Voice, called VerbalOneNumber, which wasn’t as successful as GrandCentral […]
Read More »iPhone 3GS GPS disappointment 0
I’ve been mostly pleased with my 3GS, with one exception: GPS flakiness. The hardware upgrades certainly make a difference, not only in applications but general UI responsiveness, which makes the whole experience of using the device better. The GPS however, bluntly put, sucks. In Maps, I’m lucky if it ever uses the GPS (yes, even […]
Read More »Why is engineering software so hard/different than other engineering pursuits ? 0
I’ve been pondering this topic a lot lately, and have had several discussions with colleagues and friends on what steps one might take to improve matters when working on a project which has issues associated with this topic. This Dr. Dobbs article brought the topic to the forefront of my mind and has recently resulted […]
Read More »The Tipping Point 0
I added The Tipping Point to the books page. This book was recommended to me by my former mentor at Sun, and was quite good. Follow the link or go to the books page for more details.
Read More »jpeekaboo updated, new features added 0
Something finally motivated me enough to make some changes to jpeekaboo. Time does indeed fly, it’s been almost a year since the last release… I put in some infrastructure for settings, and used that to allow the note to be pinned to either the left or right side of the screen. The settings also have […]
Read More »First wolf3d, now Doom for iPhone! 0
John Carmack commented on the existence and forthcoming release of Doom for the iPhone. That will certainly be interesting, and per the article more time has been put into the interface (among other things) so it should be a better app than wolf. Hopefully he’ll release the Doom iPhone source code too…
Read More »now that’s a great idea! (data.gov) 0
The government decided to do something useful with a few of its copious data stores, excellent! After perusing data.gov a bit, there are quite a few useful data sources. More importantly, this could be much larger than it currently is, and represents a huge opportunity for so many federal organizations to share their data not […]
Read More »MapReduce becoming ubiquitous ? => Collaborative Map-Reduce in the Browser 0
As an academic exercise, myself and a colleague at Sun are currently implementing a MapReduce client for iPhone which has a server component, and a number of other clients we’ve written in various programming languages (currently Python, Ruby and Perl). Our hope is to statistically prove iPhone and similar devices can be useful in a […]
Read More »arrrrrrrg, thanks a bunch site5… irudite.com photo prints 0
A week or so ago I created a photo print site/store to post some of my photos and possibly sell some high quality prints. To do this, I had to get a static IP and SSL cert from my host, site5. Well, I have a number of domains parked with site5 to direct things like […]
Read More »wolf3d on iPhone! 0
An immortal classic on iPhone at last, Wolfenstein3D! Buy it, or, grab the source and compile yourself! Many thanks to John Carmack for putting the source code out too, and thanks to Josh Buhler for saving me the trouble of resolving the compile errors myself per his post, Josh doesn’t have a cert so couldn’t […]
Read More »Making Things Happen 0
Added Making Things Happen to the book page. Check it out.
Read More »programming language typing, static and dynamic 0
I just read Bruce Eckel’s blog entry which discusses programming language typing, static vs. dynamic. His conclusion is that we, software developers, need “Strong testing, not strong typing.” and I couldn’t agree more. I’ll expand on his statements and reiterate that all too often software folks get caught up evangelizing their chosen technology and lose […]
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