hardware
The always entertaining Dan [http://www.dansdata.com/] linked to something I hadn't seen before-- an archived page of the Google server hardware circa 1999 [http://web.archive.org/web/19990209043945/google.stanford.edu/googlehardware.html] : [http://web.archive.org/web/19990209043945/google.stanford.edu/googlehardware.html] Here
blogging
Like Steve Broback [http://blogbusinesssummit.com/2005/05/blogs_and_googl_2.htm] , I spent many of my formative years in computing reading John Dvorak's magazine column. > I started enthusiastically reading John Dvorak's columns back in 1984, at my first job selling IBM PCs and
learning
I found this Will Wright quote, from a roundtable at last week's E3, rather interesting: Will Wright said he's learned the most from games that seemed appealing on paper, but were failures in the marketplace. "I actually ask people when hiring how many failures they&
community
Dare Obasanjo recently wrote about the failure of Kuro5hin [http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=61cdd546-7306-4aac-a64c-5288011ff613] , which was originally designed to address perceived problems with the slashdot [http://www.slashdot.org/] model: > [Kuro5hin allowed] all users to create stories, vote on the stories and to rate comments.
technology trends
I’ve talked about the programmer’s take on keyboard and chair, but I have yet to cover that other computing staple: the mouse. I was reminded when HMK referenced Ars Technica’s, History of the GUI: This was the mouse, invented by Douglas himself [in 1968] and built by
diversity
A few months ago there was a little brouhaha about lack of diversity in weblog authors, which caused a few ripples. Julia Lerman asks the same question about software development in a recent interview: I think that the lack of women in visible roles in our community is one of
barcode
I recently purchased a USB CueCat from eBay to play around with UPC barcodes, which I found out about from comments posted in a Scott Hanselman blog entry. It’s fun to run around the house scanning in UPCs from household items, although the low-powered LED reader in the CueCat
programming languages
In Maciej Ceglowski’s cutting counterpoint to Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, he cites a key difference between software development and painting: writing software doesn’t get you laid. There’s nothing whatsoever distinctive about the analogy to painters, except that Paul Graham likes to paint, and would like
software design
Rube Goldberg software design is the meme of the month, after being parodied by Rory Blyth and Scott Hanselman in this brilliant short video, and oddly enough, also currently appearing in Microsoft advertisements: Now compare that to an actual Rube Goldberg device: You can’t talk about Rube Goldberg these
parsing
I’ve blogged ad nauseam about how much I love Regular Expressions, but even the mighty regular expression has limits. As noted in Daniel Cazzulini’s blog: A full-blown programming language cannot be parsed with regular expressions. But given the limited number of programming languages (successful ones, let’s say)
usb drives
It’s a geek rite of passage: what’s on your keychain? Here’s mine: * 512mb Sandisk Cruzer USB 2.0 thumbdrive * Leatherman Squirt S4 * Arc AAA LED flashlight I carried a Leatherman Micra for years, but I forgot to ditch it prior to a business trip and it got
software development concepts
Although you eventually outgrow them, any developer worth his or her salt bears the scars of a thousand tiny religious wars. It’s an occupational hazard, as Steve McConnell notes in Thou Shalt Rend Software and Religon Asunder: Religion appears in software development in numerous incarnations– as dogmatic adherence to